{"id":11884,"date":"2021-02-01T05:55:52","date_gmt":"2021-02-01T13:55:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/exhaustnotes.us\/blog\/?p=11884"},"modified":"2021-02-01T06:10:41","modified_gmt":"2021-02-01T14:10:41","slug":"getting-to-one","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/exhaustnotes.us\/blog\/index.php\/2021\/02\/01\/getting-to-one\/","title":{"rendered":"Getting to One"},"content":{"rendered":"

Joe Gresh raised an interesting topic with his recent blog on motorcycle quantity.\u00a0 \u00a0You know, how many motorcycles are too many?\u00a0 That blog got a lot of hits and tons of comments on Facebook.\u00a0 It seems like he struck a nerve.<\/p>\n

The most motorcycles I ever owned at one time was five, which pales in comparison to Gresh’s shop full of motos and maybe the collections of a few other people I know.\u00a0 When my collection hit that peak, I had a Triumph Daytona 1200, a Harley Heritage Softail, a Suzuki TL1000S, a Honda CBX, and a KLR 650.\u00a0 That was about 20 years ago. There was no rhyme or reason to my collection and no central theme guiding the contents of my fleet.\u00a0 I just bought what I liked.\u00a0 In those days I had more money than brains, but don’t interpret that to mean I was rich.\u00a0 I just never had a lot of brains.\u00a0 Most folks who know me recognize that pretty quickly.<\/p>\n

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My Harley Softail in the muddy plains outside Guerrero Negro, Baja California Sur. There’s a kitchen sink in there somewhere.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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The Triumph Tiger. Good, but tall and very heavy. It was essentially a sport bike with excess suspension travel and ADV cosmetics.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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Me with a buddy currently in the witness protection program, and my Honda CBX. It was a surprisingly competent touring motorcycle.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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The Triumph Speed Triple. One of my buddies nicknamed it the Speed Cripple, which became true for me.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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Ah, the yellow locomotive. My Triumph Daytona 1200. Delightfully crude and fast. I loved this bike and I rode the 2005 Three Flags Classic on it.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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Turning sportbikes into touring machines…my TL1000S somewhere in Baja. This was a seriously fast motorcycle.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

I seemed to hover around that number (five, that is) for a while.\u00a0 Other bikes moved in to displace one or more of the above, most notably a Triumph Tiger and then a Triumph Speed Triple.\u00a0 Those were fun, but they’ve gone down the road, too.<\/p>\n

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One of my favorite former motorcycles for real world adventure riding…the Kawasaki KLR 650 in its natural surroundings (Valle de los Cirios in Baja).<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Which one did I enjoy riding most?\u00a0 That’s easy.\u00a0 It was the KLR 650.\u00a0 The KLR 650 was the bike that led me on an arc toward smaller motorcycles, like the CSC RX3 and then a TT250.\u00a0 I was a bit player implementing Steve Seidner’s decision to bring those motorcycles to America.\u00a0 The 250s were a lot of fun.\u00a0 I sold off all the big bikes and only rode 250s for a few years, then I fell in love with the new Royal Enfield 650 Interceptor when it hit the market, and suddenly I was back up to three.<\/p>\n

But three, for me, was too many.\u00a0\u00a0I haven’t been riding much in the last few years for a lot of reasons.\u00a0 The pandemic put a dent in any big travel plans (YMMV, and that’s okay), and constantly moving the battery tender around and cleaning the TT250’s jets was getting old.\u00a0 I couldn’t move anything in my garage because there was so much stuff crammed in there, and I had to park the TT250 under the rear porch awning.\u00a0 I don’t have a separate workshop area and I don’t pour concrete (I don’t have Mr. Gresh’s talents, but even if I did, it looks like too much work to me), so hanging on to a big motorcycle fleet was not in the cards.<\/p>\n

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My TT250. I’ve ridden it in Baja, too. It sold the day after I placed an ad for it a couple of weeks ago, and at the asking price. This bike held its value well.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Badmouthing Facebook has become trendy, but I’ll tell you that Facebook Marketplace came to the rescue.\u00a0 I already had a ton of photos of my motorcycles and whipping up ads for the TT250 and the RX3 literally took only seconds.\u00a0 I checked Kelly Blue Book values, picked prices only marginally below what a dealer would charge, and both bikes sold quickly.\u00a0 The TT250 sold the day after I listed it; the RX3 took one additional day.<\/p>\n

All the China haterbator keyboard commandos said Chinese bikes had no resale value.\u00a0 Like everything else they posted, they were wrong.\u00a0 The haters said Chinese bikes were unreliable (they were wrong), the haters said you couldn’t get parts for them (they were wrong), the haters said they were built with slave labor (I’ve been in the factories, and they were wrong), and they said they had no resale value (and they were wrong about that, too).\u00a0 My 6-year-old RX3 with 20,000 miles on the clock went for 69% of its original MSRP, and my 5-year-old TT250 with 3,000 miles went for 74% of its original MSRP.\u00a0 That’s pretty good, I think. And both sold right away.\u00a0 Not that I was in a hurry to sell.\u00a0 I probably could have held out for more.<\/p>\n

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My current sole ride (or is that soul ride?), the Royal Enfield Interceptor 650 on Baja’s Highway 1 south of Ensenada.\u00a0 At this point in my life, one motorcycle is enough.\u00a0 Your mileage may vary.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

So I’m down to one motorcycle, and that’s the Enfield.\u00a0 For me, at this point in my life, one motorcycle is the right number (your mileage may vary).\u00a0 I’m on to other “how many” questions now, like how many guns are too many, and how many bicycles are too many.\u00a0 The answer to both of those questions is something south of my current number, but those are topics for future blogs.<\/p>\n

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There’s lots of Baja photos in this blog, and for good reason.\u00a0 Baja is one of the best places on the planet for poking around on a motorcyle. Check out our updated Baja page<\/a>, and pick up your copy of Moto Baja!<\/p>\n

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Joe Gresh raised an interesting topic with his recent blog on motorcycle quantity.\u00a0 \u00a0You know, how many motorcycles are too many?\u00a0 That blog got a lot of hits and tons of comments on Facebook.\u00a0 It seems like he struck a nerve. The most motorcycles I ever owned at one time was five, which pales in … Continue reading “Getting to One”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":11958,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":true,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[654,392,452,103,89],"tags":[3,1827,1825,1785,1826],"class_list":["post-11884","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-adventure-motorcycle-books","category-back-in-the-day","category-harley","category-harley-davidson","category-motorcycle-adventure-ride","tag-baja","tag-correct-number-of-motorcycles","tag-how-many-motorcycles","tag-motorcycle-collection","tag-multiple-motorcycle"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/exhaustnotes.us\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/01\/170323_0368-900.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/exhaustnotes.us\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11884","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/exhaustnotes.us\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/exhaustnotes.us\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/exhaustnotes.us\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/exhaustnotes.us\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11884"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"https:\/\/exhaustnotes.us\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11884\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12051,"href":"https:\/\/exhaustnotes.us\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11884\/revisions\/12051"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/exhaustnotes.us\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11958"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/exhaustnotes.us\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11884"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/exhaustnotes.us\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11884"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/exhaustnotes.us\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11884"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}