Mr. Subjective

Riding from Pickerington, Ohio to Duluth, Minnesota. Between 2000 and 2007 I rode from Minnesota to Ohio and back several times a year, always aboard a 1981 BMW 800. These were wonderful bikes with famously weak electrical charging systems. My outbound route was east across US2 to the Mackinac Bridge then south on I-75 to Columbus. The route back was...

Back in 2009 I had two flats, both at highway speeds and both due to using dry-rotted innertubes. Luckily no crash resulted. All because of my own negligence and ignorance. Somewhere along the way I’d forgotten that one should always put a new tube in when installing a new tire. In hindsight I don’t know what I could have been...

Nearly everywhere you’ll ever camp you’ll find all kinds of combustible hot-burning biomass. Sticks and twigs the size of your thumb and smaller. This stuff is way faster and easier to light and to cook with that you’d think, burns nearly smokelessly, and will reliably provide more than enough heat for all kinds of trail cookery. https://youtu.be/I2iGzPGDUBM But why go...

Our Irrational Attachments Many years ago I read a story in a British motorcycle magazine about a fellow who’d ridden the same bike for almost his entire life. A quintessential quirky Englishman. I liked this story so much that I transcribed and saved it back in 2002, because at that time I didn’t have easy access to a digital scanner...

There are essentially just two kinds of tank bags: The emptyish ones for varying day-to-day commuting loads and full-ish ones that have been loaded and equipped specifically for long distances and all-day-plus rides. Over the past thirty years I’ve assembled several of the latter type and even though each has been assembled with slightly different components, a few commonalities exist...