Hitting The Road On Two Wheels

When you're young and poor, but you have that hankering to hit the road on your motorcycle, just about any old bike you can manage to afford will fill the bill. Full fairing with sound system? Lockable hard saddle bags? Heated grips? Those things live in some fantasy world.

Does your bike run? Can you throw a couple gym bags and maybe a tent and sleeping bag on the back with bungee cords? Let's ride, dude! Where do you want to go?

That's how my buddies and I handled it 20-some years ago when we first started taking our now-annual summer trips. About the only thing we planned was our first-night destination and even that was open to change. Sometimes it changed because we came into some place that was just too sweet to pass on through. Other times it happened because there was no room at the inn. Festivals, graduation weekend--those kinds of things will do that to you. More than once if you travel a lot.

We traveled light, because we didn't have the ability to do anything else, and sometimes that proved to be too light. Do you know that sometimes water falls out of the sky? It's called rain, and if you're riding down the road on a motorcycle and it starts to rain you're going to get wet. And if you get wet, there's something called hypothermia that sucks all the heat out of your body as that rain water evaporates. We have experienced hypothermia. Maybe we should all buy rain suits and find room for them in our bags.

Also, do you know that it gets cooler when the sun goes down, especially when you're in the mountains? Wow. Maybe we'd better start bringing some seriously warm clothes, even if it is July.

As we learned from our experiences our bikes started sprouting accessories, such as saddle bags and tank bags and wind shields. Have you ever seen a $5 cheap plastic rain suit flap itself into disintegration running down the road? We have. And we found that $150 spent on a top-quality rain suit was a much better use of even limited funds than $5 spent on cheap plastic.

Inevitably, after awhile we started thinking the same things about our bikes. Sure this little 20-year-old 750cc Yamaha gets me where I'm going. But wouldn't it be nice to have a purpose-built touring bike that would actually be comfortable on long days and have enough room to carry more than just the basics? Maybe we could even get things like cruise control so you could let your right hand relax now and then. Temptation, temptation. Plus, as we got older we weren't as poor anymore, and a used, $800 bike was no longer the best we could do.

By now every one of us has taken the plunge. We're all riding bikes now like the Kawasaki Vulcan Nomad, the Star Motorcycles Road Star Silverado S, and the Suzuki Boulevard C109RT. These are real cruising machines with fairings, plenty of storage space, power to spare, and all the individual farkles each of us has added to make the bikes our own. Breakdowns are a thing of the past because these are modern, reliable, extremely capable machines. Sure it was a lot of fun in the old days, but none of us has any desire to go back there. Besides, it's still fun. Consider us hooked.