Welcome to my motorcycle touring site.            

06-14-2009

I made it home safe and sound....

After 8,174 miles on the road, I'm glad to be home. The ride was one of the most memorable rides I have ever been on. The Pacific Northwest is just amazing and not just by motorcycle riding standards. The whole place has a surreal feeling that brought out the adventure of exploring like no other.

Arriving home, I cut the grass and washed my bikes. The ST had all those miles of bugs and road dirt and the KLR was covered in yellow pollen from all the trees surrounding the house. The ST will need a few good washings to clean it up a bit. I know the bike will never again look new but the few blemishes on the finish just complement the riding this bike has done.

The ST will need another oil change and I ate up a rear tire on the ride so I'll have to change that before the New Hampshire safety inspection.

If you're interested in "long-riding" or sport touring, check out the "Trip Journal" section to read about this and other rides I have done.  I hope you enjoy these pages nearly as much as I have enjoyed the riding experiences that I have had creating these memories.

-Paul

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".

Even LEO's stop me just to chat, Well maybe not just to chat... 

I don't have the brand loyalty some riders do. I like all motorcycles. My last bike was a cruiser and I loved it. 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 the kind of riding I do. When my riding style changes, My bike will change with it. However, I don't see that happening for quite some time.

Look in the "Trip Journals" section for day by day notes from rides. You can also check out the "Everything Else" section for stuff not necessarily motorcycle related but still interesting to me.

Please take a couple of minutes to sign the guestbook. The link is in the upper menu bar.  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.

You can always email me at paul@nhrider.com with questions, comments, great destinations or just to say hello.

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, but by now I've had a handful of bikes over a half dozen years 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.

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.