Motorcycle Adventure Ride – Page 31

Happy Thanksgiving, and let’s hear from you…

My first motorcycle had 3 cubic inches. This one must be 48 times better.

I love this time of year. The temperatures are nice (although it’s raining here in So Cal today and for the next couple of days), it’s good to get together with friends and family, and like most folks fortunate who live in the US, I have a lot for which I am thankful.

Earlier this week, I picked up a screw in one of my Subie’s tires, so it was off to America’s Tire, where they fix these things for free. The idea is that you’ll think of them first when it’s time for new tires, and in my case, you can bet that’s going to happen. It was a 2-hour wait, and I used that time to go for a walk. Our local Harley dealer is just up the street from the tire place, I hadn’t been in a Harley showroom in a while, so I stopped by to check things out.

Things have changed from when I rode a Harley. In those days, any Harley dealership was a hopping place. When I walked over to the dealer this week, the place was mostly empty, they didn’t have a ton of T-shirts, and there were plenty of motorcycles. It’s a world gone mad, I tell you.

Sometime when I wasn’t looking, production shifted from T-shirts to motorcycles. In the early and mid-1990s, you’d have to go to the Laughlin River Run, Daytona, or Sturgis to see this many Harleys in one spot.

Ah, hope springs eternal. A thousand dollar dealer markup? At least these folks are honest about it, and they don’t try to disguise gouging as freight and setup.

I haven’t kept up with the latest from Harley, other than the headline-grabbing stuff about the Livewire. I guess they had a hiccup with the initial rollout, but that sort of thing happens and I hear it’s been fixed. What hasn’t been fixed is the Milwaukee notion that any Harley is worth $30K, and I think that’s one of the major reasons the bar-and-shield folks’ best days are in the rear-view mirror. I haven’t heard that Livewires are flying out of the showrooms, and judging by the looks of the dealer I visited, neither is anything else. It’s not just me saying this…the stock market shows a Harley trend that is downright scary. Harley has ridden their rebel reputation big time since the early 1990s, but one place you don’t want to buck the trend is in the stock market.

Harley’s stock performance over the last 5 years.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average over the last five years. It’s been said that a rising tide lifts all boats. Maybe it does. Maybe Harley’s stock would have been much lower without the bull market of the last few years. Maybe, maybe, maybe….

The Harley sales guy was eager to help, so I asked him about the Bronx 975 (Gresh did a piece on it not too long ago). My guy never heard of the Bronx, so I asked if they had any Sportsters (there was one, so maybe they are selling better). I then asked about Harley’s Street models (the 500 and 750 V-twins), and he told me there were none. “They didn’t sell too well,” he said. I thought that was unfortunate. I’m conceited enough to think that if Gresh and I had ridden those bikes in Baja, if Harley offered guided Baja tours to Street buyers, and if Harley had an effective blog, that bike could have been a winner. We sure sold a lot of motorcycles at CSC with those Baja tours (including to folks who didn’t ride with us in Baja). It was just the idea that they could (that, of course, and the CSC motorcycles’ price). Good buddy Dan is adventure touring in Tunisia right now along with a bunch of other Guzzistas on a ride organized by Moto Guzzi. I think that’s brilliant (and I’m jealous). Tunisia! Damn, that’s exotic!

I don’t think there’s much of a future in two-wheeled, 900-pound, 114-cubic-inch dinosaurs, but hey, what do I know? That’s a rhetorical question…I think my lack of knowledge is right up there with the industry wizards who continue to ponder the “what can we do about the sad state of the motorcycle industry” question, and then continue to offer 114-cubic-inch, $30,000 motorcycles that sit for presumably extended periods on showroom floors. And like I said earlier, I don’t think ebikes are the answer.

So, what do you think? Let us know with a comment or two. We love hearing from you. And I think the folks in Milwaukee would, too. They read these pages, I think, judging by what I’m seeing on Google Analytics. Let us know.

One hell of an ad…

A selfie of yours truly, as reflected in J’s visor, somewhere in the twisties below Lake Tahoe.

Good buddy J, with whom I’ve ridden a lot, is selling his old KLR. I had to laugh when I read his ad, and with his permission, I’m printing it here for you to enjoy as well (and if you ride a GS, my apologies in advance). J and I have ridden big miles in Baja (those trips were on the CSC RX3 motorcycles), as well as northern Nevada and California in the Lake Tahoe area (we both rode our KLRs on that ride). They were all awesome rides.

Okay, that’s enough of a stroll down memory lane. Here’s the ad for J’s KLR:

2005 Kawasaki KLR 650 project for sale – $800 (DAYTON)

2005 KLR650 project for sale
$800
49,509 miles

Do you have big adventure-bike dreams but a very small adventure-bike budget? Have you got some basic mechanical skills, a strong desire to learn more, and a dry place to work over the winter? If so, this is perfect for you.

This is a Kawasaki KLR650. The OG adventure motorcycle.

Show up at any gathering of adventure riders on a well-traveled KLR and hold your head high. While a guy on a BMW GS has to put up with constant Starbucks jokes, when you ride a KLR you just climb on and go look for a good taco stand. In Baja.

I’ve done this. I rode this bike all the way to Cabo San Lucas and back. In winter. To a Horizons Unlimited meet in Mariposa. I rode it to Overland Expo in Flagstaff a couple of times and had a beer with Ted Simon. All of those were amazing trips. I want you to have trips like that.

The best thing about this bike is that you’ll know everything about it. Because you overhauled it yourself. Imagine sitting around the campfire, under a big desert sky, telling the story of how you brought this bike home, tore it down, put it back together, and rode it to somewhere awesome, far away. You need that experience in your life.

The bike has been sitting in my garage since June, 2016. I haven’t tried to start it since then. It ran well enough when I stopped riding it. I know the clutch was slipping under load. And the fork seals were leaking. I quit riding this because I got something newer that I liked better. I’m not aware of any major issues that aren’t easily fixed.

Somebody who really knows what they are doing could probably have this thing roadworthy in a few days. I don’t have the time nor the motivation to make that happen. So I’m offering it as a project, at a price much lower than I would ask if I didn’t just want it out of my way.

Clean title in hand.

First person who shows up with $800 in cash, and a truck or trailer to haul the bike and all the extra parts away, gets everything.

Farkles:
Progressive Suspension adjustable rear shock with remote adjuster
Doohickey done at Happy Trails headquarters in Idaho
Happy Trails soft panniers with waterproof liners
Happy Trails pannier racks
Happy Trails engine guard and highway pegs
Happy Trails engine guard bags
Happy Trails skid plate
Happy Trails rear master cylinder guard
Moose Racing handguards
Bike Master heated grips
Powerlet accessory power outlet on handlebars
RAM mount ball mount and double-socket mount
Sargent gel seat, needs to be recovered

Spare parts and extras:
New Shinko 705 front and rear tires, still in the shipping packaging
Slightly used Michelin T63 front and rear tires, lots of life left
New clutch kit, still sealed in the original packaging
New clutch cover gasket, still sealed in the original packaging
New clutch cable, in original packaging
New front and rear brake pads, still sealed in original packaging
Spare engine, needs to be rebuilt
Spare carburetor
Lowering links
Shortened sidestand
Clymer shop manual

You know, after reading that ad, I’m tempted to buy that KLR myself. But I’m in the same boat as J: I don’t have the time or the motivation to bring it back to life. But wow, it’s one hell of a deal and the Kawasaki KLR was one hell of a motorcycle. I had a lot of fun with my KLR, and I often wish I still had it. But it went to a good home, and good buddy Daniel is putting it to good use.

The ride J and took with a bunch of other motojournalists in the northern Sierra Nevadas was grand. The riding through that part of the world is about as good as it gets.

Carla King’s photo of yours truly. My KLR went down the road a couple of years ago. Maybe I should have kept it.

Chasing J, Carla, and a a few others in the Sierra Nevada mountains.

Oh, hey, one more thing: If you have an interest in J’s KLR, here’s the link to the ad.

The Three Rivers Petroglyphs

It’s mid-November here in southern New Mexico, nights are cold but our mid-day temperatures are still in the 70’s. That will change soon. I needed a break from concrete so I texted Mike and asked him if he wanted to take a little ride before it got cold. Mike always wants to ride.

Mike lives in Carrizozo about 50 miles north from Tinfiny Ranch. 50 miles is not a lot of distance but the weather is much wilder up at his place. Located at the crossroads of Highways 380 and 54 right between a dip in the Sacramento Mountains the landform, there funnels a steady stream of wind across the strange little town. Even though it sits at a lower elevation than Tinfiny, Carrizozo is colder in winter. Hollywood has found the old buildings of Carrizozo picturesque and it seems like there’s always a crew shooting a funky scene whenever I go through.

“Can we get a couple coffees?” The lady working at the Three Rivers trinket shop says she will have to make some. Mike tells her that’s okay, we’ll wait. The coffee making process is interrupted by two black dogs coming in the front door. The dogs seem really glad to see us. They fall to the ground and beg to be petted. The smaller dog wants to kiss, needs to kiss, will die if he doesn’t get a kiss. That coffee pot is taking forever so I grab a cold drink. Mike is eating a bag of chips. When the coffee is finally ready and the dogs are thoroughly petted, we’ve killed an hour.

The road to the petroglyphs heads east towards the mountains, if you keep going it turns into dirt and ends at the beautiful Three Rivers campground. From that point Ruidoso is only a 20-mile hike: uphill all the way. You should go camp there.

The rocks here have some kind of iron oxide-like coating and the petroglyphs are kind of pecked into the rock. Dimpled could be used to describe it. The dimple knocks off a small chunk of the oxide revealing the stone beneath. There are thousands of them along a three-mile round trip path at Petroglyphs State Park. The images are still very clear with lots of contrast. You can mostly tell what the artist was representing with maybe 25% of the artwork being symbolic of something that made sense thousands of years ago.

These pictures from the past aren’t fragile cave paintings or fading lines scraped into soft sandstone. These suckers are exposed to the elements and some look like they were made last week. We don’t know a lot about the Mogollon People who made the petroglyphs but I can tell you they built their artwork to last. These stone images will go another 10 thousand years no problem.

It’s late afternoon by the time we get back to the trinket shop for more coffee. “There’s only enough for one cup and it’s gotten cold, I’ll have to make another pot.” The dogs can’t be bothered to lift their heads and acknowledge our existence. We are old news. The coffee brews its slow drip. A BMW rider sees our bikes out front and stops in to chat.

Conversation is easy. The trinket lady joins in with strong opinions on which Medicare plan is best (Plan F). I snack on a bag of dry-aged peanuts and some hard candy. The BMW guy is staying at the Three Rivers campground. He trailers his motorcycle around the country stopping in different areas to ride. His wife got all the money and the 80-acre farm back in Wisconsin. We pay the trinket lady; she made 9 dollars from us today and it only took her 2 hours to do it.

It’s starting to cool down now. In a few weeks we will be getting started with winter here in Southern New Mexico. I don’t like riding at night so I say goodbye to the boys. We start our bikes and three motorcyclists go their separate ways: Mike to the north, me to the south and BMW guy to the east.

Book Review: Berezina

Berezina, by Sylvain Tesson. Save your money, folks. This one’s a snoozer.

Damn, it sounded good, and the book review I read last week in The Wall Street Journal (which I must have read too quickly) made it sound like an interesting read. And the cover looked good, too. It had to be good: Five guys riding from Russia to France in the dead of winter, retracing Napolean’s retreat from a military disaster, on three Ural motorcycles. I love motorcycle adventure books. How could it not be great?

Well, let me tell you how. Berezina is the name of a river Napolean crossed on the way back from Moscow in 1812, and in colloquial French it’s become a term for anything that’s a disaster. It’s an entirely appropriate title for this book. I was hoping for stories about riding in the cold, riding from Russia to France, the challenges in riding motorcycles not known for reliability…in general, a good adventure read. What I found was a lot of intellectual drivel laden with three-dollar words talking almost exclusively about Napolean and his retreat. Somehow, for the most part, the author managed to do this without describing the areas he rode through, and without hardly mentioning the bikes or the ride. He spent a lot of time imagining the misery experienced by Napolean, his army, and bizarrely, his horses. I would estimate that less than 5% of the book was about the riding. Getting through this story was a slog, even though the book was mercifully short.

I realized all of the above in the first few pages, but I kept reading and hoping it would get better. It didn’t. Berezina reminded me of another motorcycle adventure that was mostly about things other than motorcycle riding (Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, which I also found to be a slog when I read it 50 years ago). Zen, however, at least spent some time on the bike and the riding. In Berezina there was precious little of that, and what little there was wasn’t nearly enough. Save your money, folks. The best thing about Berezina was that it was only $15.

There’s an old saying: You can’t tell a book by its cover. In this book’s case, never were truer words spoken.

If you want a great read about a real motorcycle adventure, buy a copy of Riding the Edge, Dave Barr’s epic story about his ride around the world on a constantly-failing Harley. If it has to be about riding Russia in the winter, try Riding the Ice, Barr’s sequel about a trip across Siberia in a sidecar-equipped Sportster. Either of those books is a great read. Better yet, buy both books. You can thank me later.

More books? Hey, check out our Books page!

The Perfect Bike?

This was a blog I wrote for CSC about 6 years ago, and it’s still relevant. Earlier this year I posted a photo showing my Harley in Baja and Gresh made a good comment: Any motorcycle you take a trip on is an adventure motorcycle. I agree with that. The earlier blogs on my Harley Softail had me thinking about this question again: What is the perfect motorcycle?

Cruisers. Standards. Sports bikes. Dirt bikes. Dual sports. Big bikes. Small bikes. Whoa, I’m getting dizzy just listing these.

The Good Old Days

In the old days, it was simple. There were motorcycles. Just plain motorcycles. You wanted to ride, you bought a motorcycle. And they were small, mostly. I started on a 90cc Honda (that’s me in that photo to the right). We’d call it a standard today, if such a thing still existed.

Then it got confusing. Bikes got bigger. Stupidly so, in my opinion. In my youth, a 650 was a huge motorcycle, and the streets were ruled by bikes like the Triumph Bonneville and the BSA Lightning. Today, a 650 would be considered small. The biggest Triumph today has a 2300cc engine. I don’t follow the Harley thing anymore, but I think their engines are nearly that big, too. The bikes weigh close to half a ton. Half a ton!

I’ve gone through an evolution of sorts on this topic. Started on standards, migrated into cruisers after a long lapse, went to the rice rockets, then morphed into dual sports.

Cruisers and Adventure Bikes

The ADV bug hit me hard about 15 years ago. I’d been riding in Baja a lot and my forays occasionally took me off road. Like many folks who drifted back into motorcycles in the early 1990s, the uptick in Harley quality bit me. As many of us did, I bought my obligatory yuppie bike (the Heritage Softail) and the accompanying zillion t-shirts (one from every Harley dealer along the path of every trip I ever took). I had everything that went along with this kind of riding except the tattoo (my wife and a modicum of clear thinking on my part drew the line there). Leather fringe, the beanie helmet, complimentary HOG membership, and the pot belly. I was fully engaged.

Unlike a lot of yuppie riders of that era, though, I wasn’t content to squander my bucks on chrome, leather fringe, and the “ride to live, live to ride” schlock. I wanted to ride, and ride I did. All over the southwestern US and deep into Mexico. Those rides were what convinced me that maybe an 800+ lb cruiser was not the best bike in the world for serious riding…

The Harley had a low center of gravity, and I liked that. It was low to the ground, and I didn’t like that. And it was heavy. When that puppy started to drift in the sand, I just hung on and hoped for the best. Someone was looking out for me, because in all of that offroading down there in Baja, I never once dropped it. As I sit here typing this, enjoying a nice hot cup of coffee that Susie just made for me, I realize that’s kind of amazing.

The other thing I didn’t like about the Harley was that I couldn’t carry too much stuff on it without converting that bike into a sort of rolling bungee cord advertisement. The bike’s leather bags didn’t hold very much, the Harley’s vibration required that I constantly watch and tighten their mounting hardware, and the whole arrangement really wasn’t a good setup for what I was doing. The leather bags looked cool, but that was it. It was bungee cords and spare bags to the rescue on those trips…

Sports Bikes

The next phase for me involved sports bikes. They were all the rage in the early 90s and beyond, but to me they basically represent the triumph of marketing hoopla over common sense. I bought a Suzuki TL1000S (fastest bike I ever owned), and I toured Baja with it. It would be hard to find a worse bike for that kind of riding. The whole sports bike thing, in my opinion, was and is stupid. You sit in this ridiculous crouched over, head down position, and if you do any kind of riding at all, by the end of the day your wrists, shoulders, and neck are on fire. My luggage carrying capacity was restricted to a small tankbag and a ridiculous-looking tailbag.

I was pretty hooked on the look, though, and I went through a succession of sports bikes, including the TL1000S, a really racy Triumph Daytona 1200 (rode that one from Mexico to Canada), and a Triumph Speed Triple. Fast, but really dumb as touring solutions, and even dumber for any kind of off road excursion.

Phase III for me, after going through the Harley “ride to live” hoopla and the Ricky Racer phases, was ADV riding and dual sport bikes. The idea here is that the bike is equally at home on the street or in the dirt. Dual purpose…dual sport. I liked the idea, and I thought it would be a winner for my kind of riding.

A BMW GS versus Triumph’s Tiger

The flavor of the month back then was the BMW GS. I could never see myself on a Beemer, but I liked the concept. I was a Triumph man back in those days, and the Triumph Tiger really had my attention. A couple of my friends were riding the big BMW GS, but I knew I didn’t want a Beemer. In my opinion, those bikes are overpriced. The Beemers are heavy (over 600 lbs on the road), they have a terrible reputation for reliability, and I think they looked goofy. The Tiger seemed to be a better deal than the Beemer, and it sure had the right offroad look. Tall, an upright seating position (I had enough of that sports bike nonsense), and integrated luggage. So, I bit the bullet and shelled out something north of $10K back in ’06 for this beauty…

The Triumph had a few things going for it…I liked the detachable luggage, it was fast, it got good gas mileage (I could go 200+ miles between gas stations), and did I mention it was fast?

The Tiger’s Shortfalls

Looks can be deceiving, though, and that Tiger was anything but an off-road bike. It was still well over 600 lbs on the road with a full tank of gas, and in the soft stuff, it was terrifying. I never dropped the Triumph, but I sure came close one time. On a ride out to the Old Mill in Baja (a really cool old hotel right on the coast a couple hundred miles south of the border), the soft sand was bad. Really bad. Getting to the Old Mill involved riding through about 5 miles of soft sand, and it scared the stuffing out of me. I literally tossed and turned all night worrying about the ride out the next morning. It’s not supposed to be like that, folks.

And the Tiger was tall. Too tall, in my opinion. I think all of the current dual sport bikes are too tall. I guess the manufacturers do that because their marketing studies show a lot of basketball players buy dual sports. Me? I don’t play basketball and I never cared for a seat that high. Just getting on the Tiger was scary. After throwing my leg over the seat, I’d fight to lean the bike upright, and not being able to touch the ground on the right side until I had the thing upright was downright unnerving. I never got over that initial “getting on the bike” uneasiness. What were those engineers thinking?
The other thing that surprised me about the Tiger was that it was uncomfortable. The seat was hard (not comfortably hard, like a well designed seat should be, but more like sitting on small beer keg), and the foot pegs were way too high. I think they did that foot peg thing to make the bike lean over more, but all it did for me was make me feel like I was squatting all day. Not a good idea.

Kawasaki’s KLR 650

I rode the Tiger for a few years and then sold it. Even before I sold it, though, I had bought a new KLR 650 Kawasaki. It was a big step down in the power department (I think it has something like 34 or 38 horsepower), but I had been looking at the KLR for years. It seemed to be right…something that was smaller, had a comfortable riding position, and was reasonably priced (back then, anyway).

I had wanted a KLR for a long time, but nobody was willing to let me ride one. That’s a common problem with Japanese motorcycle dealers. And folks, this boy ain’t shelling out anything without a test ride first. I understand why they do it (they probably see 10,000 squids who want a test ride for every serious buyer who walks into a showroom), but I’m old fashioned and crotchety. I won’t buy anything without a test ride. This no-test-ride thing kept me from pulling the trigger on a KLR for years. When I finally found a dealer who was willing to let me ride one (thank you, Art Wood), I wrote the check and got on the road…and the off road…

My buddy John and I have covered a lot of miles on our KLRs through Baja and elsewhere. I still have my KLR, but truth be told, I only fire it up three or four times a year. It’s a big bike. Kawi says the KLR is under 400 lbs, but with a full tank of gas on a certified scale, that thing is actually north of 500 lbs. I was shocked when I saw that on the digital readout. And, like all of the dual sports, the KLR is tall. It still gives me the same tip-over anxiety as the Tiger did when I get on it. And I know if I ever dropped it, I’d need a crew to get it back on its feet.

That thing about dropping a bike is a real consideration. I’ve been lucky and I haven’t dropped a bike very often. But it can happen, and when it does, it would be nice to just be able to pick the bike up.

Muddy Baja

On one of our Baja trips, we had to ride through a puddle that looked more like a small version of Lake Michigan. I got through it, but it was luck, not talent. My buddy Dave was not so lucky…he dropped his pristine Yamaha mid-puddle…

The fall broke the windshield and was probably a bit humiliating for Dave, but the worst part was trying to lift the Yamaha after it went down. Slippery, muddy, wet…knee deep in a Mexican mudbath. Yecchh! It took three of us to get the thing upright and we fell down several times while doing so. Thinking back on it now, we probably looked pretty funny. If we had made a video of it, it probably would have gone viral.

The Perfect Bike: A Specification

So, where is this going…and what would my definition of the perfect touring/dual sport/ADV bike be?

Here’s what I’d like to see:

Something with a 250cc to 500cc single-cylinder engine. My experience with small bikes as a teenager and my more recent experience has convinced me that this is probably the perfect engine size. Big engines mean big bikes, and that kind of gets away from what a motorcycle should be all about. Water cooled would be even better. The Kawi KLR is water cooled, and I like that.

A dual sport style, with a comfortable riding position. No more silly road racing stuff. I’m a grown man, and when I ride, I like to ride hundreds of miles a day. I want my bike to have a riding position that will let me do that.

A windshield. It doesn’t have to be big…just something that will flip the wind over my helmet. The Kawi and the Triumph got it right in that department.

Integrated luggage. The Triumph Tiger got that part right. The KLR, not so much.

Light weight. Folks, it’s a motorcycle…not half a car. Something under 400 lbs works for me. If it gets stuck, I want to be able to pull it out of a puddle. If it drops, I want to be able to pick it up without a hoist or a road crew. None of the current crop of big road bikes meets this requirement.

Something that looks right and is comfortable. I liked the Triumph’s looks. But I want it to be comfortable.

Something under $5K. Again, it’s a motorcycle, not a car. My days of dropping $10K or so on a motorcycle are over. I’ve got the money, but I’ve also got the life experiences that tell me I don’t need to spend stupidly to have fun.

It was maybe a year after that blog that the RX3 came on the scene, and it answered the mail nicely. A year or two after the RX3 hit the scene, BMW, Kawasaki, and one or two others introduced smaller ADV motorcycles. I commented that these guys were copying Zongshen. One snotty newspaper writer told me I was delusional if I thought BMW, Kawi, and others copied Zongshen. I think that’s exactly what happened, but I don’t think they did as good a job as Zongshen did.

If you’ve got an opinion, please leave a comment. We’d love to hear from you!

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Singapore

I like Singapore and I fly there a couple of times a year on business. I know, I’m supposed to be retired, but I’m finding I’m not very good at it. And I don’t need much of an excuse to fly to Singapore. The flight is a bruiser (it’s 16 1/2 hours from LAX to Singapore on a nonstop, and it usually goes over 24 hours if you can’t get a nonstop), but I don’t mind doing it. Singapore is worth the trek. I say I go there on business, but my visits are more like vacations than work. I like the place.

Orchard Road: Singapore’s Rodeo Drive

Orchard Road is Singapore’s upscale shopping area, and the architecture, the night scenes, and feel of the place is amazing. These are scenes from a walk along Orchard Road with an 8mm fisheye lens on my Nikon. It had just rained the evening I took these, and it made for dramatic photography.

You see two kinds of buildings in this area, and I captured both in the photos above. Old Singapore consists primarily of shop houses…two-story structures where folks have a business on the first floor and live on the second floor. And there are the modern skyscrapers. The mix of both makes for interesting scenes.

See those trees along the sidewalks? They’re quiet during the day, but at night, the zillions of birds roosting in those trees are deafening. You literally have to shout to carry on a conversation because the birds drown everything out. It gets interesting when there’s a thunderstorm (very common in this part of the world). When the skies thunder, the birds all fall silent for a second. Then, after a brief pause, they start chirping again. It’s all very cool.

Little India in Singapore

On another visit, I poked around Singapore’s Little India section. There are four major ethnic groups in Singapore, and folks from India comprise one of them.

Singapore Industries

Singapore has a rich maritime heritage (the four major industries in Singapore are shipping, oil refining, finance, and tourism). The shipping industry came about as a result of Singapore’s central location between India and China (the Chinese are another major ethnic group here). There are all kinds of interesting things to see in Singapore, and it’s a walker’s paradise if you like to explore on foot.

You can see all kinds of things in Singapore you won’t see anywhere else in the world. Check this out:

The structure you see above is a shopping, apartment, office, and entertainment complex comprised of three huge buildings capped by a roof styled like a ship (complete with gardens and a swimming pool). The buildings are supposed to be waves, with the ship riding along top. I’ve never seen anything like this. You might have seen it on television when President Trump was in Singapore meeting with the North Korean guy. But that’s Singapore. It has a lot of things you won’t see anywhere else.

Singapore Museums

To me, all of Singapore is a museum with architecture, dining, street sculpture, automobiles, and more that makes getting out and walking around a hell of an experience. There are many museums, including one focused on Singapore’s World War II history I found particularly interesting. Here are a few photos I grabbed in it.

Exploring Singapore on a Motorcycle?

Nope, I haven’t done that (not yet, anyway). But I’m tempted to spend an extra day or two over there on the next trip and see if I can find somebody to rent me a motorcycle. I’ve seen RX3s in Singapore. That would be fun, and I think the RX3 would be a perfect bike to poke around on in this tropical urban paradise. The entire country is only about 24 miles long, and most (maybe all) of it is city. It seems to be very safe, too, so I don’t think I could find myself in any dangerous areas. The only problem is they drive on the wrong side of the road over there, and that would take some getting used to.

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Lunch with Marty and the boys

Marty and his 145,000-mile BMW K1200RS. That’s my RX3 in the background.

I’ve been riding with good buddy Marty since the early 2000s (it’s been close to 20 years now), and we’ve covered miles all over the US, Mexico, and Canada. Marty has owned the BMW K1200RS you see in the above photo since it was new. He owns and has owned a bunch of exotic bikes (Ducatis, Aprilias, Triumphs, other BMWs, and more), but he prefers the K1200RS and he told me he’s keeping it forever.

I’ve got a bunch of good friends I ride and socialize with, and I know all of them through Marty. We all get together for coffee at the Brown’s BMW dealership on Saturday morning. That’s followed by lunch, and maybe we’ll talk about the next big ride. We frequently talk about rides we’ve done in the past. Sometimes the conversation turns to politics, and we all have strong opinions. Some of the guys are right (the ones who agree with me), and some of them are wrong (the ones who don’t), but it doesn’t matter. Every once in a while I inject the thought that the problem in America is that the guys who really know how to run the country are screwing around drinking coffee at Brown’s and riding their motorcycles. It usually gets a laugh, even though the guys have heard that line about 800 times.

I like the get-togethers at Brown’s, although sometimes I’ll go months without getting over there. I don’t know why, because I always enjoy it when I go. And I like riding my RX3 to our Saturday morning meetings. It’s an excuse to get out on my favorite motorcycle (not that anyone needs an excuse to go for a motorcycle ride). Sometimes folks ask about my motorcycle; more than a few motorcycle riders have never seen an RX3. Some folks think it’s a BMW, even though BMW has their own competitor in the small adventure touring motorcycle category (that’s the BMW G 310 GS and you can read our road test of it here). Whatever. My RX3 is slathered with decals denoting some of the big rides I’ve done, and I guess that gets it some credibility in a crowd known for high mileage.

While I’m at the Brown BMW dealership, I like to check out the vintage and new motorcycles. The old bikes are beautiful, and some of the new ones are, too…

A mid-’60s 600cc BMW. Those old bikes are drop dead gorgeous.

A new old stock (that is to say, a leftover) 2017 Boxer café bike. It’s stunning. It’s a hell of a deal, but there’s no package deal for a chiropractor, and I’d need one if I rode this bike. I can dream, though. The styling on this bike really makes it for me.

I tried to show the difference in size between a brand new GS 1250 and the mid-’60s BMW, and I failed. The photo doesn’t do the bikes justice. Side-by-side, the difference in size is shocking. The GS is outrageously huge. The older BMW seems to be the perfect size for me.

So that’s it for today, folks, except to ask a quick question: Do you have a riding buddy like Marty in your life? Hey, we’d love to hear about it, so drop us a comment or two and let us know!

Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument

The latest Motorcycle Classics issue has a great story in it on Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, the National Park that’s tucked in along the Mexican border, south of Ajo and Why in southern Arizona. It was a fun visit for us, but wow, was it ever hot and desolate out there! The two closest towns, Ajo and Why, are remote. As in extremely remote.

Arizona has towns with unusual names. Ajo means garlic in Spanish (I didn’t see a single garlic when I was there). Why is name that makes you wonder, well, why anyone would put a town in that location (it’s not much more than two or three buildings out in the middle of nowhere). The good folks in Arizona wanted to simply call the place Y, as it was built at a fork in the road (you know, like the letter Y). But Arizona requires their towns to have at least three letters in their names (don’t ask me Why).

So, another day, another Destinations piece in Motorcycle Classics, one of the world’s great magazines. Other motorcycle magazines are dropping like flies, but MC keeps on keeping on with the best stories and photography in print. I’ve been writing for Motorcycle Classics for over 10 years now, to the tune of something like 64 articles. You can get to all of them online, or you can order your very own copy of Destinations, the book with all of the travel pieces I’ve done for MC (we have both black and white and color options). They make great gifts. You should buy several..buy two or more and shipping is free!

And speaking of stats, we’ve been publishing ExhaustNotes for a little over a year now. In that time, we’ve posted 512 blog posts, and we’ve had 2100 comments. We love your comments, so please, keep them coming. Do you have anything special you want us to write about? Hey, let us know. Post a comment!

Regarding blog topics, one of the things we’ve tried to do is steer clear of politics. Joe went there a little bit with the title of his recent blog (something about never getting a free gun when Obama was president). The problem with discussing anything related to politics is nobody listens to understand; they only listen to respond. That’s true no matter which side of the divide you live on (in my opinion, which of course is always the right one on all political issues). Do you want us to go there? There’s just so much to write about, but the deal is that no matter what position we take, we’ll infuriate half our readers. But wow, the topics are so tempting, and they’ll excite so much discussion. Get this: Illinois just imposed a tax on trade ins (they tax you on the car you’re buying, and they tax you on the car you’re trading in). I could have fun writing about that. But, it’s politics. And it’s Illinois (you know, Chicago, the place where stringent gun control laws are working so well). Should we go there?

Ah, let’s see, what else is going on?

Well, lots. I received my .257 Weatherby Ruger No. 1 back from the repair center with a new stock, and we’ll be posting photos of it along with a range report in the near future. I’ve got some good inputs on good loads from my good buddy Mississippi Dave, and we’ll put them to the test.

And things are going great guns with Gear’d (how’s that for alliteration?).

My Gear’d ZX2-1116. I am loving this watch!

I’m wearing my Gear’d watch as I write this, and the more I wear it, the more I like it. I’ve been checking its accuracy, and it is spot on. I’ll have an update on my Gear’d in the near future, and so will good buddy Joe Gresh. Joe’s watch is on its way to him, and he’s got a torture test in mind similar to the one I posted recently. Joe tells me it has something to do with concrete.

You know, we’ve done a lot of product reviews here on ExNotes, and as promised, we’re adding a Product Reviews page on the site to provide an index to all of them. Stay tuned, and we’ll post a link in the next few days. I can’t remember if I’ve mentioned this, but we recently updated our Tales of the Gun page. Take a look. It’s better organized, and we’re all caught up with adding each of the gun blogs to this page.

And that’s a wrap for today, folks. As always, there’s lots more coming your way right here on the ExNotes blog. Keep your comments coming; we love hearing from you.

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Two-Wheeled Thai Taxis…

I’ve seen a lot of interesting things in the world, and I’ve seen some really interesting things in Asia. Mind you, all this is filtered through the mind of an East Coast boy who really didn’t get out of Dodge until he finished college, but boy oh boy, I’ve sure covered a lot of ground since then. And I’ve covered a lot of it on two wheels. And because of that, I’ve always been intrigued by how other people in other countries use their motorcycles.

One of the wilder things I’ve seen is how small motorcycles do duty as taxis, and in particular, how they do so in Thailand. One night a few years ago I was wandering around in Bangkok, one of the world’s more sultry and exotic cities, and the action on a typical street corner just off Sukhumvit Road (one of the main roads through Bangkok) was both mind numbing and mesmerizing. I recorded about 10 minutes of it. Sit back, grab a cup of coffee, or Scotch, or whatever floats your boat, and enjoy.

One of my good buddies who lives in Bangkok owns a couple of small bikes and he invited me to tour Thailand. I’m tempted.

Misery on a Motorcycle

We’ve probably all felt it, and nowhere is misery more pronounced than on a long motorcycle trip where there is no end in sight. The rain, the cold, the heat…it all makes us wonder why we do it. Good buddy Juan Carlos said it best when we were riding through an extreme freezing rainstorm in Colombia’s Andes Mountains. “We sometimes wonder why we suffer through this kind of misery when we could be home with a warm cup of coffee,” or words to that effect, was his take on it all. Indeed, I’ve had the same thought many times myself. I’ll share a few of my most miserable moments with you and then I’ll provide my answer to why we do what we do. And there’s an invitation at the end of this blog…if you’d like to share the misery (misery loves company, you know), we’d love to hear from you.

Super Hawk, and Super Cold

My first ever memory of misery on a motorcycle was riding on the back of my Dad’s Honda Super Hawk back in the 1960s. It was a 305cc twin-carb black-and-chrome beauty, and Dad bought into the dream during a time when you really did meet the nicest people on a Honda. What the Japanese marketing gurus left out, though, is that you sometimes also met the coldest people on a Honda, and two of them would have been Dad and me that morning. It was early on a Saturday in September, I was 14 years old, and we were riding the Honda to Cooper’s Cycle Ranch in Ewing, New Jersey for its first service.

Yours truly in the Summer of 1966, when things had warmed up a bit. Dad would let me ride the Super Hawk in the land behind our house. When he wasn’t home, sometimes I rode it elsewhere, too.

It was really cold that morning, as only New Jersey can be that time of year. Really, really cold. We weren’t dressed for the weather, the bike had no windshield or fairing, full-faced helmets and good moto gear hadn’t been invented yet, and the cold was brutal. I remember we stopped at a diner somewhere on Route 130 and Dad bought two copies of the newspaper. After a hearty and hot breakfast, Dad stuffed one of the newspapers in the front of his jacket (not a motorcycle jacket, as that kind of gear didn’t exist yet), and I did the same with the newspaper he gave to me. The newspapers helped a bit, but not enough to really make a difference. But I remember that ride like it happened yesterday.

Canada: My First International Adventure

For me, this thing about international adventure riding started early, as in college. I was in my junior year at Rutgers when good buddy Keith Hediger and yours truly decided a motorcycle adventure from New Jersey to Quebec was just what the doctor ordered. It was Spring Break, our engineering courses were brutal, and we needed a respite from hitting the books.

Keith on my 750 back in the day. I didn’t get a photo of him on his Kawasaki 500cc Triple. He bought the jacket after our trip to Canada.

Canada. It would be great. As they say, it’s almost like going to another country. Both Keith and I were ROTC students, and we joked that we would be draft dodgers. The ride north was great, Canada was great, and then it rained the entire length of Vermont on the way home. I’m not exaggerating. It was raining when we crossed the border back into the US, and it rained all day long without a single break.

We didn’t have rain gear in those days. Keith was on a Kawasaki 500cc two-stroke triple and I was on my CB-750 Honda. For us it was bell-bottomed jeans, nylon windbreaker jackets, open face helmets, and tennis shoes. We were soaked to the gills and we were indeed miserable. And cold. But we had ridden to Canada and back on our motorcycles. I didn’t know anybody else who had ever done that. It was fun. The rain notwithstanding, it lit a fire in me for international motorcycles rides that burns to this day. And I remember it like it happened yesterday.

Mexico: Soaked Again!

Fast forward thirty years or so and good buddy John Welker and I were on our cruisers headed to Baja’s Cabo San Lucas, a ferry ride across the Sea of Cortez, and then Puerto Vallarta, Guadalajara, and other points in mainland Mexico. I had a ’92 Harley and John had a Yamaha Virago I called the Viagra. Most of the ride was in great weather. But that first day was terrible. It was raining I left the Los Angeles area, it was raining when I hooked up with John down in San Ysidro, and rained nearly the entire day. It rained when we blew through Tijuana and we rode through the rain to Ensenada. We were experiencing the tail end of the El Nino storms that hit our part of the world that year.

We didn’t let the rain stop us, though. We stopped at La Bufadora south of Ensenada, a spot where there’s a natural opening in the rocks, and when the waves from the Pacific come crashing in, it shoots a spout 150 feet in the air. That spray soaked us, too. But it had rained nearly all day, so the extra La Bufadora spray didn’t make us any wetter. We were already soaked.

John Welker, me, and our two V-twins during a very brief break in the weather on that brutally wet day in Baja.

We rode nearly 200 miles south into Baja the first day, and then I threw in the towel. I had to stop. I was soaked to the bone (we didn’t have rain gear, even though we started the ride in the rain…smart, huh?). I was so cold I couldn’t ride, so we stopped in a little hotel in Colonet. I remember feeling the water seeping through my leather jacket, and I remember shivering so badly I could hear my teeth clattering. The hotel had an old-fashioned register you had to sign when checking in, and I was shaking so badly I couldn’t sign my name. Even soaked and freezing, though, I couldn’t remember when I had ever felt better or more alive. And you know what? I remember that day like it happened yesterday.

Steamed Mustangs

When I was a consultant and I wrote the blog for CSC Motorcycles, in the early days the company made Mustang replicas. They were cool little bikes that looked like 1950s Mustang motorcycles, and I had this bright idea that we would make a splash if we rode the little 150cc Mustangs to Cabo San Lucas and back. You know, ride the length of Baja on little 150cc tiddlers. It was a story that guaranteed press coverage, and my idea worked. Half a dozen magazines picked up that story.

What I didn’t realize when I scheduled the ride was that September is the hottest month of the year in Baja. I mean, who know such a thing? I grew up in New Jersey, and in New Jersey, September means you’re rolling into winter. In my mind, September is not a month one associates with hot weather.

Simon Gandolfi, novelist, blogger, and motorcycle adventure rider on a CSC 150 somewhere on the road to Cabo San Lucas. Damn, it was hot that day!

But not in Baja. As soon as we crossed Parallelo 28 and Guerrero Negro, the heat went from bad to you’ve-gotta-be-kidding-me misery. And then as we rolled into Santa Rosalia and approached the Tropic of Cancer, the humidity hit us. We were riding in a crock pot, and the setting was on high. Those little bikes would barely make 50 mph the way we had them loaded, so we couldn’t make enough wind to stay cool. It was, without a doubt, the worst heat and the most physically-challenging ride I’ve ever experienced. But (and you can probably guess what I’m going to say next), I remember that ride like it happened yesterday.

Why We Do It

Guys, I ain’t the smartest person in the room, and I don’t have any great insights here. I can’t speak for everyone, but I can speak for myself. I ride because it’s fun. If a little rough weather comes along, hey, that’s part of the deal. It’s miserable when it happens, but it sure makes for some great memories, and oddly, the off-the-scale misery moments are the ones I remember best.

Do you have a particularly miserable motorcycle day, you know, a ride through rough weather, you’d like to share with us? Hey, leave a comment!

Want to read some of our epic rides? Check this out!