Life Among the Brethren
Imagine a couple hundred codgers on BMWs sleeping in the dirt, drinking beer and traversing California for three days. But no one knows where the next day’s ride will go until they arrive at camp each night….
Tag: bmw motorcycles
Clean from Six Feet
My bikes display a lack of cleanliness that has the singular advantage of serving as a theft deterrent. “Hey Bob, this one is unlocked, but honestly, who would want it? If we’re going to risk arrest we might as well go for something clean. Let’s move on….”
In Search of Pretty Marsh
Riding the interior roads of Maine is a little like one of those underground trains at the amusement park, where you go into dark and haunting interior spaces, then emerge in dazzling sunlight, the world resplendent and pure….
The Cup Cake as Lean Angle Sensor
Just over the Santa Cruz mountains from my home on the Northern California coast, in the trendy little town of Los Gatos, there is a store that sells cupcakes. But twisty roads, it turns out, are not kind to cupcakes.
Blame the Weather
Confined to the house for much of the winter, I did what any reasonable person of a certain age would do: I bought another motorcycle.
Mechanical Misadventures
Over the years I’ve done hundreds of oil changes, valve adjustments, brake bleeds, and tire swaps. I’ve hunted down and exterminated electrical gremlins, changed fork seals, built and trued spoke wheels, replaced bearings, flushed radiators, and even done nut-and-bolt restorations of vintage bikes. Sadly, along the way I’ve also rounded off a hardware store worth of bolt heads, dropped the errant washer down a spark plug hole, and smashed enough knuckles that my wife doesn’t even comment on the bloodbath anymore. This long and messy apprenticeship has elevated my stature from “incompetent” to merely “hamfisted.”
50 Years of Useless Knowledge: A Life in Motorcycling
Originally published in On the Level, the magazine of the BMW Riders Association. What has been learned in 50 years of motorcycling? Unless you have experienced it, there is no way to know that a sunset is infinitely better from the seat of a motorcycle; or that the fine edge of traction exists in the…
Old and New: BMW vs. BMW Motorcycles
The other evening, I was surveying the wreckage that is otherwise known as my garage, and realized that those fun-loving folks in Munich have siphoned off a good portion of my lifetime earnings. Across the decades I have owned an airhead, an oilhead, a hexhead, and a waterhead. Plus an assortment of BMW automobiles. If…
All the Places I Shouldn’t Go
Originally published in “On the Level,” the official magazine of the BMW Riders Association. This afternoon, I went to the gym, just six miles away. Naturally, this was via Alice’s Restaurant, a two-hour ride each direction on relentlessly twisty roads with broken pavement. And yesterday, I had a special mission: the post office. This took the…
Non-essential Activities for a Non-essential Person
Originally published in “On the Level,” the magazine of the BMW Riders Association. Because I’m retired, you might say that my entire existence could be classified as non-essential. In fact, some of my colleagues probably would have told you I was non-essential when I was working; I’m even more so now, during the time of…