Tour De Force

the loveliness of the long-distance cruiser

A lot of us ride motorcycles--around town. For some, the highway never ends. They get their act together and take it on the road. Sometimes their lunch hours end three states later. What does it feel like?

You are riding a BMW through France, past hedgehogs and stone walls, along tree-lined roads, through towns where the buildings move in close to the road, where old men sit in chairs leaned against sunlit walls and nod their approval at the motorcyclists sweeping past. Five miles outside Avignon, the walled city that once housed Popes, you pass a police car, a Peugeot, parked on the side of the road. Your eyes glance down at the speedometer. You convert kph into mph and figure you're well on the interesting side of 100 mph. The gendarmes wave. At the next rest stop, your guide, a factory rep, asks if perhaps the pace is excessive. Would the group like to go slower--perhaps enjoy the (continued on page 223) Tour De Force (continued from page 142) scenery? One of the other riders sums up the group's attitude: "Fuck the scenery. We can buy postcards at the airport. How often do you get to ride past the highway patrol at 110 mph?"

You proceed to haul ass across Europe for three days. At one point, you express some concern--you don't feel quite right risking a $7300 machine as polished and precise as the R100RT that's not yours. "Listen," says the rep, "you could drop the bike. That would be unfortunate. You could try to pass a line of cars at an inopportune moment and run head on into a truck. That would be a minor disaster. Or you could play it safe, fall behind, miss a turn and get lost in France. That would be a tragedy." You keep up. At some point in the trip, you overtake a tour bus laboring over a high Alpine pass. That bus will take hours to reach what you will leave behind in minutes. And you will see everything its passengers will and more--the level of attention it takes to operate a motorcycle opens you to the environment. It doesn't take forever to get the message. In the lake country of Switzerland, the group proceeds single file. A hundred yards from the road, a woman emerges from the water, topless. Her boyfriend hands her a towel, helps her tie the knot on her top. One after another, the riders flicked their eyes left, prayed to God and went back to the road. You could have stopped, pulled out the Instamatics, had a picnic lunch; but, really, you had seen all there was. When the trip is over, you will have an endless film loop--castles, cafés. You will also know the terrain on another, more intimate level. You will know the rhythm of the road, the topography.

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The preceding account is somewhat misleading. Europeans have been touring for years. Their idea of a good time is to deck themselves out in leathers, climb onto their bikes, drop their wrists and go full tilt--playing connect-the-dots across the face of Europe--pushing their machines from apex to apex. It is something to behold. The American notion of touring is somewhat different--after all, we are a nation blessed with throughways and a 55-mph speed limit. When you have to cross Nebraska, it's not just a trip, it's a career. Given that, a Harley seems like a good idea.

The men who ride long distances on motorcycles in America are a breed apart. They have chosen their weapon; now they have to make it work. They are not unlike the frontier scouts or NASA engineers. They know life-support systems. They have developed--by trial and error and freezing hands--an appreciation for equipment. They fill the storage compartments on their motorcycles with Rukka rain suits, Tour Master cold-weather suits, electric gloves, neck gaiters, etc. They debate the merits of leathers vs. synthetics. For example, the Fackelmann riding suit is made of Kevlar, the same stuff that's in bulletproof vests. If you fall off your bike, a synthetic suit will hold out two and a half times longer than leather. These guys are serious.

Touring is the blue-chip stock of the American motorcycle market. It was slow to catch on, but it has grown every year, and the people who tour can afford the best. Honda staked out the market with the Gold Wing--an opposed-four tourer that defined the state of the art. Everything you ever wanted on a motorcycle but were afraid to ask for--plug-ins, smoothness, gadgets galore, power, custom seats, fairings, saddlebags, reliability, infinite patience--the works. The bike became a cult object--owners called themselves Wingnuts, staged Wingdings, etc. Mostly, they just pointed the suckers out of town and rode.

When we road-tested these bikes, Peter Ross Range, our Washington-based Contributing Editor, asked if he could take the Aspencade to San Francisco. The following is his report of the return journey. He is not a man moved to poetry, but he obviously had a good time. "We ran the seaside, swooped around 1500-foot Pacific cliffs, wound through the redwood forests of Big Sur and even crept in first gear through a surprise snowstorm on the high pass of the Carmel Valley. The motorcycle ran like it couldn't tell the difference. I can already see that the telling of this tale hardly equals the experience itself. What gave it a lingering aura of incredulity was the rapidity with which everything changed. We peaked in a curtain of thick snowflakes. We descended into a light rain, emerged into a cold sunshine. Within several miles, we were riding in the glory of pristine skies overlooking a meandering river that cut through a mini-Grand Canyon. Sharp contrasts of cliffs and lush, high pasture, cattle grazing nonchalantly on verdant meadows. We came out of the mountain and cruised into Los Angeles, accompanied by Bruce Springsteen." On a bike, you are out there, sensitive to the environment, more awake than the pitiful creatures motivating along in their four-wheel living rooms will ever be.

When we chose the bikes for this feature, we had one criterion: They were good for a ride. The Suzuki, the Yamaha and the Kawasaki began as sports bikes, but they have attracted a touring crowd. The machines seduce the rider, take him beyond his boundaries, into the unexpected. We spent a day tossin the Suzuki GS1100GZ down canyon roads, beneath an overcast sky. We went over the crest of a hill and ran head on into the Pacific Ocean, spread out before us, brilliant in the sunlight. You had to be there. We took the Kawasaki to Northern California and ran laps around Lake Tahoe. On the Nevada side, a highway-patrol officer pulled us over and wrote out a ticket--for speeding, general delinquency and indecent enjoyment. We told him to wait, we'd be back in an hour and he could do it again. He did. We rode the Virago around Los Angeles for three days. It was our mount. We were addicted to the low throb, the torque, the effortless chug of the V twin. The bike is sleek and sexy. It is the ultimate boulevard bike, with the bulk to tackle the long run. We were low-slung, throwing a profile. It never failed to draw a crowd. On a fogbound morning, we walked out of our hotel to find the doorman wiping the moisture off the seat. He treated the machine like a Rolls or a Mercedes. He was not looking for a tip.

All of these bikes will do. Our only advice--ride them. See how far you get, how many miles you rack up before the real world reasserts its claim.

"The men who ride long distances on motorcycles are not unlike the frontier scouts."