Riding in the Rain – The ExhaustNotes Blog

Motorcycle Cold

By Joe Berk

Misery makes for strong memories, and nowhere is that more true than on a motorcycle in cold wet weather. I’ve had times when I’ve been absolutely teeth-chattering cold and couldn’t shake it. Hypothermia, they call it.

We have all experienced cold and wet weather riding experiences. These are the ones that reside in my memory.

My First Big Baja Trip

Back in 1994, Baja John and I did our first big Baja ride, from southern California all the way down to Cabo San Lucas. I met John somewhere on the way down in So Cal (I can’t remember where), but what I do remember is starting out around 4:00 a.m. in a heavy downpour. I must have had some kind of rain gear (in those early days of my big trip rides we didn’t wear the kind of gear that came later), but it was relatively ineffective and before long I was pretty wet and miserable. I remember I was wearing jeans and a heavy leather motorcycle jacket. I was on my ’92 Softail, and John was on his Yamaha Virago.

Our thawing out stop in Vicente Guerrero. We didn’t cover too many miles that first day entering Baja, mostly because of the rain and the cold.

It rained off and on for most of that day. John and I stopped in Ensenada, took a few pictures, stopped again at La Bufadora, and from Bufadora on it was a steady downpour. We were young and dumb, and we just keep going. Somewhere around Vicente Guerrero (about 200 miles south of the border) I saw a hotel and stopped. My teeth were chattering uncontrollably and I felt like I was having a hard time controlling the motorcycle. It was around 4:00 in the afternoon and I was absolutely miserable.

The hotel was a cheap Baja place with concrete floors and no heat. The front desk had a register we both had to sign and I was shaking so badly I couldn’t sign my name, so I just made a big X like a hillbilly (not that there’s anything wrong with being a hillbilly). I remember the hotel clerk gave us a roll of toilet paper. We found our room, I stripped down, unrolled my sleeping bag (it had stayed dry, fortunately), and fell asleep in it shaking like a crazy person (not that there’s anything wrong with being a crazy person). I’d wake up every hour or so, check my watch, and realize I was still shivering. Finally, when I woke up at 4:00 a.m. (exactly 12 hours after climbing into my sleeping bag), I had stopped shaking. I slept for another couple of hours and was good to go.

By the next morning, the rain had stopped. The Harley and our clothes took a little longer to dry out. The guy on the BMW snagged the electric heater.

When we checked out that morning, another traveler was doing the same and I watched in surprise as he turned in an electric heater. We could have asked for one to put in our room, but we didn’t know. I remember thinking those BMW riders knew a thing or two.

That first day riding into the Baja El Nino rains was a brutal experience. We had nice weather and a rain-free ride all the way down to Cabo and back.

The Tibetan Plateau

I am a slow learner. Maybe a better description would be a learner who forgets and has to learn all over again.

When we prepared for the big ride circumnavigating China (20 years after the Baja ride described above), I had a very flaky rain suit that I knew would let water penetrate. Prior to getting on the plane for China, I sprayed the hell out of it with Scotchguard and hoped for the best.

Hope is not a strategy, as I again learned riding through another motorcycle trip downpour. This time we were headed to the Tibetan Plateau, with the very capable Sergeant Zuo leading the way (that intro photo above was on the way up to the Tibetan Plateau in that downpour). The rains were oppressive, the mountain roads were curvy and dark, it was cold, my Scotchguard didn’t work worth a damn, and I was wet and cold. Bitter cold. Not quite hypothermic, but cold nonetheless.

The Raiders Tibetan bar scene. Gresh and I lived it.

We finally arrived at our destination late that evening. It was wooden hotel in a tiny town with an adjoining dining area, and both looked like Indiana Jones’ girlfriend’s place from his first movie, Raiders of the Lost Ark. Gresh and I ducked into our room and I changed into dry clothes. The dining area didn’t have a menu. They had but one offering for dinner: Dumplings. All boiling in a big pot that looked like the one you’d see cannibals cooking people in. No kidding…it was that big. There must have been 900 dumplings floating around in that boiling cauldron. It was an all you can eat arrangement, and I ate plenty. They were great, and they were hot, both attributes that were perfect for my low-temperature condition.

We filled a smaller serving bowl with just a few of the dumplings from the giant dumpling cauldron. They really hit the spot.

Back to the “freeze your butt off” aspect of this blog. The room had some sort of a heater in the bathroom (complete with a Chinese style squat toilet, which was good for a few laughs). Gresh and I could not figure out how to get the heater to work. I’m not that smart, so I wasn’t surprised I couldn’t find the path to enlightenment. Gresh…he’s pretty smart, and his similar inability to crack the code made me feel not quite so dumb. We could get it to give us hot water, but we couldn’t get it to throw any heat. Being an engineer, I finally said screw it: We’ll just let the hot shower run all night and hope that’s enough to keep the room a degree or two above the outside temperature.

I woke up a few times during the night to the sound of the shower running. The room was like a sauna. Steamy, zero visibility, but warm. That hot water worked great.

A Cold Night In Tangke

When we were coming down off the Tibetan Plateau on the China ride, we rolled into a tiny town called Tangke.

Gresh and I joked about now being able to say “when I rode down off the Tibetan Plateau…”

Tangke was remote and primitive, and it was cold. It felt like it was going to rain as we entered, but it did not. We stayed in another place that had a restaurant with a hotel behind it. The restaurant was kind of fun because one of our riders (a fellow name Lu) saw a Tibetan woman making butter and asked if he could try it. She agreed. The approach was different than what I would have thought. Instead of churning the butter in a circular motion (like I’d seen done in countless Western movies), her approach involved slowly pumping a big stick up and down in a floor-based bucket. Lu was a real cut up. He started pumping the rod in a manner that could only be described as suggestive, which the Tibetan lady thought was hilarious. We did, too.

Good buddy Lu, suggesting unnatural acts with a Tibetan maiden. It was a fun ride, China was.

To get to the hotel behind the restaurant, we had to follow a dirt path and carefully avoid stepping in dog poop (at least I hope it was dog poop). I was thinking the hotel room would be a real disappointment, but it was actually pretty nice. When the hotel guy showed us the room, I looked around and couldn’t find a thermostat, and not wishing to run the shower all night, I asked about it. He didn’t speak English, but I managed to get my point across visually (I was a mime on a radio show in another life), and he showed me how to work the electric bed. It was like an electric blanket, except the heater was built into the mattress.

I was a little leery about sleeping on a toaster, but that electric bed worked wonderfully well. It was cold, real cold, that night, so much so there was frost on the bikes the next morning. But I was snug as a bug.

The Honda Electric Shower Heater

Nope, this has nothing to do with Honda motorcycles. There’s actually a town in Colombia up in the Andes Mountains called Honda.

Like most of the towns we rode through in the Andes, this one was hilly. The hills were so steep you couldn’t park the bike and rely on the kickstand to keep it from rolling away; keeping the bike in gear was necessary. Good buddy Juan, who led our ride, stopped in front of our hotel, which was securely hidden behind a tall wall and gigantic doors. “Security is an issue here,” Juan explained. The big doors had a little door at eye level. I immediately thought of that scene in Romancing the Stone (which was supposed to be in Colombia, but was actually filmed in Mexico).

A scene from Romancing the Stone. Our hotel in Honda had a similar little door in its gates.

Just like in the movie, someone from the hotel opened the eye level little door, conversed with Juan for a minute, and decided to allow us in. We couldn’t leave the bikes on the street (“Too dangerous,” Juan said), so we parked that at a secure warehouse around the corner.

Our hotel in Honda. The big gated doors to the left of our bikes (in the yellow wall) actually had a little door that could be opened to check out whoever wanted to enter before opening the big doors.

Once inside the hotel, I showered before dinner. There was only one faucet in the shower, and the shower was cold. I saw a switch on the showerhead, and what appeared to be an electrical coil that the water flowed through. I nervously tried the switch (standing naked in the icy water pouring through the showerhead), but the water remained icy. Oh well, I thought. I’ve taken cold showers before (no jokes, please).

At dinner in the hotel that night (which was excellent), I asked Juan about the showerhead. He smiled. “The electrical coil is supposed to heat the water as it flows through,” he said. “That’s the theory, anyway. Most of the time they don’t work,” he added, with a weak smile. Maybe that’s a good thing, I remember thinking.

Dad’s Super Hawk Heading to Cooper’s

When I was a 14-year-old kid back in rural New Jersey, I managed to get my Dad interested in motorcycles. In the space of less than 4 months, he bought a used CB 160 Honda (the baby Super Hawk), a new 305cc Super Hawk, and then a ’66 Triumph Bonneville. Cooper’s Cycle Ranch in Hamilton was our dealer, and in the early days, it was a ranch, with a big barn and all the accoutrements that went with it.

Sherm Cooper, a well-known Triumph flat track racer who became a very successful Honda and Triumph dealer in the 1960s and 1970s. He was a nice guy.

One morning (I’m guessing it was in the Spring, after the snow and ice disappeared, but before the temps starting getting reasonable), we left early on a Saturday morning to bring the Super Hawk in for its 500-mile service. The ride was along Route 130, a highway that ran from our area to Hamilton (a distance of about 35 miles).

It didn’t seem like it was going to be that cold on that distant-past Saturday morning, but let me tell you, it sure was. Dad and I both had jackets, but nothing like the motorcycle gear folks wear these days. And we had not counted on the wind chill. It was bitter. I had Dad to shield me from the wind chill; he was out in it. I guess you could say he was a Popsickle (or maybe a Popcycle).

We pulled into a store and bought a couple of newspapers, and we each stuffed them into the front of our jackets to cut the wind chill. It was a good idea, but it didn’t work very well. We still froze our butts off. I was freezing; it must have been terrible for Dad.

Yours truly at age 14 on Dad’s Super Hawk. We were dressed only slightly warmed on that ride to Cooper’s.

When we reached Cooper’s, it was still cold but at least we could warm up in the shop. The techs (they were called mechanics back in the day) had to wait for the engine to cool so they could adjust the valves, but their wait wasn’t very long that morning. When we left, central Jersey had already warmed up a bit and it was a pleasant ride home. But that ride there…wow, that was a cold one.

I should have noticed (and noted) that our previous blog (published on 6 August) was our 1,800th blog. This one is our 1,801st. That’s a lot of blogging.

The Wayback Machine: Riding in the Rain

By Joe Berk

I thought I would repost a blog I wrote in 2019 about riding in the rain. It’s been raining nonstop here in So Cal for days. When I say nonstop, that’s what I mean. Ordinarily when you get caught in the rain, it lasts for a while and then stops, and then maybe starts again. With this atmospheric river (the meteorological term) we are experiencing, it has literally been constant rain. I’m staying warm and cozy with a cup of coffee here in my home, but looking out the window, I’m reminded of past rides in the rain…and with that intro, here’s our previous blog.

Wow, it has been pouring here for the last week, with little respite other than this past Sunday. Sunday was nice. Every other day this week and the tail end of last week has been nonstop rain. Big time. Buckets full. And my iPhone just started buzzing with a flash flood warning for this area. Wow again.

So I’m sitting here at the computer, enjoying a hot cup of coffee, looking out the window, and I’m thinking about what it’s like to ride in the rain. We’ve all had those rides. Those memories stick in my mind. I remember every one of those rides like they happened yesterday.

The first was the return leg of my first international motorcycle foray, when good buddy Keith Hediger and I rode up to Montreal and back. That was in the early ‘70s, and we didn’t call them adventure rides back then. They were just motorcycle rides. I was on a ’71 CB750 and Keith was on a Kawi 500cc triple. It rained the entire length of Vermont at about the same intensity you see in the video above. We had no rain gear. It wasn’t cold, but it sure was wet. We were soaked the entire day. Wouldn’t trade a minute of it. It was a great ride.

Another time was on the second ride I ever did in Baja with good buddy Baja John. It was pouring when we left at 4:00 a.m., and it didn’t let up for the entire day. I was on a Harley then, and we finally stopped somewhere around Colonet to checked into a cheap Baja hotel (a somewhat redundant term, which is becoming less redundant as Baja’s march in to the 21st century unfortunately continues). Leather, I found out on that trip, makes for lousy rain gear. I went hypothermic, and I had the shakes until 4:00 the following morning. It made for a good story, and the rest of that trip was epic. Down to Cabo, back up to La Paz, on the overnight ferry over to Mazatlan, out to Puerto Vallarta and Guadalajara, back up to Nogales, and a thousand-mile one-day dash to make it home on New Year’s Eve. Wouldn’t trade a second of it.

Riding with Marty on the ’05 Three Flags Classic, we were caught in a downpour the second day out as we rode along the Dolores River in Colorado. It was a magnificent ride, with Marty on his K1200RS and me on my 1200cc Daytona. It wasn’t a drizzle. It was a downpour, just like you see in the video above. I remember it vividly, and I wouldn’t trade it for anything.

Colombia had lots of rain, but it only hit us hard on the very first day. It was raining hard that first morning as we rode out of Medellin and into the Andes early on that fine Colombian morning, but it lightened up by breakfast. I had real rain gear and the only issues were visibility and passing 22-wheelers on blind curves, as my Colombian riders did with gleeful abandon. Exciting times. But good times, and certainly ones I remember. Colombia was an adventure for the ages. I wouldn’t trade a second of it for anything else.

I’d have to say the heaviest rains I ever rode through were in China, where it rains a lot. It probably rained 25% of the time on that trip, and the first few days were the worst. Imagine riding up into the Tibetan Plateau, in the dark, on dirt roads, in rain way heavier than what you see in the video above. That’s what it was like, and I loved every mile of that ride. I wouldn’t trade it for anything else on the planet.

You might be wondering…why no photos? Well, the simple truth is that my cameras on each trip were tightly wrapped in plastic bags, and I wasn’t about to break them out in the rain. That’s something I guess I forgot to mention in my earlier blog about what to bring on a Baja trip: Garbage bags. They take up almost no space when you’re not using them, and they work great for keeping stuff dry when you ride in the rain.

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Rain Delay

There are three paved routes across the Sacramento Mountains in southern New Mexico. To the north, highway 380 crosses from Hondo all the way to the small town of San Antonio on the Rio Grande River. Thirty miles south is the central road, Highway 70, running from Roswell to Tularosa. Highway 70 is 4-lane all the way and is the main east/west route over the mountains. Another thirty miles further south is Highway 82. Highway 82 twists and turns its way from oil rich Artesia to Cloudcroft at 9000-feet elevation and then runs downhill to the valley floor at Alamogordo. There is another route, unpaved, called 506. Yet another thirty miles south from 82, Route 506 takes you from Queen in the east to the border patrol checkpoint on Highway 54. Not really a highway, 506 is a fairly good dirt road but in the wet it can be tough going. 506 is the lowest-elevation passage as it crosses the southern tailings of the Sacramento Mountains, which flatten out towards El Paso, Texas.

I’m telling you this geographical information because of the tacos. I took the RD350 on a lunch run with the Carrizozo Mud Chuckers the other day. We did a great circle route that brought us to a taco stand in Ruidoso, on Highway 70. This particular taco place was one I had not been to yet. It was rundown-looking and at first I thought it was closed. The front had an enclosed porch area that had 2X6 beams roofed with plywood. One end of the porch was open. The ceiling was low and I could touch the 2X6 beams if I jumped a little. Inside this patio were three wooden picnic tables thickly coated with a gummy white paint.

Dozens of coats of paint left the texture sort of soft, like skin, but more like dried skin. If you stood up fast enough you could just catch the fading impression of denim on the bench seat. To the far right was an entry door. Through this glass entry door I could see an indoor dining room with six, orange, Formica-topped booths but the door to this room was locked.

“Can I help you?” a small plexiglass window swung out into the patio. Inside was the one guy running the taco place. It was my turn to buy so Mike ordered nachos with cheese and a Mexican Coke in the tall, glass bottle except they were out of nacho cheese. I ordered a Pepsi and 3 beef tacos with rice and refried beans but had to order the items individually since there was no meal option. Eddie ordered a single tamale with rice and beans and a Sprite. The order was scribbled on one of those light green paper pads with a piece of carbon paper between the pages for a copy. Our taco man tallied up our stuff in his head and it came to 31 dollars, which shocked me a little. I gave the window guy 2 dollars as a tip. The guy in the window said, “Let me have your name, I’ll call you when it’s ready.”

It’s monsoon season in New Mexico and dark clouds were encircling the taco place. Any direction you looked had rain curtains slanting across the sky. I heard my name called, no mean feat with the thunder, and picked up the order. Eddie carried the drinks. My food came in a styrofoam, 3-compartment box. The main, triangle-shaped compartment held three disintegrating tacos. In the little square area to the upper left was a spoonful of rice, in the right compartment was a squirt of liquefied, refried beans. My tacos fell apart on contact. Mike’s nachos were like tiny burned triangles of cardboard. The nacho cheese would have really helped those chips more than I can say. Mike looked at the chips and said, “I’m not really hungry.” and he shoved the festive, red tub of ashes over to Eddie and me.

The guy in the window leaned out and asked us how the food was. I gave him a thumbs up hand signal. I don’t know why I did that. I guess I should have complained. I figured why spoil the taco guy’s day. If he hasn’t learned how to cook by now he never will make better food and telling him how truly awful the stuff was would change nothing on the ground. We finished up and decided we better make a run for home before it started raining on the taco place. I didn’t like our odds staying under that roof.

By sheer luck I had a rain jacket in the Yamaha’s tank bag. Eddie had a t-shirt and Mike had a semi-water-resistant jacket. To understand how unprepared we were you have to understand the optimism all motorcycle rides start with. We split up, Mike and Eddie turned north towards Highway 380 and I headed directly west on Highway 70. Within a mile it was pouring rain.

Great, horizontal bolts of lightning lit up the dark grey skies. The Yamaha ploughed through deep pools of water hydroplaning slightly and I dropped my speed to allow more time for water to squeeze out from under the tires. At 7600 feet elevation my wet jeans were starting to get cold. The raindrops were huge and felt like pea gravel hitting my hands.

Water trickled in from my ungloved wrists and pooled in the rain jacket elbows. My boots began to fill with water. Past the fire station, Highway 70 begins its descent into Tularosa. Each mile downward raised the air temperature a fraction of a degree. I entered the Mescalero Indian Reservation. Weather-wise, it was still raining but the skies were looking lighter further ahead and I was no longer shivering in my wet clothes.

Both lanes of traffic on Highway 70 came to a stand still. I could see flashing blue police lights reflecting off the wet pavement. It was still raining pretty hard and on a motorcycle you don’t want to be stuck in a line of stopped traffic. The head of the stoppage wasn’t far away so I lane-split between parked cars and the smell of brake linings until I found a gap in front of a late-model, white Chevy pickup. I turned right into the gap at walking speed. The truck driver got on his horn for 10 or 15 seconds to scold me. Here I was, soaking wet, trying to get off the road, while he was sitting snug and dry in his $70,000 pickup. Yet he begrudged me because I got 35 feet ahead of him. What kind of perpetually-miserable person does that? How much better would things need to be for him before he let go of the anger?

I parked the Yamaha at a cut that led up to a wide parking area. Water ran through an earthen ditch, pooled for a moment, and then crossed an asphalt swale before dropping off a tiny waterfall where the undermined asphalt had broken away in chunks, like calving icebergs. There was a guy standing in the rain smoking a cigarette, I asked him if there was an accident. “No, a mud slide has blocked the road.” He said. “The cops say it will be about 30 minutes before the road is cleared.” The man finished his cigarette and flicked it into the ditch where the current swept it down to the pool. The butt eddied several times then floated over the asphalt swale, plunging down the falls and drifted with the current until it was out of sight. The man walked back to his car and got inside out of the rain.

My boots were full of water and my feet needed to dry out a bit so I pulled off each boot and then poured out as much water as I could. Standing barefooted I rung out my socks, then pulled each sock back on followed by the side-specific boot that corresponded with the foot I was working on. Should I turn around and climb 9000 feet to Cloudcroft and home? It would take about an hour of cold, wet, riding. The rain clouds looked heavier in the direction of Cloudcroft and there is no guarantee that route won’t have a mudslide. The rain picked up strength and the blue skies ahead were closing in.

I could go north to Highway 380 and home but that’s back into the main part of the storm and two more hours of cold feet. I‘m nearly home, maybe 40 miles to go. Another cop pulled up and spoke to the one blocking the highway. The first cop started his SUV Ford. It looked like we were getting ready to go. I started the Yamaha; it’s a cold-blooded engine and cools off fast when not running. Steam rose up from the warming engine, fogging my face shield. I could hear cars starting in the line of stopped traffic. The first cop drove down Highway 70 towards the mudslide and the second cop took up his position blocking the highway. And then he shut off his car. I let the Yamaha run a few more minutes then turned it off. A big cab-over box truck turned around and drove away in the opposite direction followed by a new Jeep Wrangler pickup truck. Then some more cars gave up and headed back. I walked over to the new cop and asked him what was happening. “They had the road cleared but another mudslide came across and buried the road.” Across the highway a yellow Case backhoe drove down the wrong side of the road.

“Any idea how much longer?” The new cop said maybe 30 minutes. Things were getting complicated and my calculations began to factor in the road not opening for quite a while. Going over Cloudcroft at night in the rain would not be fun so if this thing went really long I planned on going north to 380 to go south back home, a distance of 110 miles or so. If we could just get a mile or two down the highway I could get on reservation roads and work my way around the stoppage. The rain fell steadily and in my wet clothes I was starting to get a bit chilled so I took a walk to get my blood circulating.

The longer I waited the more I had invested in Highway 70 home. If I had made a decisive move back when we were first stopped I could have been home by now. I was well over an hour stopped and the blue sky ahead was gone, replace by dark clouds. I guess I could go back to Ruidoso and get a motel room for the night. I could dry out my clothes and try again in the morning. Another cop pulled up and spoke to the second cop who looked over to me and said “We’re getting ready to go.” I ran back to the Yamaha and started the engine.

The police cars formed a rolling blockade and the miles long line of traffic followed behind slowly. The mudslide section was still pretty slippery and there were small branches and stones to dodge. Further on we came to another mudslide area but kept driving through the inch-deep goo. A few miles outside of the Indian reservation the road was just wet and the cop cars pulled off the highway. I was at the head of the line, or P1, and no way was I going to let all those cars pass me and kick up a wet fog of water. I spun the Yamaha up to 7000 RPM and the run into Tularosa was fast and violent but I got there first.

It was warm and dry in Tularosa. I backed off the throttle and puttered along at the speed limit. The honking guy in the white truck passed me and then got in front of me. He just had to, you know? I made it home several hours after the Carrizozo Mud Chuckers. They got hammered by the rain also but didn’t have to stop for blocked highways. In retrospect, if I had taken their route I would have been home much earlier but then if I did that I wouldn’t have had anything to write about.

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My 1st International Motorcycle Adventure, Eh?

Everybody has their preferred riding schtick and for me it’s international motorcycle travel. Anyone can ride their cruiser to a local hangout for a beer or their GS to Starbuck’s for a $6 cup of coffee. My riding is all about crossing international borders and collecting cool photos in places most two-legged mammals only dream about. Just to make a point, I once rode a 150cc scooter (my CSC Mustang) to Cabo San Lucas and back. The day after we returned, I needed something at Costco and I rode the little CSC there. When I parked it, a beer-bellied dude in a gigondo 4×4 pickup told me, “that’s a little cute bike.” He didn’t intend it to be a compliment.

“Thanks,” I said.

“I ride a (brand name deleted to protect the guilty),” he announced, his chest swelling with Made in ‘Merica pride to the point it almost equalled his waistline. “We ride all over.” He emphasized the “all” to make sure I got the point.

“Cool,” I said. “Where do you go?”

Cook’s Corner, the ultimate So Cal burger/biker stand.

“Last week,” he told me, “we rode to Cook’s Corner!”

Cook’s Corner is a southern California burger joint about 40 miles from where we were talking.

“Where do you all go on that little thang?” He actually said “you all” and “thang,” but he didn’t have the accent to match the colloquialisms. Okay, I had the guy dialed.

“Well, we rode to Cabo San Lucas and back last week.” I said.

Mr. 4×4’s jaw dropped. Literally. He looked at me, speechless, dumbfoundedly breathing through his open mouth. Without another word he climbed into his big truck and rode off. Our conversation was over. So much for the biker brotherhood, I guess.

My 150cc CSC Baja Blaster. I had a lot of fun and covered a lot of miles on that little Mustang.

The international motorcycle travel bug bit me when I was still in school. I had a ’71 Honda 750 Four back in the day (that’s me 50 years ago in the big photo up top). One of my Army ROTC buddies had the first-year Kawasaki 500cc triple. It was a hellaciously-fast two stroke with a white gas tank and blue competition stripes. We were in New Jersey and we wanted to do something different, so we dialed in Canada as our destination. They say it’s almost like going to another country.

And so we left. Our gear consisted of jeans, tennis shoes, windbreaker jackets, and in a nod toward safety, cheap helmets (ATGATT hadn’t been invented yet). We carried whatever else we needed in small gym bags bungied to our seats. Unfortunately, in those days “whatever else we needed” did not include cameras so I don’t have any photos from that trip. That’s okay, because all they would have shown was rain.

A 1969 Kawasaki 500cc, two-stroke triple. Widowmakers, they were called, in a nod to their often unpredictable handling.

As two Army guys about to become Second Louies, we joked about being draft dodgers in reverse. We were looking forward to active duty (me in Artillery and Keith in Infantry). We were going to Canada not to duck the draft, but as a fling before wearing fatigues full time. We didn’t really know what we were doing, so we took freeways all the way up to the border. It rained nearly the entire time. All the way up and all the way back. We bought sleeping bags because they looked cool on the bikes (it was a Then Came Bronson thing), but we stayed in hotels. It was raining too hard to camp, and besides, the sleeping bags were soaked through and we didn’t think to bring a tent. We got as far as Montreal, which seemed far enough to give us Canada bragging rights. We spent that single Montreal night in a cheap dive and pointed the bikes south the next day.

These days, I know to check the weather, bring rain gear (even if none is forecast), and study a map to find the most interesting roads (rather than the fastest). But hey, we were young and dumb, it was an adventure ride, it crossed an internationational border, and riding four days in a steady cold rain was a lot of fun. I didn’t think so at the time, but that’s how I remember it today. In fact, I remember that ride like it was last month. And it got me hooked on international motorcycle adventures. Canada was to be the first of many.

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