Welcome to my motorcycle touring site.            

07-17-11

Welcome to my Motorcycle touring website. I created this site to share my passion for touring North America on various motorcycles. I never planned or would have dreamed  this hobby would take hold as much as it has.

With the 2011 riding season revving up, I've been riding locally anticipating that first long-ride.

Every long ride is an adventure that can't be matched. Each ride has it's own personality and it's own set of rules. Long rides also bring out the Zen like feeling of being totally "in tune" with your ride. Focused on the ride without anything clouding the brain becomes natural. Your ready to carve any hairpin curve or tackle any city. You soon feel that you've really become a excellent rider. Then forget to put down the kickstand and drop the bike in front of a few 100 folks.

I'm having a harder time planning routes these days. I been to amazing places and seen things most folks will never see. Be it in the middle of nowhere or in the city, The people you meet are the icing on the cake. Most of the time when someone sees me in riding gear they say "I'd love to be doing what you do".

I don't have the brand loyalty some riders do. I like all motorcycles and have ridden just about everything on the planet.  I have great memories off all the bikes I've had over the years. I'm a firm believer of the phrase "Its not what you ride, It's that you ride"  The ST is a sweet ride and perfect for "long-ride touring" and as hard as it is to praise the KLR, I have to give it it's props. It's a fun "duel sport thumper" to ride with more fun factor rolled into it than I expected. Maybe someday I'll opt for a BMW/GS or more likely the KTM 990 but for now the KLR-650 is just fun. 

Please take a couple of minutes to sign the guestbook. The link is in the upper menu bar. It's nice to know who you are and where you have been.  Feel free to e-mail me anytime with questions or comments. I do my best to promptly answer all mail. 

I will update this page to direct you to what's new or additions to this site. I may just throw some stuff in here interesting to me.  Have fun and look around, it might just be interesting to you also.

I'll be seeing  you on roads near you!  

-Paul

The best way to describe riding a motorcycle...

There is cold, and there is cold on a motorcycle. Cold on a motorcycle is like being beaten with cold hammers while being kicked with cold boots, a bone bruising cold. The wind's big hands squeeze the heat out of my body and whisk it away; caught in a cold October rain, the drops don't even feel like water. They feel like shards of bone fallen from the skies of Hell to pock my face. I expect to arrive with my cheeks and forehead streaked with blood, but that's just an illusion, just the misery of nerves not designed for highway speeds.

Despite this, it's hard to give up my motorcycle in the fall and I rush to get it on the road again in the spring; lapses of sanity like this are common among motorcyclists. When you let a motorcycle into your life you're changed forever. The letters "MC" are stamped on your driver's license right next to your sex and height as if "motorcycle" was just another of your physical characteristics, or maybe a mental condition.

But when warm weather finally does come around all those cold snaps and rainstorms are paid in full because a motorcycle summer is worth any price. A motorcycle is not just a two-wheeled car; the difference between driving a car and climbing onto a motorcycle is the difference between watching TV and actually living your life. We spend all our time sealed in boxes and cars are just the rolling boxes that shuffle us languidly from home-box to work-box to store-box and back, the whole time entombed in stale air, temperature regulated, sound insulated, and smelling of carpets.

On a motorcycle I know I'm alive. When I ride, even the familiar seems strange and glorious. The air has weight and substance as I push through it and its touch is as intimate as water to a swimmer. I feel the cool wells of air that pool under trees and the warm spokes of sunlight that fall through them. I can see everything in a sweeping 360 degrees, up, down and around, wider than PanaVision and higher than IMAX and unrestricted by ceiling or dashboard.

Sometimes I even hear music. It's like hearing phantom telephones in the shower or false doorbells when vacuuming; the pattern-loving brain, seeking signals in the noise, raises acoustic ghosts out of the wind's roar. But on a motorcycle I hear whole songs: rock 'n roll, dark orchestras, women's voices, all hidden in the air and released by speed.

At 30 miles an hour and up, smells become uncannily vivid. All the individual tree-smells and flower-smells and grass-smells flit by like chemical notes in a great plant symphony. Sometimes the smells evoke memories so strongly that it's as though the past hangs invisible in the air around me, wanting only the most casual of rumbling time machines to unlock it.

A ride on a summer afternoon can border on the rapturous. The sheer volume and variety of stimuli is like a bath for my nervous system, an electrical massage for my brain, a systems check for my soul. It tears smiles out of me: a minute ago I was dour, depressed, apathetic, numb, but now, on two wheels, big, ragged, windy smiles flap against the side of my face, billowing out of me like air from a decompressing plane. Transportation is only a secondary function. A motorcycle is a joy machine. It's a machine of wonders, a metal bird, a motorized prosthetic. It's light and dark and shiny and dirty and warm and cold lapping over each other; it's a conduit of grace, it's a catalyst for bonding the gritty and the holy.

I still think of myself as a motorcycle amateur, when I feel like an expert, it's time to hang up the keys. Being fortunate enough to have ridden a plethora of motorcycles and slept under my share of bridges. I wouldn't trade one second of either the good times or the misery. Learning to ride was one of the best things I've done. A lifetime of memories words just can't describe. That memory that is yours and yours only to savor and cherish forever. 

Cars lie to us and tell us we're safe, powerful, and in control. The air-conditioning fans murmur empty assurances and whisper, "Sleep, sleep." Motorcycles tell us a more useful truth: we are small and exposed, and probably moving too fast for our own good, but that's no reason not to enjoy every minute of the ride.

New rubber, 130 horsepower and the need to explore the unknown. If I have to explain, you'll probably never understand.