If you had to pick one of your rides, which one would you say was your greatest achievement? If it’s not the same ride, what was your all time favorite ride?
That will take some thinking. 49 years of motorcycle travel, there are a lot of trips.
I think the greatest achievement is not dying on a motorcycle.
Yet.
There have been some really close calls.
With only about a half hour of thinking, I'd venture there isn't anyone best or favorite ride, but a lot of parts of rides that were great and favorite times. More than a few really awful times too.
One of the best early rides was with my wife on our 1974 850 Norton Interstate. We rode to Steamboat Colorado for a weekend and back to Denver.
Short, free wild camping by a stream.
On our way back,
We never got rained on that trip but it got cold at one point. Jean jackets are no match for real cold.
We did a two week ride to Arizona one summer over July 4th. Tucson. Super hot and neither of us had been riding much on the bike. I'd not been commuting because we had moved to about a mile from my work, so I walked. Our route that trip was straight south on I-25 to Santa Fe, then the idea had been to head south a bit then west across the two lane, but the summer monsoon weather forced us off the greasy dirt/gravel roads and back to the interstate.
The first night was in a terribly cheap motel in Santa Fe with a non-functional wall air conditioner, paper thin walls and a tiny shower I could barely turn around in. I was about 130#'s at the time, so not a large human.
The second day would've us discover one of the nuts holding the barrels on the bike come loose and a second from the head fall off. I'd had the shop service the bike because it was a specific requirement for warranty coverage. In retrospect, I'd have fared better skipping any notion of warranty and done the work myself. After this little adventure it was abundantly clear the shop was not doing a proper service.
The one nut was found bouncing happily on the engine, the other escaping on the road somewhere. With darkening skies we raced the summer storms south to Demming and a Holiday Inn where we had a big, late lunch. Then spying a huge dust cloud/storm headed toward us form the east, we pointed the bike into the wind and hunkered down in the room, hoping for the best.
The darkness about 2:30pm on a late June afternoon thanks to the approaching dust storm.
This was summer 1975
On the way across town, we picked up a four inch screw into t he back tire. I patched the tire and rode across town in a different direction to the Norton shop and bought two spare tubes. Also got a replacement nut for the head. The shop loaned me a torque wrench to torque everything as well, then we checked the valve clearance and were off back to where we were staying with my wife's sister and her husband.
When we left Tucson headed to Phoenix where my great aunt and uncle lived, it was 113° by the temperature displayed at the post office. So hot it forced fuel past the closed petcocks flooding the carbs and cylinders. I had to pull both plugs and kick the bike to blow fuel out of the cylinders.
Stick the plugs back in and fired the bike right up. We stopped a short time later at Casa Grande at a Holiday Inn for some cooling off. The frozen Nalgene jars of water we had in the fairing were of course melted and very warm to drink. We had a pitcher of iced tea and ice cream. Then off into rush hour across Phoenix.
My aunt created us with towels for a cool shower and clean off and an iced G&T after for cocktails before riding in her Coupe De Ville to a steak dinner. After a day with them we heard for the south rim of Grand Canyon by way of Sedona. Up to this point we had been rained on off and on since we were south of Pueblo Colorado a few hours from home. This would be no different. Getting to the south rim campground we found them all full, but the ranger said a couple were camped at the group camping and they might allow us to join. We went off looking and were welcomed.
I rode up to the store for a case of cold beer while Lois set up our tent. Then back at camp, we finished up with setting up and made dinner. While we talked the couple that had got the site were on a restored /2 R69S BMW from around Boston. He was a plumber and they had been out riding for five weeks. The bike was hard to start and leaking oil from a valve cover.
I took a look and fixed the leak, (a piece of old gasket material had been left on with a new cover gasket in place creating a ready hole).
Then I taught the plumber how to properly start a plunger-primed carb bike. Once I demonstrated the correct method, he was shocked. First kick starting.
Even his wife could start the bike easily.
Sadly no photos of all this as I'd wound film into my canon, stripping the film strip cog holes out at first. I would not discover this until we were in Mesa Verde and I noted I'd just wound past 38 exposures on a 36 exposure reel with no resistance.
lost sunset over the GC and sunrise photos along with photos of relatives and along the way, through Sedona and rain and hail. Plus the camp photos we'd set up with tripod and timer to get all of us.
The next bit of bad luck was noticing the rear fender dragging once in a while on the rear wheel. What had happened was the frame had bent just aft of the lay-down shock mounts forcing the fender much closer to the tire. Once home, we saw there was actually a crack, but we were a week away from that discovery.
Anyway that was still a great ride. I had a real motorcycle shop fix the frame for me. And bought a 1974 BMW R90/6 as a better travel mount. The Norton would return around 60 mpg at the then national speed limit of 55 mph. I had experienced 75 mpg with a 24 tooth drive sprocket replacing the 22, but that required a lot of clutch slipping to launch. Two up that was a bad idea so I stuck with the stock 22.
The R90 had a 2.91 final drive ratio so wasn't too bad on economy returning mid 60's on flat cool interstate or two lane. 55mpg was the usual in-town commuter economy.
The R90 was probably the best travel bike I've owned. The 1150 GS Adventure was confortable, but heavy and tall. Much less confidence inspiring with two people onboard. The R90 was better economy than the GS. I've not had a fuel injected bike that was reliably economical compared to a similar capacity and size carbureted bike.
Even my CBR900RR would return 65mpg with stock gearing on the interstate if ridden at the speed limit. Add ten to twenty mph and the economy drops to mid to upper 50's.
I don't think we ever had a perfect trip. We had a lot of them that were fun for the most part but had some issues here ar there or several. Logistics and mechanicals. The R90 never gave us any problems other than. the original seat being so bad the second day of riding was pure pain and the first night trying to sleep on our backs was impossible because of how much our butts hurt from that seat.
Even the water cushion could not fix the profile of the saddle. Having the EZ Berg built was the best money spent on that bike.
We sold it and bought the. R65 which I built into an S, but it was too small a saddle for two up and BMW never got the bag mounts built before we tired of it. I sold it for more than we paid for it with the extras on it and went on a quest for an RS.
The RS was pretty good. Not as good of saddle as the custom, but I could ride it all day.
We figured to sell it in California, but used loan interest rates made that impossible so I flew out and met my wife who was out in LA for work. We rode him on it. The. hard luggage having been sold off the bike before I rode it to California.
Mark Twains Cabin where he prospected for gold and wrote the Jumping Frog Contest.
After selling this we were going to be bike less as we became a family of three.
That lasted about six months.