July 2016 – One Hell of a Ride

Day 1—2: Texas—Arizona

We headed out of Austin on two heavily loaded motorcycles on Friday evening. In two days, we clocked 900 miles across the three southern states of Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona. Getting across the south looks everything one expects it to look. Straight road with red, dusty hue, stretching for hundreds of miles and coming together as a single point at the horizon? Check. Sand storms on the sides of the road? Check. 106 degrees of blazing heat? Check. Neil Young melodies mysteriously sounding from thin air? Ch…nah, that doesn’t actually happen.

In case you’re wondering whether that’s actually fun — yes, it’s a ton of fun, for the first 15 minutes. The rest of the time, which for us has been like 12 hours in the saddle in total, is boring as wretched hell. Riding on a straight, perfectly paved road isn’t much of a ride, and the excruciating heat doesn’t make it any better. The boredom is occasionally pierced by the sighting of beautiful trains, but that doesn’t happen often enough to be anything more than just a blip.

El Paso looked great. Definitely need to go back and explore it thoroughly. Riding along the US-Mexican border and seeing all the colorful houses on the other side of the border within a thousand feet was great. I’m feeling more and more drawn towards the idea of riding across mainland Mexico.

Unfortunately neither Cesare nor I haven’t yet mounted the GoPros, so there aren’t any ride photos/videos in this post.

The real treat was Tim, whose camper we slept in for the night in Arizona, in preparation of crossing the Mexican border tomorrow.

Tim telling the story of how he hit a tractor with his Harley in 1975 and broke his arm.

How Baja Came Along. Part 1: BMW

What do all the motorcycle adventures have in common? That’s right, an adventure motorcycle. So this is the story of how my adventure motorcycle came to be.

So Lucy and I moved to America, and we were like — “We’re not gonna spend money on anything significant until we become filthy rich, so that we remain laser focused.” We lived that way for a few months, and then that slowly transformed into “We’re not gonna spend money on anything significant until we buy a house, so that we remain laser focused.” Then a few months after that, we were like “OK fuck, let’s get the best motorcycle money can buy.”

Which motorcycle is that? But of course. The one on my Facebook cover picture.

The problem with America is that everything is so accessible it’s ridiculous. So we went to the BMW Motorcycle dealership in Austin, test rode an F800GS and an F800GS Adventure, went like “naaah we’re not gonna buy a bike, gotta stay focused on buying a house, man”, and forgot about it. By saying “forgot” I of course mean started watching every-single-F800GS-video-on-youtube-every-free-hour-of-every-day. That’s a hell lot of videos.

A few short months later, my colleague Brian goes like “Hey dude I’ve saved up a ton of money, and I don’t have anything good to do with it, so I just wanna waste it on buying one of those Slingshot cars. They carry them at the BMW dealership, wanna come along for a test drive?” “Sure,” I say. Who would mind test driving a Slingshot?

Myself and Brian, under some kind of an influence.

So back to the dealership, Brian is checking out the Slingshot, but I’m just glued to the BMW motorcycles section. The salesman, Sean, is the same guy that gave me the bikes for test riding the previous time. He goes “Hey you seem to be really into this bike, why did you decide against buying it the last time?” and I go “Well dude, we’re trying to buy a house, so stop tempting me” and he goes “Guess what, if you buy it today, I’ll give you $3000 off.”

Holy fuck.

Fast forward 1 hour, Brian and I are going back home. Me having just bought a brand new BMW F800GS Adventure. Brian being like “the Slingshot was meh.”