This article was originally published in the BMW MOA magazine.
In my younger days, motorcycle adventures involved unfurling a not-so-sweet-smelling sleeping bag in the dunes, eating a UFO (Unidentified Food Object) from a rusty pot, and washing the dinnerware with river rocks. Cold hands were warmed on protruding cylinder heads. Showers were an imagined luxury, and laundry time was crudely determined by the smell test.
Things are different now. On this recent trip through Vermont, Meredith and I, celebrating our 30th anniversary, stay in posh B&Bs, and are served breakfast accompanied by a five-minute soliloquy on how the berries were sourced from a farm up the road and the eggs came from a chicken known to the chef by name. We are on a rented BMW K1600GTL, which means that Meredith, instead of squirming on some tiny bitch pad, sits atop something more closely resembling the throne of Queen Nefertiti. I keep expecting people to genuflect and throw flowers as we pass down main streets from Burlington to Brandon.
Evenings are spent drinking wine from actual stem glasses rather than a rusty Sierra cup with the detritus of yesterday’s meals in the bottom. Dog-eared maps—how I love thee still!—have been supplanted by the utterly reliable monotone of the very small lady who apparently resides in the bowels of my GPS and speaks to me sternly but reliably through the Bluetooth device I have installed in my helmet. I don’t find her to be very friendly but she sure does know the way to the closest Starbucks.
In the continuum of motorcycle travel, we are surely at the decadent end. We will not be crossing the Darien Gap, prying leeches off each other, or eating a steaming bowl of gonad soup lovingly prepared by natives, who consider us to be travelers from the future.
Something has been lost. But, in this transition to comfort and complacency, something has certainly been gained….
Six Cylinders of Pleasure
Exhibit A in this epiphany is our choice of motorbike. Meredith, in the name of love, has ridden pillion on some real farm machinery, including everything from my ’69 Triumph to a Kawasaki KLR, with knobbies. At freeway speeds, the latter exhibited all the silky resonance of a paint shaker.
Lately I’ve become fond of renting bikes, which supply an opportunity to try out something different, or perhaps just more extravagant. So for this trip we went straight to the top, procuring the GTL from MotoVermont.
Where my own R1200RT occasionally labors under the burdens of passenger and gear, the GTL seems to sense no payload whatsoever. With 120 foot-pounds of torque, it pulls like a draft horse that has been asked to carry an additional bottle of bourbon to camp. Pffff.
The big six runs turbine-smooth and dispenses vehicles into the wing mirrors like runway lights during takeoff in passenger jet. Slow-moving trucks are disposed of in less time than it takes to say “135 horsepower.” The truth is I don’t need this much power. But I sure like having it.
When the weather turns evil, we dial up enough electrical accessories to evoke the smell of burning flesh. A really cool LCD display in the GTL’s dash indicates that the handgrips are now at roasting level, and so I use the “mouse” on the left handgrip to dial it down. The mouse, if I understand it correctly, can do almost anything. I don’t really know how to use the thing but I’m pretty sure it has the capability to summon the president, exercise stock options, or resolve differential equations, all at 90 mph.
It is, in fact, too much motorcycle for me but that practical view is easily clouded out by the sheer exuberance that comes from twisting the right handgrip. At about 4,000 rpm, worldly concerns begin to recede from consciousness. At 5,000 rpm, personal conflicts, financial challenges, employment anxiety, and a lingering case of athlete’s foot have been rendered a distant memory. At 7,000 rpm, it seems unlikely that I have ever experienced the most fleeting difficulty in my life or exchanged a cross word with anyone over the course of the last 50 years. All these things are gone in a faint vapor trail, jettisoned out those six elegant holes in the sensuous exhaust system.
May I please have this in pill form?
Muggles Be Gone
Northern California, where I live, has some of the best riding in the world, but it’s conducted in the presence of so many muggles that we sometimes forget what a completely empty road looks like. Well, it looks like this. On roads from Rutland to Randolph, it seems we’re accompanied by nothing more than each other’s voices in the intercom. I suppose you could find an unsightly strip mall in Vermont if you wanted to, but it might take some doing.
By day three we are in the rhythm of Vermont roads—I’m mostly in third on the two-laners, exercising that exquisite-but-not-obnoxious-sounding six up and down the tachometer. Every 10 miles or so, we see a yellow 30-mph sign, indicating a village. I click down to second, flip up the faceshield for a fresh breeze, and enjoy a good look at the village green. On the opposite end of town, once again freed from civilization, the faceshield goes down, the revs come up, I click into third, and the landscape is rendered in a subtle blur. The whole thing is a kind of meditation. I could do this all day.
In much of the Green Mountain State, the general rule is that if you are traveling east-west, you are climbing passes, across the spine of the mountains. If you are traveling north-south, you’re shooting down valleys and river drainages. This makes it easy to pick your riding style on the day. Many of the river valleys reveal startling damage from Hurricane Irene, with houses that have had their foundations pulled out from under them like that obnoxious tablecloth trick your uncle does at dinner.
We drop into Montpelier, which is, unbelievably, the state capital. The tiny town seems freshly cut from the wilderness. From the look of things, the governor could go out the back door of the domed capital building, hike for an hour at lunch, and never see a soul. The only people hiking around the capital building in my state are ones looking to make a drug deal.
I have a thing about ferries and motorcycles, and at one point, we’re able to take two in the space of an hour, ducking over to New York on the tiny Ticonderoga cable ferry, then quickly crossing back 40 miles north at Essex. On one ferry we get the front spot on the deck, and discover that the GTL looks fabulous as a figurehead, pointing the way to opposite shore, like Washington crossing the Delaware.
Due to a pinched nerve in my leg, I’m stopping at town greens and splaying myself out on the grass, stretching. This quickly becomes a kind of bizarre photo essay chronicling our journey, placing me in different photographic circumstances like the Travelocity Gnome. Here’s Geoff doing contortions in Pomfret! And Montpelier! And Woodstock! Collect the whole series!
Due to my injury, my only form of exercise is swimming, and so the trip is pleasantly punctuated with stops by every available river and lake, where I do my superman routine in the bushes, trading Cordura for a swimsuit and goggles. In minutes I’m stroking my way to the far shore, looking at fish. Then I’m back in my riding gear, dreaming of river bottoms and the next body of clean Vermont water.
In Vermont, dirt roads are not an occasional diversion or oddity, but rather an integral part of the transportation matrix. And we find ourselves using them on occasion without warning. Such roads are not the preferred ecosystem of the 800-pound GTL, but the surface quality is good and it’s easy to stay upright. If not for the persistent fear of dropping a bike I do not own, it would be really fun to let the back end step out in a joyous and dusty burst of acceleration. Unfortunately, this might also contribute to a conspicuous silence at dinner, so I refrain.
All told we cover only about 650 miles in four days of riding (albeit, without touching an inch of superslab in the process). But we find the concentrated span heightens the pleasure, like whiskey undiluted by ice or H2O. It’s a refreshing dose.
Welcome to Adventuring 2.0. We are better when our lives are punctuated by such things, no matter the length, or the quality of the bedding. It’s less important how we do it, than the fact that we do it at all.
