{"id":33867,"date":"2026-08-09T00:01:56","date_gmt":"2026-08-09T07:01:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/exhaustnotes.us\/blog\/?p=33867"},"modified":"2026-08-10T12:19:42","modified_gmt":"2026-08-10T19:19:42","slug":"on-being-cold","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/exhaustnotes.us\/blog\/index.php\/2026\/08\/09\/on-being-cold\/","title":{"rendered":"Motorcycle Cold"},"content":{"rendered":"
By Joe Berk<\/h6>\n

Misery makes for strong memories, and nowhere is that more true than on a motorcycle in cold wet weather.\u00a0 I’ve had times when I’ve been absolutely teeth-chattering cold and couldn’t shake it.\u00a0 Hypothermia, they call it.<\/p>\n

We have all experienced cold and wet weather riding experiences.\u00a0 These are the ones that reside in my memory.<\/p>\n

My First Big Baja Trip<\/strong><\/p>\n

Back in 1994, Baja John and I did our first big Baja ride, from southern California all the way down to Cabo San Lucas.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 I remember I was wearing jeans and a heavy leather motorcycle jacket.\u00a0 \u00a0I was on my ’92 Softail, and John was on his Yamaha Virago.<\/p>\n

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Our thawing out stop in Vicente Guerrero.\u00a0 We didn’t cover too many miles that first day entering Baja, mostly because of the rain and the cold.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

It rained off and on for most of that day.\u00a0 John and I stopped in Ensenada, took a few pictures, stopped again at La Bufadora, and from Bufadora on it was a steady downpour.\u00a0 We were young and dumb, and we just keep going.\u00a0 Somewhere around Vicente Guerrero (about 200 miles south of the border) I saw a hotel and stopped.\u00a0 My teeth were chattering uncontrollably and I felt like I was having a hard time controlling the motorcycle.\u00a0 It was around 4:00 in the afternoon and I was absolutely miserable.<\/p>\n

The hotel was a cheap Baja place with concrete floors and no heat.\u00a0 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).\u00a0 I remember the hotel clerk gave us a roll of toilet paper.\u00a0 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).\u00a0 I’d wake up every hour or so, check my watch, and realize I was still shivering.\u00a0 Finally, when I woke up at 4:00 a.m. (exactly 12 hours after climbing into my sleeping bag), I had stopped shaking.\u00a0 I slept for another couple of hours and was good to go.<\/p>\n

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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.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

When we checked out that morning, another traveler was doing the same and I watched in surprise as he turned in an electric heater.\u00a0 We could have asked for one to put in our room, but we didn’t know.\u00a0 I remember thinking those BMW riders knew a thing or two.<\/p>\n

That first day riding into the Baja El Nino rains was a brutal experience.\u00a0 We had nice weather and a rain-free ride all the way down to Cabo and back.<\/p>\n

The Tibetan Plateau\u00a0 <\/strong><\/p>\n

I am a slow learner.\u00a0 Maybe a better description would be a learner who forgets and has to learn all over again.<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0 Prior to getting on the plane for China, I sprayed the hell out of it with Scotchguard and hoped for the best.<\/p>\n

Hope is not a strategy, as I again learned riding through another motorcycle trip downpour.\u00a0 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).\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Bitter cold.\u00a0 Not quite hypothermic, but cold nonetheless.<\/p>\n

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The Raiders Tibetan bar scene. Gresh and I lived it.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

We finally arrived at our destination late that evening.\u00a0 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<\/em>.\u00a0 Gresh and I ducked into our room and I changed into dry clothes.\u00a0 The dining area didn’t have a menu.\u00a0 They had but one offering for dinner:\u00a0 Dumplings.\u00a0 All boiling in a big pot that looked like the one you’d see cannibals cooking people in.\u00a0 No kidding…it was that big.\u00a0 There must have been 900 dumplings floating around in that boiling cauldron.\u00a0 It was an all you can eat arrangement, and I ate plenty.\u00a0 They were great, and they were hot, both attributes that were perfect for my low-temperature condition.<\/p>\n

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We filled a smaller serving bowl with just a few of the dumplings from the giant dumpling cauldron. They really hit the spot.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Back to the “freeze your butt off” aspect of this blog.\u00a0 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).\u00a0 Gresh and I could not figure out how to get the heater to work.\u00a0 I’m not that smart, so I wasn’t surprised I couldn’t find the path to enlightenment.\u00a0 Gresh…he’s pretty smart, and his similar inability to crack the code made me feel not quite so dumb.\u00a0 We could get it to give us hot water, but we couldn’t get it to throw any heat.\u00a0 Being an engineer, I finally said screw it:\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

I woke up a few times during the night to the sound of the shower running.\u00a0 The room was like a sauna.\u00a0 Steamy, zero visibility, but warm.\u00a0 That hot water worked great.<\/p>\n

A Cold Night In Tangke<\/strong><\/p>\n

When we were coming down off the Tibetan Plateau on the China ride, we rolled into a tiny town called Tangke.<\/p>\n

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Gresh and I joked about now being able to say “when I rode down off the Tibetan Plateau…”<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Tangke was remote and primitive, and it was cold.\u00a0 It felt like it was going to rain as we entered, but it did not.\u00a0 We stayed in another place that had a restaurant with a hotel behind it.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 She agreed.\u00a0 The approach was different than what I would have thought.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Lu was a real cut up.\u00a0 He started pumping the rod in a manner that could only be described as suggestive, which the Tibetan lady thought was hilarious.\u00a0 We did, too.<\/p>\n

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Good buddy Lu, suggesting unnatural acts with a Tibetan maiden. It was a fun ride, China was.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

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).\u00a0 I was thinking the hotel room would be a real disappointment, but it was actually pretty nice.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 It was like an electric blanket, except the heater was built into the mattress.<\/p>\n

I was a little leery about sleeping on a toaster, but that electric bed worked wonderfully well.\u00a0 It was cold, real cold, that night, so much so there was frost on the bikes the next morning.\u00a0 But I was snug as a bug.<\/p>\n

The Honda Electric Shower Heater<\/strong><\/p>\n

Nope, this has nothing to do with Honda motorcycles.\u00a0 There’s actually a town in Colombia up in the Andes Mountains called Honda.<\/p>\n

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This was one of my best rides ever.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Like most of the towns we rode through in the Andes, this one was hilly.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 \u00a0“Security is an issue here,” Juan explained.\u00a0 The big doors had a little door at eye level.\u00a0 I immediately thought of that scene in Romancing the Stone<\/em> (which was supposed to be in Colombia, but was actually filmed in Mexico).<\/p>\n

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A scene from Romancing the Stone. Our hotel in Honda had a similar little door in its gates.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

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.\u00a0 We couldn’t leave the bikes on the street (“Too dangerous,” Juan said), so we parked that at a secure warehouse around the corner.<\/p>\n

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.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Once inside the hotel, I showered before dinner.\u00a0 There was only one faucet in the shower, and the shower was cold.\u00a0 I saw a switch on the showerhead, and what appeared to be an electrical coil that the water flowed through.\u00a0 I nervously tried the switch (standing naked in the icy water pouring through the showerhead), but the water remained icy.\u00a0 Oh well, I thought.\u00a0 I’ve taken cold showers before (no jokes, please).<\/p>\n

At dinner in the hotel that night (which was excellent), I asked Juan about the showerhead.\u00a0 He smiled.\u00a0 “The electrical coil is supposed to heat the water as it flows through,” he said.\u00a0 “That’s the theory, anyway. Most of the time they don’t work,” he added, with a weak smile.\u00a0 Maybe that’s a good thing, I remember thinking.<\/p>\n

Dad’s Super Hawk Heading to Cooper’s<\/strong><\/p>\n

When I was a 14-year-old kid back in rural New Jersey, I managed to get my Dad interested in motorcycles.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

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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.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

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.\u00a0 The ride was along Route 130, a highway that ran from our area to Hamilton (a distance of about 35 miles).<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0 Dad and I both had jackets, but nothing like the motorcycle gear folks wear these days.\u00a0 \u00a0And we had not counted on the wind chill.\u00a0 It was bitter.\u00a0 I had Dad to shield me from the wind chill; he was out in it.\u00a0 I guess you could say he was a Popsickle (or maybe a Popcycle).<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0 It was a good idea, but it didn’t work very well.\u00a0 We still froze our butts off.\u00a0 I was freezing; it must have been terrible for Dad.<\/p>\n

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Yours truly at age 14 on Dad’s Super Hawk. We were dressed only slightly warmed on that ride to Cooper’s.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

When we reached Cooper’s, it was still cold but at least we could warm up in the shop.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 When we left, central Jersey had already warmed up a bit and it was a pleasant ride home.\u00a0 But that ride there…wow, that was a cold one.<\/p>\n

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I should have noticed (and noted) that our previous blog (published on 6 August) was our 1,800th blog.\u00a0 This one is our 1,801st.\u00a0 That’s a lot of blogging.<\/p>\n

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