This post/essay is included in Section 5 of the book "The Riders" (pictured below) available for purchase here. The smaller and more obscure a road is, the more interesting it usually will be on a motorcycle. This size/interestingness inverse proportionality is well known to experienced riders. Motorcyclists naturally want to find out what is just over there, on the other side of the horizon, and around the next few bends in the road. We do this again and again, often via ever smaller and less crowded roads. If enough reasons exist to get from wherever we are to somewhere over there, a small pathway will first develop, which, over the course of time as more people want to go there, will become a larger road. The more travelers, the wider and straighter a road will become. At one extreme are superhighways with as many as eight or more lanes in each direction, and at the other end of this spectrum are endless squiggly, seldom-used, single-and-double track trails. The genius of every motorcycle ever made is its unique ability to help us traverse and enjoy this entire range. No other motorized vehicle is able do this. Road networks develop in ways similar to the branch and root systems of trees and the evolved meandering pathways of river and circulatory systems. Mathematicians sometimes describe this natural branching using algorithmic formulas for fractals, and riders experience it more directly whenever they choose to head off down roads that become successively smaller and less commonly used. Thus, roads that don’t seem to go anywhere important often make for very desirable journeys on a motorcycle. I’m located in the north central part of the United States, and from here to the West Coast it’s about 1,800 miles (2,900 km) by road or about 1,500 miles (2,400 km) by air on the shortest-distance great circle. Covering this distance are three more-or-less parallel and reasonably comparable routes: Interstate 94, US Highway 2, and Highway 200. From top to bottom on a map, US 2 runs near the US/Canada border, Highway 200 does the same roughly 50 miles (80 km) farther south, and I-94 crosses similar country about another 100 miles (160 km) lower. “I-Ninety-Four” is the newest. It connects largish prairie cities like Minneapolis, Fargo, and Billings with a smooth kind of efficiency appreciated by engineers, accountants, long-haul truckers, and drivers with places to go and things to do. This road is about speed, safety, and making good time. At the other extreme is the much older “Two Hundred” that connects countless little farm and ranch towns and is occasionally intersected by even smaller crossroads and driveways, each unique. Lastly, “US Highway Two” evenly splits this difference in traffic, average speeds, roadway age, safety, and architecture. The Interstate (aka “Freeway”) is about as straight, flat, and smooth as is humanly possible to achieve. It comes complete with a wide, nicely mowed, grassy median separating the opposing lanes, of which there’s always a minimum of four, so it’s usually simple to safely pass other vehicles at any time. Its paved shoulders are extra-wide, and 50 feet (15 m) beyond them is a sturdy wire fence to help keep local wildlife out of your way. There are no stop signs; all crossroads involve bridges, underpasses, or on-and-off ramps. You simply lock down your bike’s throttle at the chosen speed and this endless slab of near-perfect pavement supports you and your bike until the machine needs gasoline, or you get hungry and thirsty, or you need to pee. The magnificent Great Plains pass by in the distance and produce an effect that is simultaneously awesome and soporific. Highway Two Hundred is at the other extreme. With a few exceptions, there’s little traffic and you’ll find only two opposing and fairly narrow lanes the entire way. The endless prairie, foothills, and mountains begin a couple of feet from the edge of a slim gravel shoulder and extend in every direction to the far-off horizon. There’s no median and no wildlife fences. You are right in the environment. Along one side of this ribbon, an infinite row of evenly spaced telephone poles has been planted. Every so often you’ll notice a hunting bird perched atop one of them. Each of 200’s small towns, motels, roadhouses, and gasoline stations is slightly different, and between them every few miles are occasional lonely-looking ranch mailboxes. You’ll also occasionally see someone out walking, riding horseback, or bicycling. Those you may stop to talk with will be polite and sometimes a little quirky. The quality of 200’s pavement is generally very good, but during the spring thaw, a few low places may be a bit flooded. You’ll see mountains, forests, rising foothills, small streams, rolling prairies, near-endless billiard-table flat areas, and great expanses of naturally variegated terrain—the Great Plains up close. Occasionally there will be a required 90-degree turn at an intersection in the middle of nowhere, so if you want to remain on this highway, you need to pay attention to signposts. Even out there with almost nothing else around you, it’s still possible to miss an important turn. Sometimes more than an hour will pass without seeing even one other vehicle, and it’s easy to run out of gas if you don’t stop to fill up where you need to. Though this road (like all roads) can be cannonballed, taking 200 usually means riding about 600 miles (966 km) each day, which makes either reaching or returning from the West Coast an easy three-day project. Both directions are a ride you’ll remember. It doesn’t take a genius to correctly guess which roads deliver the best riding experiences. When you have the time, it’s nearly always the road less taken. Enjoy the ride.

“Social media is less a reflection of who we are, and more a performance of who we want to be." - Drew Harwell and Shiori Okazaki, May 11, 2021, in a Washington Post front-page story featuring a life-long motorcycle rider. Here’s a link to the full article. The story is about a 50-year-old male rider in Japan who successfully pretended to be a beautiful young female rider on social media by employing a popular face-image altering app. This technology helped him develop a large social media audience. When he eventually revealed the truth about who he actually was, his social media audience became even larger. Missing from this exceptional article is how similar such online behavior is to traditional real-world cosplay, and, extrapolating further, how closely linked cosplay-in-general is to the huge commercial success of the Harley Davidson company as they provided a mass-produced river of carefully developed bikes and ‘costume’ gear which allowed a generation of average people (baby boomers) to dress up and enjoy riding around casually projecting the appearance of genuine 1% biker outlaws. At least a passing resemblance to those riders. Putting aside how actual criminal bike gang members may have felt about being elevated to aspirational fashion icons by thirty-five years of Harley’s brilliant marketing programs, at the bottom of this story is (…predicably) William Shakespeare and his famous stage-scripted line about how “…all the world’s a stage, and we are just players.” That is a paraphrase from the opening soliloquy in “As You Like It.” (which might partly be about how marketing works, but I’m guessing). There’s no place else to go with this except to note a sentence from Steve Thompson’s 1985 Cycle World Op-ed essay “Dressing Up”, which was written about his confounding and revelatory experiences using one of the very first Aerostich suits. At that time even the most enlightened and expert riders did not understand or appreciate high-tech armored textile coveralls. Summarizing this, he wrote: “…there is an obvious reason why riding gear for street bikers is so style sensitive: Riding a street bike itself is largely a matter of style.” We had always sorta hoped otherwise. Shakespeare knew better. All the world IS a stage, and this inescapably includes all of us Road Grimed Astronauts. Here’s the rest of Steve’s prescient 1985 one-page essay. - Mr. Subjective, May 17, 2021

Did you and your contemporaries ever call notoriously slow cars and bikes ‘stones’? For example: “That old van sure is a stone…” When I was growing up my pals and I always referred to all underpowered vehicles as ‘stones’ or ‘slugs’, so I’m not sure if the new ‘Moto Guzzi V7 Stone ’ is an example of truth-in-advertising, or if someone at the company was unfamiliar with twentieth century midwestern American slang, or maybe they felt a reverse-psychology name for this bike would attract younger, hipper irony-craving buyers. Those youthful sophisticates who call their cars ‘whips’. How cars and bikes are named is one of the minor mysteries of the universe, and so is how some models receive affectionate nicknames from the public. Such nicknames are usually better than the original manufacturer-given names. For example, a ‘flivver’ is a much better name than ‘model T’, and a ‘Bug’ or ‘Beetle’ are both leagues better than the official name of that original Volkswagen car, which was ‘Type 1’. Fiat named it’s similar tiny car the Tipolino, which in Italian is ‘Little Mouse’. The Italians have flair. This name is better. Several of my favorite vehicle nicknames involve motorcycles. The old Suzuki GT 750 (with its capable three-cylinder liquid cooled two stroke engine) was universally known as the ‘Water Buffalo’ (in the USA) and the ‘Kettle’ (as in tea kettle) in the UK. Its unusual idling exhaust burble sounded almost like water boiling in a stove top tea kettle, but I have no clue about the origin of ‘water buffalo’. While this model was in production, and for many years afterward, one could go anywhere in the world and tell any other rider you had a ‘Water Buffalo’ and they would instantly know exactly what you were referring to. Same as ‘Hog’, which of course identifies all larger Harley Davidsons, and ‘Airhead’ for all older BMW’s and ‘Lead Wing’ for all Honda Gold Wings. ‘Water Buffalo’ might be the best affectionate bike nickname on record so far. Several of these old Water Buffalos have in recent years actually been ridden in the famous Ironbutt 11-day endurance event. Many people simply enjoy pronouncing those two incongruously joined words. ‘Water Buffalo’. My wife has a quirky tradition of naming her cars after characters from the movie ’Napoleon Dynamite’. Her last car, a black Toyota Corolla which she’d purchased new eleven years ago, was always named ‘Kip’. For the past several months her new black Volkswagen Tiguan has gone back and forth between ‘Uncle Rico’ and ‘Rex’. At the moment it looks like ‘Rex’ is winning. I’ve never named any of my vehicles, except when they are not cooperating with my pathetic efforts to repair their occasional faults. At that point they all temporarily receive this name: ’The Pig from Hell’. It’s a name never to be spoken aloud just in case they can hear. If there is one company with a gift for coming up with great names, it would have to be Rolls Royce, with names like the ‘Phantom’, ’Silver Ghost’, ‘Wraith’, etc. You can’t do much better than those. The Mercury ‘Zephyr’ name comes close, but it was a fluke. Who wants to drive a Marauder or Grand Marquis? Moto Guzzi makes some great motorcycles. One long-produced nearly indestructible early model featured a large forward-pointing horizontal cylinder with a massive external flywheel attached to the left end of its crankshaft. This was a bit of an odd-looking bike in a military-steam-punk-meets-antiquarian-moto-technology way, but everything worked well, and the bike was apparently quite good. I’ve seen a couple of them at random bike nights. Their very long production run ended about a dozen years before I began riding. That big spinning external flywheel is spectacular when the engine is running. A higher-performance version of this model had a superb name: ‘Falcone’ which is Italian for Falcon. They probably also had some cool nickname, likely referencing that huge naked flywheel, but Falcone was such a great name whatever the slang name might have been could hardly top it. Moto Guzzi has long had a knack for model names. Their larger contemporary sport bikes have frequently been named ‘Le Mans’ after the famous French racetrack, and the smaller sporting ones are called ‘Monza’s after another famous Italian track. The Monza race facility must be a bit smaller than Le Mans. Guzzi’s luxury-class bikes were long called either ‘Eldorado’s or ‘Ambassador’s. Those models were popular world-wide as police bikes and also for ceremonial or parade escort use, so those names were appropriate to the institutional use these models often served. I remember them being Harley-solid dreadnaughts which were easy to maintain, super durable, comfortable long-distance bikes. They competed most directly with alpha-numerically named BMW’s. If you were a daily-riding motor-officer, which would you rather tell someone you rode? The tutonically-named R-75, or an Ambassador? (Side note: Both of those good names were also used on popular automobiles. Cadillac once sold lots of Eldorado’s and a few years earlier American Motors/Rambler also sold a fair number of Ambassadors.) The new Moto Guzzi ‘Stone’ seems like a nicely modernized mid-size old-school bike. Well-engineered, practical and a bit uncommon. If you are shopping for bikes and believe any particular model is likely to remain in production for a long time, uncommon-ness is a real virtue. Earlier versions of the ‘Stone’ have been produced for many years, so it is likely future versions of it will be made for a long time ahead. This is a good thing. If you happen to be looking for a bike about like the Stone, you could do a lot worse. Say (for example) you were comparing it with a Triumph Tiger or Speed Triple (great names, great bikes), several of the excellent Ducati ‘Scrambler’ iterations and, for good measure, also the wonderful Suzuki SV650/Gladius. All are current versions of long-running models. Your choice might simply come down to if there is a better Guzzi, Triumph or Suzuki shop nearby. As a thought-experiment imagine answering the common question: “Hey, what kind of bike is that?” with: “It’s a Stone. A Moto Guzzi Stone.” (“Bond. James Bond…”) Does that seem like it would be more fun than pronouncing the names of the similar machines? “It’s a what?…A Stone?” Maybe “Stone” is a cool bike name after all. Not quite in the ‘Water Buffalo’ coolness league, but definitely in that same ballpark. I double-dog-dare any Japanese, Korean, Indian or Chinese bike manufacturer to name a new motorcycle their XYZ ‘Slug’. “So, what are you riding?” would receive this great deadpan reply: “It’s a XYZ Slug.”. You couldn’t say that without grinning inside. This would seem to be difficult to top, though Renault-Nissan once offered an overly cute small car called an ‘Escargot’ (Snail), so maybe there are no absurd name boundaries. Perhaps in the future some boring nerd book will be written about the universe of interesting, cool and odd bike and car names. Bikes like the ‘Monkey’, ‘Concourse’, ‘Ninja’, ‘Blackbird’, ‘Hurricane’, and ‘Rune’. Already there’s this random bike name generator out there on the internet three languages. Whatever you call your chosen conveyance, its name is cool. -- Mr. Subjective 2021 PS – As far back as I remember I’ve had a soft spot for the vehicle name ‘Roadmaster’, which Buick used for decades on one of its larger cars. And long ago my younger brother gifted me the luxuriously chromed plastic model badge you see here (right). On Buicks this badge added about five miles per hour to the top end, and on this home-made garage boombox I’m positive it has always added two or three more decibels.

This is a short essay about what the Apple company might be planning for their Next Big Thing. First, please note I am not an Apple 'fan-boy’ and have not spent even one second doing any actual research on this, so what follows is mostly made-up storytelling. I was recently daydreaming (thanks pandemic!) when a bunch of ideas came into my imagination sort of all-at-once and suddenly I thought I might somehow be able to guess what this new Apple car might be like, why it would be good for motorcycling and about when it might be introduced. Maybe sometime in 2022. The background for this fantasy starts with how it is semi-generally known that for the second time in the last decade Apple is working on creating a car. Based on their history it would need to be revolutionary. Projecting forward from that, here are five background pieces: Apple historically likes to mashup existing technologies to create entirely new kinds of consumer products. Co-founder Steve Jobs was an intuitive genius at this, and his goal was to create spectacular new things. This still is a core part of the company culture, and at the moment Apple has huge money available for developing complex new things. Creating an all-new kind of car would certainly be that. A few years ago (five?), Apple spent a lot of time and money researching and developing an Apple car then suddenly shut the entire program down. The impulse to make cars has been within the company for some time. The first time around maybe they didn’t quite fathom the kind of mashup needed, or they felt the timing was wrong, but for a bunch of reasons maybe now they believe they do know. It feels to me like this might be the right time. Timing is everything. The incredible success of Tesla has completely and unequivocally validated consumer acceptance of, and interest in, revolutionary kinds of electric cars. Three wheeled road vehicles have never been widely popular and thus have never been as intensely regulated as four wheeled vehicles (safety, emissions, everything), but Polaris and a few others have taken advantage of this quasi-loophole by successfully producing a variety of recreational road-legal three wheelers. Apple has long enjoyed strong IP, industrial, political and manufacturing trade relationships in China, and China has a great political and economic interest in dominating the world’s technological future. The result of the above (and other items not listed) is that Apple may fairly soon enter American and world car markets with a very advanced electric powered three-wheeled car mostly made in China. This all-new vehicle should be just as sophisticated, fast, comfortable, fully self-driving and ‘cool' as a Tesla but in some intentional ways it should also be even more revolutionary. It could be slightly less costly, though not a lot, because its content, innovation and feature levels would be substantial. It should probably seat four, have about a 200-mile range and a top speed of around 100 miles per hour. The CEO of Apple today is one of the world’s best logistics people. Co-ordinating the near-instant roll-out of an all-new type of car would be a perfect make-a-dent-in-the-universe assignment for such a logistical genius. Right now through some shell company having no obvious association with Apple they may already be quietly buying and leasing locations for a bunch of wholly Apple-owned car stores, and also to support all the recharging infrastructure which would be needed. Apple’s three-wheel cars would need to look and work a lot better than all prior three-wheel cars. The full Apple-Bauhaus design ethos would be applied, so much so the first examples appearing in teaser marketing would be odds-on favorites to be painted (and molded) in white. And even though crash-testing is not required for three wheelers, these cars should be fully air bagged. Some impressive videos of how well the vehicle performs in crashes should be available, for anyone curious enough dig a little. What does any of this have to do with Aerostich and motorcycles? Only one thing, but it’s a ginormously huge thing: Any three wheeled Apple car probably would be engineered to lean into corners. It would ride on three regular profile car tires which would always stay more-or-less perpendicular to the road, but it would also contain a Segway-like balance chip connected to an instantly adjustable suspension which would automatically tilt the body and its ‘skateboard’ chassis far enough during cornering so everyone riding inside would feel safe and comfortable. Maybe as much as fifteen or twenty degrees if one was really hurrying. Imagine witnessing an Apple car weaving through traffic and taking corners by leaning just like a slaloming skier or motorcycle rider. That’s the key. Almost everyone seeing this from their conventional vehicle should want to experience the feel of that ride. Thus, it’s easy to project Apple’s pioneering corner-leaners instantly becoming a cult-curiosity and then fairly quickly transitioning into an “I want one of those” thing. Mainstreaming should soon follow. These fully autonomous-driving electric three wheeled leaners would inferentially and by example teach almost everyone to accept (and possibly enjoy) a fundamental reason why we love our inherently unstable motorcycles and bicycles. Apple’s revolutionary leaning three wheeled cars, if they happen, and if they’re as successful as many other recent Apple products, would help normalize leaning into turns, and this (normalization, finally!) should lead to even more motorcycle and bicycle riders. I wonder if Jay Leno will have the opportunity to purchase the first one. Ok, now I’m done. Thoughts welcome. PS – Important analogy: 3.2 beer is very nice, but most beer drinkers prefer the full-strength stuff. I’d probably be among those who would want to own a snazzy Apple self-driving electric ‘leaner’, but no matter how cool that ride (and everything else about it) might be, I know I’ll continue to prefer leaning into corners full-strength. By riding there. PPS – This was typed on an Apple MacBook Air. Mr. Subjective, 1-15-21

Here’s an excerpt from an emotional essay about the recent ending of some good special interest outdoor magazines. Not the print motorcycle titles we all knew and have recently lost, but almost the exact same scenario: “...And what’s left is too often shit. I don’t mean Bike, Powder, Snowboarder, or Surfer, I mean junk shows like Men’s Journal. Is this really what you want from your outdoor media—a firehose of pandering, listicles, lowest-common denominator pap, and nakedly commercial gear roundups designed to get you to click on affiliate links? Magazines like Men’s Journal exist only to enrich their CEOs and shareholders; rather than enrich the culture they purport to serve; they treat it as a commodity from which to scrape their profits.” He’s a better writer than I. Here’s the entire wonderful essay. My sadness is not only for the decline of specialty magazines as viable businesses, including most of the popular motorcycle titles which I grew up enjoying*, but with the broader decline of print in all its forms: daily newspapers, monthly magazines and books. The main reason I am concerned about this has to do with the disappearance of useful contexts, which for me has always been of value. Search algorithms provide a lot of information incredibly conveniently, but almost no useful context. This narrow perfection is precisely what makes them so great, though at the same time something is lost. When you hold a physical magazine, newspaper or book, even a so-so one, the words you are directly reading moment-by-moment are surrounded by other elements which have little to do with whatever is being conveyed by the words your attention is directed at decoding. The physical proximity of all the other stories and advertisements in that newspaper or magazine, and of all the other pages of any book, are inseparable. This makes it obvious that whatever you are focusing directly on is only a small part of something larger and broader. Search algorithms give you (for example) fantastic information about every kind of pencil eraser in .2 seconds, but usually provide little else. In contrast, any printed office or school supply catalog (even a lousy one) probably presented their range of pencil erasers within a broader context. This inferentially taught the reader something important about pencil erasers: How they fit within the world of schools or offices. The very best online webzines and media websites do this, but imperfectly. The search algorithms we use countless times a week (everyday) do it barely at all. When I was a kid hiding motorcycle magazines between the pages of oversize social studies and civics textbooks during 7th grade study hall periods I learned a lot more about motorcycling than just the focus of my immediate interest at that time: small displacement street-legal dirt bikes. By providing inescapable tangential context, print motorcycle magazines did a lot more for me -- and for tens of thousands of other young riders -- than any search algorithm today ever can. Those print magazines helped me begin to identify myself as a motorcyclist, as someone apart from the mainstream. I was becoming something more than another kid wanting to move from a bicycle to a street legal dirt bike. This same is effect is at work in realms covered by the newspapers, non-motorcycle magazines and all the printed books I grew up reading. Until recently almost everything one read came with physical context, and even if I wasn’t paying conscious attention to it, I always absorbed something important from its presence. You cannot watch a pretty sunset and be in awe of it without the inescapable context provided by an unmoving horizon. Physical context is important. Context is difficult to achieve on a screen when scrolling and searching. It’s more like looking at whatever the specific subject is through a telescope, but backwards. You get a kind of tunnel-vision view of everything. The philosopher Marshall McLuhan once (famously) wrote: “The medium is the message.” and I sure believe this is true. Communications technology itself can be as impactful on meaning as whatever information is objectively presented. Digital is not categorically better or worse than print though. They are essentially complementary. This essay would be incomplete if I didn’t mention two other (maybe obvious?) things about physical print: 1.) Print can be durable and energy-efficient if the ink and paper are engineered to be long-term stable. Acid-free parchment, etc. One can easily read five-hundred-year-old bound bibles, and many of those recovered scrolls which are ten times as ancient. There are text files in my computer which are completely unreadable by any kind of easily obtainable software after only twenty-five years. 2.) Anyone who asserts that using physical trees and inks places a heavier overall environmental load on our planet than does the ultra-precise processing and management of elements and electrons is full of baloney. We humans are generally comfort-seekers who don’t (or won’t) change our thinking or behavior unless there is a gun directly at our heads. But when this does happen, we are also extremely good at thinking clearly and working together. So maybe at some future time print may come back. In my view this would probably benefit the planet and our still-evolving human social contract. Regardless, we should not throw our search algorithms under the bus in some kind of either-or formulation. Search algorithms and print are, at the end of the day (and again) complementary. *Two personal stories about print magazines: Once on jury duty I was selected to be a juror. The attorneys involved asked each potential juror questions to discern any hidden bias which would be unfavorable to their trial goal. I was asked what magazines I read regularly and started reciting the titles. After I was finished, I was rejected as a juror possibly because I’d admitted to reading too many magazines. Once, during a big snowstorm that occurred here years before the internet existed, I was driving around late at night and it seemed like there was a chance everyone could be snowed in the following day so I stopped at a C store to pick up some magazines just in case. (This was also before cable TV…) After browsing the rack, I laid a thick stack on the counter and as the clerk started totaling them, he started talking: “Oh, Road & Track. I read that.” And then “Oh, Dirt Bike. I read that.” He continued this way, magazine after magazine, and seemed rather smug about it. A few moments later they were all bagged and paid for and there wasn’t anything to say so I thanked him, picked up the bag and headed for my car. The little store was empty except for the two of us. Halfway out the door and standing there with snow blowing in, I looked back over my shoulder and said with a smile: “I think I read more magazines than anyone I know, but I don’t know very many people because I read so many magazines.”. Then the I stepped outside smiling from ear to ear as I got into my car. That moment was: A) the most perfect spontaneous circumlocution I’d spoken, ever, and B) 100% True. Print magazines are great. Especially motorcycle magazines. – Mr. Subjective, 10-2020

(Wish You Were Here) By Guest Blogger Rand Rasmussen It is perfectly okay to not love the prairie. But anyone who thinks there is nothing to see there, simply does not know how (or where) to look. This is a minute-by-minute recounting of an evening’s ride I took in 2015 on my 250,000-mile, 1983 R-65. I ride west on I-94 into a blinding late-summer evening sun. Even with my sun visor down the sun bores mercilessly into my eyes--dimming the road ahead. I ride along, shading my eyes with my left hand as my right hand manages the throttle. It is cool for August in North Dakota–perhaps 65 or so degrees. But then, there are always one or two of these early, cool days each August as though autumn feels compelled to remind me that its time is soon coming. I have on my electric jacket liner and my gloves. Neither are heating at this point, but both will be before I get home. Only minutes ago, I was in the Fargo/Moorhead/Dilworth/West Fargo 'metroplex'. With a population of 250,000, it is the biggest metro area in or near North Dakota, but the FM area, as it is commonly known, is too small to have the seemingly endless suburbs which ring larger cities. Thus, getting out of town–in any direction–takes minutes alone. I hop off the freeway at the first rural exit which is fewer than 10 miles out from downtown Fargo then take the bridge back over the freeway and turn right onto the paved frontage road which parallels the south side of eastbound I-94, poking along at 55 to 60. Frontage roads are made for slower speeds, not for blazing along like fighter jet. Just an hour ago I was in a psychologist's office taking a psychological exam required by a position to which I was applying. Now, out here, the toughest decision I have to make is whether or not to turn on my heated jacket-liner and gloves. I come to an intersection and turn south toward Durbin; now a literal ghost town, but years ago it was the hometown of my next-door neighbor Lee. South is a welcome direction to be riding at 7:30 on a sunny evening. This is an old, rough, county road with patched pavement and deep grooves worn into the lanes–and I love it for exactly those things. My shadow is projected on the front rows of a very healthy-looking cornfield. Except for some severe weather, this has been an ideal growing season in North Dakota with virtually every crop projected to bump. I can see Durbin, or what's left of it anyway, from more than five miles out. Distance on the prairie is a different commodity than it is elsewhere. (I remember once driving a visitor, who was from Upstate New York, from Fargo to Crookston, Minnesota. On one stretch I pointed out a small white church in the distance ahead. I asked how far away he thought it was. "Oh, man," he said, studying the distance. "That's gotta be two or three miles." "Six," I told him. He just shook his head and chuckled. "I can't get used to these distances.") I turn left and swing through Durbin and do not see another person nor anything to suggest that a single soul remains here, save for a homemade sign in a yard that reads, "No Trespassing: If you can read this you are in range!" I briefly contemplate whether they would ever find my body out here. Of the four directions out of Durbin, three are gravel. The only exception is north–the direction from which I came. I am not inclined to retrace my steps just to avoid a little gravel, so I head west on an unidentified gravel road. In dry weather, most gravel roads in North Dakota are a rider's dream, even on a road bike. There are almost always two hard-packed tracks which allow a rider to travel at pretty much whatever speed he or she chooses. Good thing, too, because riding into the blinding sun again would be a risky thing indeed in deep gravel or sand. Right at a nice, neat farmstead with a traditional white farmhouse and a barn with a new red metal roof, and the road eases to the south then back to the west again. On a small wood-plank bridge, I cross over an unmarked creek about eight feet wide and maybe two feet deep. Along its banks are thick stands of cattails and rushes. In a wet year, like this one, the prairie is veined with little creeks just like this one. I approach State Highway 18 with mixed emotions. The pavement will be easier on which to ride, certainly, and I will again be riding perpendicular to the sun which is a relief of sorts. Unfortunately, the likelihood of making a new discovery, of seeing something I have never seen before drops significantly on more traveled roads. I turn south on 18 and wind my way back up through the gears. I raise the internal sun visor in my helmet and relish the optical sensation of looking through one less layer of plastic. The fields alternate between cropland and pastureland covered with herds of healthy-looking cattle of all colors and breeds, grazing contentedly. Lots of corn and lots of alfalfa. Many of the farms still have traditional windmills, some still working and some not. I love the way they look against the evening sky. Out here, the world has a scent of its own. It smells of earth and newly mown green things and of nothing human-made. It looks different too. The sky dominates the entire view. In his classic work Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert Pirsig compares the prairie sky to a giant, inverted bowl; it is a commonly used simile. I understand the comparison, but personally it has never worked for me. Something about the bowl analogy suggests limits to me, while the deep blue sky out here is beyond limitation. Put any kind of a frame around it, metaphoric or actual, and it disappears completely. The sun has begun its slow, diagonal fall toward the western horizon. Riding south, it is hitting me from the right rear. The deep, deep blue color of the day is changing to the blue-green sky of the coming dusk. Wispy clouds are lighted orange to complete the sky. When I ride on North Dakota prairie evenings I know why the Miami Dolphins chose the colors they did for their uniforms. My motor hums quietly between my feet. The ever-cooling breeze seeps into my helmet. The dashed yellow centerline flickers rhythmically beneath my left elbow. All of my senses seem to be heightened and relaxation is complete. I feel as though I want this ride to go on forever. At Highway 46, 18 jags east for five miles before returning to its southern trajectory. A small, white country church sits at this corner. Ahead, I can see hills and lots of green breaking-up the vanishing-point horizon. On the prairie that means water. I slow down to read a road sign indicating that the Barrie Congregational Church lies just a half-mile down a gravel road to my left. A 100-year-old church is plenty reason for a detour, so I turn left toward a thick copse of trees. The gravel is in good shape–dry and hard-packed. The road hooks sharply right past a little secluded farmstead replete with horses grazing peaceably on a small, tree-enclosed pasture. In only another second or two, I come across the smallish white church on the right side of the road. I can't tell if it is still active or not. On the one hand, there is no sign out front indicating a pastor's name or scheduled events. On the other hand, the building does not look abandoned; it is in far too good shape for that. Just across the gravel road, on my immediate left, I can see the Sheyenne River down through the trees; altogether a quite pleasant setting. I continue south on the remote gravel road for a hundred meters or so as the sky ahead appears to lighten. The road turns sharply left again…and suddenly, unexpectedly, there is open sky. I find myself at a rusty girder bridge, perhaps 15 meters long and maybe 5 meters wide, over the Sheyenne River. I stop for a moment and sit there on the quietly idling machine and take it all in. Given the style and the materials used, the bridge is clearly decades and decades old; maybe a WPA (Works Progress Administration) project from the 30s--perhaps even older than that. Maybe it was constructed at the same time as was the church--a hundred or more years ago. I ease out the clutch and move quietly out onto the bridge deck, feeling the ancient, gnarled and split 3 x 12s moving and creaking beneath me. I shut off my engine and am immediately rewarded by the symphony of tings and ticks and dings a BMW air-cooled motor makes when it is shut off in cool air. There are no other sounds save for the barely audible lapping sound of the north-flowing Sheyenne moving past the bridge pilings which I can see through the spaces between the deck boards. I dismount and walk the bike in a left-bearing half-circle so it will be correctly oriented for when I leave, and I deploy the sidestand. I walk over to the rail. The river is maybe ten meters down, plodding northward on its ponderous journey at three or four mph. The Sheyenne River in eastern North Dakota, is not one of your "Coors, clear flowing mountain streams." Like most rivers in this part of the state, it is a silty brown color; but at least the color derives from suspended solids and not from industrial pollution. Still, there is a certain beauty in any river or creek wandering peacefully alone through the woods, the color of the water notwithstanding. I can see in the mud banks near the water the tracks of many different animals from birds to raccoon to deer. Just off to my right I can see what is clearly a beaver, muskrat, or otter slide, going down the steep bank and ending in the water. As I lean on the rusted, dented angle-iron rail, I begin to study the bridge itself. I love girder bridges in general and this one is especially interesting. It is constructed mainly of angle-iron, held together with hot-hammered rivets and square-head bolts and nuts. I suppose those features would allow a bridge historian to narrow down its date of construction. It does no more for me than to confirm its obviously advanced age; indeed, it need do no more. I imagine its builders, decades ago, suspended over this very river in harnesses and bosun's slings driving and flattening those rivets–the very same rivets which I now touch with my fingers–and tightening those old square-head bolts. Touching the bridge connects me viscerally to the past in the pleasantest way. The folk singer, John McCutcheon, calls it "Water from Another Time." I look back at my beloved R-65, leaning over slightly, its side-stand braced against the uneven wood of the bridge deck. It looks particularly at home on this old bridge in this natural setting, as though it were intended by its design engineers to take me to places just like this. Maybe it was. The dark is slowly engulfing the land. It is darker here in these woods than it will be back out on the prairie, but it is still time to move on. Reluctantly, I reapply my ear plugs and helmet. The last thing I do before I fire the motor is to plug back into my heat. I have a feeling I will need it soon. I throw a leg over the saddle, take one final look around, and regretfully turn the key and hit the starter. I trail slowly off the bridge using only the idle of the motor for power. I hang a hard right then a hard left and I leave behind the trees attending the Sheyenne. As I get back to 18, I stop for a moment to memorize the setting. This is a place to which I will want to return–perhaps with my banjo–and I want to make sure I do not lose it. I judge from the remaining light that I will have enough time to turn southward once more until the next east-west blacktop road appears. At that point I will turn left and make for I-29 and the fast burn home. I turn left into Highway 18 south. The trees last for another couple of miles before I climb out of the shallow river valley and back up onto the plains. It feels good to once again be in the open country. Some of the fields are crowded with large, golden, round straw bales made from bailing wheat and oat stems, while others are crowded with large, light-green, round bales of alfalfa for winter cattle feed. I stop at the juncture of County Road 4 and turn on my jacket and gloves for the first time. I turn left on 4 toward Colfax. My attention is immediately drawn to a beautiful giant cottonwood tree in the middle of a field, dark green against the wheat stubble and the skyline. In woodier country, such a tree would probably go unnoticed against a background of other trees, but out here single trees draw one's attention like a beacon. On familiar rides, there are individual trees which have become like friends to me, so familiar have they become. I once asked a family farmer why farmers would leave a tree, which must be plowed around and which takes up valuable crop space, in the middle of a field. "Oh," he said, "I've heard a lot of reasons offered from 'It's a good place to pile rocks' to 'It helps break the wind.' But I think most of us leave the trees just because we like trees and don't want to cut down a healthy one." I sure liked that answer. I get to Colfax and continue-on through town for two more miles to the entrance ramp of I-29. I burn down the acceleration ramp at full throttle, taking each gear almost up to soft redline before I shift and begin my race with the night to see which of us will get to Fargo first. The sun is down now, but there is still light lingering in the western sky. The wispy clouds of earlier have gone from a soft, back-lit orange to blurred watercolor brush strokes of dark grey as I bear due north at 85mph. I turn my electrics up a little bit. In deep dusk, I come to 52nd Avenue, which sort of demarks the southern end of the FM metro. I drop my speed to 60. A couple of miles later, I pass 32nd Avenue which used to demark the southern end of the metro. Next up is the I-94/I-29 interchange known as "the tri-level." In another three miles, I exit right on 19th Avenue. As I pass Hector International Airport, I am rewarded with a jet passing a few dozen meters directly over my head on its final landing approach. Ten seconds later I see the puff of smoke as the tires spool up to speed on the runway. A couple of traffic lights and stop signs later I pull into my own yard. I have traveled 112 miles tonight. It has been an evening of peacemaking with myself; of releasing tensions, discovering new places, and wringing one more bit of pleasure out of my riding season. How was your evening?

This is such a common back-to-school English-class homework assignment it became a cliché. So here is my little pandemic-summer story. This past weekend I replaced the ignition sensor in my 1994 Honda XR650L and now it runs again. I’ve ridden this bike since new. Over the first three years I gradually converted it from dual-sport configuration to something set up for urban street riding, though after the conversion was done I also rode it to Los Angeles once (in 2001), camping out most of the way because I’d wanted to experience ‘traveling light’, which at the time was more uncommon than it is today. No saddlebags, just two size ‘M’ Ortlieb waterproof duffels strapped across the back: one with a tent and sleeping bag and the other with clothing, miscellaneous items and a basic food bag: Canned Tuna, canned beans for a campfire, etc. No stove or cooking pot. Vagabonding. The modifications included a lowered suspension at both ends, wide 17” wheels with stickier tires, a larger gas tank, a throttle lock and a bunch of other lesser personalizations. I’d stopped riding it four or five years ago when one day it mysteriously had no spark and I was too lazy and distracted to diagnose and fix this fault. It just sat over in the corner of the garage with the right handlebar end leaning against the wall. Waiting. I decided to bring it back to life last fall: Carb and brake rebuilds, an oil change, a bright modern LED headlight, and a new fuel petcock and battery. All done by an independent motorcycle repair shop. Over the winter I did a bunch of additional smaller, easier things myself: Cleaning its sticky turn signal switch and throttle, etc. That strange no-spark thing had disappeared as mysteriously as it had come. Everything was working well for a twenty-six-year-old bike. In the spring when I began to ride it again the no-spark thing came back. Fortunately, this time there was a pandemic handy, so I wasn’t distracted by other temptations and immediately put it up on a milk crate and started following the Honda shop manual’s “no-spark troubleshooting” instructions – a sequenced fault diagnosis plan: Bad spark plug, cap and wire? Nope. Bad CDI? Nope. Bad coil? No. Next on their list was the ignition trigger thing which is inconveniently located beneath the right-side engine cover where the clutch lives. It tested bad (via the external wiring to it) on a little VOM so I ordered a new one. Last Saturday morning my ultra-slow amateur-mechanic skills meant three hours for disassembling and carefully cleaning everything and then about the same amount of time on Sunday replacing the failed component and reassembling everything. It had been around ten years since the last time I’d done anything inside an engine. Tune-ups, tire changes, farkeling and general maintenance doesn’t count. After putting everything back together there were no extra parts left over and the bike started right up, so I was happy. This job had involved the mess of an oil pan beneath the engine and a long time spent tediously scraping away the old hardened gasket material, which came off in little flakes and scraps. As I worked around the sealing edge of the case with several scraping tools, I imagined a dental hygienist removing stubborn calculus from all of the little spaces between a non-flossing person’s teeth. This task seemed about that fiddly. Except one’s bi-annual tooth cleaning goes quickly – you’re done in less than half an hour. After electric cars and bikes eventually become common, those who grew up with electrics will find it difficult to believe people not only put up with, but actually enjoyed dealing with the dirty, messy and burdensome complexities of normal combustion engine repair and maintenance. It will seem to them like we suffered the crudest rinky-dink, unreliable, antediluvian, primitive engines to serve our necessary automobility needs. When you use any newer car or ride some of the recent luxe touring bikes now, the fundamental Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang nonsense is almost entirely camouflaged beneath multiple layers of NVH-eliminating (Noise Vibration Harshness) engineering -- but it’s all still there, all the filth, fire, drama and precision-managed explosions so many motorcyclists love. Including me, at least most of the time. Future riders will say you are “Doin' it old school” as they smile, admire and slightly condescendingly regard your surviving ICE (Internal Combustion Engine) machine. In summary, the pandemic has meant almost no longer-distance motorcycle traveling anywhere and lots of house, yard, domestic and garage projects, plus electric and regular bicycle transportation-pedaling for the majority of my riding. For the first time in thirty years I didn’t ‘go’ anywhere. I guess it’s nice to be more caught up on all the previously procrastinated projects, but it is even nicer to be moving along an empty road somewhere, listening to the wind and feeling the vibrations of riding. So please come soon, summer of 2021. How did you spend your summer this year? Took far longer than anticipated to get this old XR650L running right again: 2019, Sept 20, bike given to independent MC service technician for oil change, carb and brake rebuilds, no-spark issue, etc. 2019, Oct 17, 18, bike serviced and running again, rode to work two or three times before it got too cold for it to start reliably. (Not a good cold-starter below about 35ºf.) 2020, January-April did a bunch of fiddly ‘winter’ maintenance, turn signal and throttle clean and lube, etc. 2020, May-June rode bike to work two or three times before no spark problem occurs again. 2020, July, ordered replacement CDI, Coil, Trigger. 2020, Aug 29-30, tested and replaced all three items, but it was the trigger that was bad. 2020, Sept 3rd, finally started motorcycle (not bicycle) riding to work again. Fun.

By Guest Blogger Margie Siegal It's blazingly hot on the road. I pull into a rest stop, enter the ladies room, strip down to my sport bra and rinse my cotton T shirt out in the sink. The other women in the room either smile at me or are involved in their own pursuits. The T shirt goes back on over the sport bra and the Aerostich goes over the T shirt, with all the vents opened. One woman starts asking me how I stay cool on such a hot day with all the protective gear on. I explain that air goes through the vents and evaporates the water in the T-shirt producing a form of air conditioning. She comments, “I knew you were an OK person because you were so into safety.” Girls have pounded into them very early on that it is vitally important to look good, no matter what the occasion. When the girl grows up and decides to ride a motorcycle, this training can get in the way of picking appropriate gear. “Looking good” has very little to do with comfort or safety. Designers of women-specific motorcycle gear go through contortions trying to make bike wear both fashion forwards and appropriate for the rigors of motorcycle riding. Most of the time, the perceived requirement to have the gear be fashionable trumps waterproofness, appropriate padding, storage capacity and abrasion resistance. Then there is the Aerostich – which doesn't even try to be fashionable or trendy. The sheer utilitarian -ness of the garment bothers some people. You might even call it anti-fashion. Once I let go of the need to look good in the fashion of the moment, I found an Aerostich to be very useful in many different ways. I do a lot of traveling by myself and the Aerostich serves multiple roles. On the bike, it keeps me warm, dry, and protected from the wind. The reflective tape and bright colors help me be seen by distracted car drivers. Off the bike, it keeps me warm on cold nights. It also serves as an ambassador to non-riders. Suited up, I look like an alien- silver full face helmet, sunglasses, Aerostich, boots. I often play this up. “Take me to your leader.” Non-riders see the alien act as either as cute or amusing. I feel that both reactions are positive: the last thing I need is being seen as a threat. The locals tend to react badly to threats, and there are more of them than me. Like many women, I am concerned about personal safety. Unlike many women, I go out on the road anyway. However, I feel safer looking androgynous and somewhat nerdy in my Aerostich. Other non-riders – like the woman at the rest stop – see the Aerostich as a sign that I am into safety and therefore a person that she can relate to – maybe eccentric, but a human like herself. Many non-riders do not feel that a motorcyclist is someone “normal” people can relate to. To many of these folks, “motorcyclist” equals “Hells Angel.” This is not a good perception if you want to get along, even if only for an evening, in a small town. If you don't think that a significant minority of non-riders think this way, I respectfully disagree with you. A while back, I walked into a small town motel and asked for a room for the night. The clerk (female) asked several times if I was by myself. I thought this was odd, but I was tired and this was the only decent motel in several miles. About a half hour later, I was outside my room checking the oil level and lubing the chain when the clerk turned up, very apologetic. She had thought I was the advance guard for a thundering herd of greasy outlaws!

“Younger rider’s reactions to my suit (Roadcrafter Classic, R-3) are not entirely positive.” - Any number of experienced motorcycle journalists. That’s an understatement. I’ve thought a lot about why this is. First, youth-in-general looks very hard at the micro-granular details of everything but often has a more difficult time seeing the so-called bigger picture. Looking hard at each tree means one usually doesn’t or can’t see the forest so well. When it comes to rider’s gear this means having the ‘right’ kinds of gear and knowing this or that brand is fashionable or cool in-in-the-moment, and almost nothing else matters. I experienced exactly this youthful myopia when I was younger, just as most kids do to one degree or another. Fashion and fitting in matter a lot more to the young (and young-at-heart) than to anyone older. Personal note: When I was a kid, I remember desperately wanting a Schwinn bicycle, Jack Purcell tennis shoes and Gant button down shirts. Got the shoes but not the other two. Today’s younger riders are no different than past generations of young riders. Most hope to ride the exact ‘right’ bike, wear the exact ‘right’ gear and be among the exact ‘right’ peers. This socializing-stuff is as developmentally and neurologically hard-wired in most of us as are our physical features. Aerostich’s geeky one-piece coveralls, which enormously help make it easier, safer and more comfortable to ride a motorcycle more often, in more kinds of conditions and to and from more situations, doesn’t quite compute. For most young riders, this is not why or how they want to consume motorcycling. But after one has ridden for a longer while a few things become clearer: No matter what one rides or wears, street riding itself always makes you the oddball in traffic, and in almost every other situation. Riding can be a vastly better and more satisfying way to get from A-to-B than most people realize, if one doesn’t mind being that oddball-in-traffic. In other words, once one throws looking cool under a bus, one’s life actually gets a lot better in so many areas and ways. This includes riding more. Almost everything in our post-industrial-consumer-culture is sold to us on the basis of making us cooler -- From whiter teeth to better nutrition to you-name-it. The assumption is everyone wants to be a legend and live forever. When I was young, I did too, and to be honest a part of me still does. Bikes were more popular and much more mainstream-cooler back when I was in high school than they are today. My HS class had about six hundred kids and most school days there were maybe twenty-five bikes in the parking lot. All neatly lined up in a row. On a few really nice spring days there were three or four times that many. Back then my moto-interest was dirt bikes. I didn’t know much about riding, more specifically dirt bike riding, but after school and on weekends I’d find some trails to explore and a gravel pit to go practice in. This culminated ten years later in riding local AMA Enduros for a couple of years, but this level of commitment still wasn’t sufficient. I could not get enough riding only on weekends and practicing a night or two after work. During this part of my life I’d occasionally randomly encounter former HS classmates and they would sometimes ask: “Are you still riding those dirt bikes?” The implication being that at some point I would outgrow this phase. I half-believed it myself and unconsciously was waiting for this to happen but by around thirty I realized I was going to want to ride motorcycles for the rest of my life, as often as possible. Riding was simply too much fun. Even sitting at an intersection waiting for the light to turn green was better on a bike than it was in a car. At that point most of my pretenses about riding's coolness and what-to-wear went under the bus. All that mattered was that I could be riding instead of driving and soon afterward the Aerostich coverall was ‘born’. Improvisation being a mother of invention. All these years later now I’ve become sort of an amateur anthropologist-connoisseur of social ostracization. Not that I deliberately seek out being uncool, it’s just the embedded cost of riding all the time and G-d or the universe has a funny way of arranging things to work out like this. So, whenever someone in a grocery store or any destination stares, giggles or asks a really stupid question about what I’m wearing, or if I was riding a motorcycle (after all, it is raining…), all I usually do is silently grin. Inevitably those dumb remarks, stares and comments are later remembered as the best non-riding parts of my day. So if today’s young riders want to be young riders, I say let them. A few will continue riding long enough to realize that it’s riding itself which makes you cool, not the color and model of one’s bike or if you wear the latest helmet, or what jacket or kind of boots one has. In the big wide world, nobody in any of the cars surrounding you in traffic cares even the smallest fraction about any of that. Riding itself is what is cool. - Mr. Subjective, 2020 Blog Survey Results from 3/11/2020: Thanks to everyone who took the survey!

It has always been fashionable to possess and enjoy handmade things. In motorcycling this usually means waxed cotton or leather bags and old-school traditional rider’s gear. It’s all good. Most of our products are crafted by hand. Some are made in two equally authentic versions:  One using the absolute latest high-tech modern synthetic fabrics and components, and the other with old-school materials like waxed cotton. Each has a place, and each offers a unique mix of real +’s and –‘s. A few older motorcycle bums may remember watching the brilliant comedy performer and writer Bob Einstein playing a character he created called 'Super Dave Osborne'.  It was his razor-sharp parody of famous daredevils like Evil Knievel, and of obsessive gear nerds everywhere. Einstein was a Canadian and always got laughs talking about his specialized daredevil equipment which usually included “handmade moose hide mukluks”. That particular well-remembered joke repeated enough to become a core part of his act because everyone always laughed. Today (thirty years later) I own a pair of genuine, artisanal handmade moose hide mukluks, and my wife has them too. It turned out they actually are a lighter, simpler, warmer, easier-to-wear and more comfortable type of outdoor footwear in really cold and snowy situations. Which explains why they became fashionable where there’s lots of snow and cold. The small local Minnesota-based company which made ours has done well. Bob Einstein’s mukluk joke remains funny, though now I better-appreciate why simple handmade gear often works, wears, fits and feels better than more complicated similar items designed by people who don’t actually use an item much, and which for cost reasons are made using assembly line systems located far from where the products are being used. All of the world’s sewn clothing --  from mukluks, to high fashion and business wear, to cheap generic imported T shirts – is mostly handmade. Fabric cutting processes were robotized many years ago, including here at Aerostich, but even the best computerized sewing equipment currently available cannot manage to quickly and efficiently move a mix of soft materials through a sewing machine’s stitching systems as expertly as a talented human. Producing beautifully sewn compound curves and complex shapes when combining multiple fabrics remains an art requiring world-class skill, talent and concentration. There is a difference between mass produced fashion-branded garments made to be highly marketable, and Aerostich gear. Both are handmade, but one is produced on large standardized assembly lines in annually revised variations, while the other looks almost the same decade after decade, incorporating ongoing small detail improvements. One is available in six or eight easy-to-inventory sizes and the other is available in over sixty. When you have access to industrial sewing at a very low cost, it is tempting to focus on cramming as many features as possible into a given product until it ends up being complicated and expensive. Heavier, too because you continue adding more and more until it becomes almost a kind of costume like what ‘Super Dave’ always wore. For bamboozling inexperienced and insecure consumers, and for maximizing profit, that is just what you do. Over the long run usually whatever is simplest, lightest and most functional works best.  Examples include those amusing artisanal moose hide mukluks and the Aerostich armored coveralls. There is a wonderful brief scene making fun of overdone fashion clothing in the very old movie ‘Beverly Hills Cop’. Eddie Murphy plays a regular-guy Detroit cop named Axel Foley and he’s just arrived in LA to investigate the murder of his hometown friend. He’s walking down the sidewalk of a warm sunny west LA shopping street and passes a fashion-conscious couple walking the other direction wearing matching leather designer outfits. After he’s a few steps past them he doubles over in silent laughter. Fashions change.

Our first product was the ‘Roadcrafter’, an armored coverall which has been produced, updated and improved continuously for thirty-six years. We’ve never felt the need to restyle it. Depending on how much one rides, and if they sit behind a windshield or fairing, and where they mostly ride, a Roadcrafter can function well for many years. Still, they eventually wear out. Nowadays there are riders on their third or fourth one. Last week one long-time customer emailed to suggest he might have the oldest one still in regular use. I replied: I don’t know if you are the longest continuously wearing Aerostich gear wearer or not, but it’s an interesting question. Maybe this would make a nice online contest? There already is a similar contest at our Very Boring Rally. Held every five years, one of the most fun events is a contest for the most worn-out and disreputable looking Aerostich suit. There is no shortage of entrants. (The next VBR -- number five -- should happen sometime during the summer of 2023, and we hope you’ll come.) Roadcrafters have always been simply ‘Equipment for Riders’ – a more convenient way to protectively dress to ride a motorcycle. They also unexpectedly became the recipe template for literally all of the world’s modern textile rider’s gear. Armored textile coveralls are likely to remain unconventional for a long time ahead compared to the traditional choices of denim and leathers. A favorite story about this difference happened maybe twenty-five years ago just as Aerostich was starting to become known among touring and commuting riders. I’d ridden with a friend to the old road race event held for a few years through-the-streets of Steamboat Springs Colorado. (The second night it was cold enough to leave a little snow on my tent in the morning, but by noon everything had warmed up nicely.) At some point this fellow introduced me to four other riders he knew, but whom I’d never met. The six of us were standing on a sidewalk in front of a row of small-town shops and I was wearing a somewhat grubby several-year-old one-piece Roadcrafter. My friend said: “This is Andy Goldfine, the owner/founder of Aerostich.”  Without missing a beat one of the four looked directly at me and replied: “If you are the owner of Aerostich, how come your suit looks like crap?” All I could do was smile and say it was well broken-in and comfortable, and I liked it better that way. The Roadcrafter coverall was created to help make motorcycle commuting easier, safer and more comfortable. It’s simply a piece of equipment. Wearing one always has been a little ostracizing. Roadcrafter’s don’t label you as a ‘biker’, ‘adventure motorcyclist’, ‘hip experienced moto-person’ or anything. I’m as sensitive as anyone about this, but because I only want to be able to ride more easily, safely and comfortably, I don’t care. This just isn’t a big deal if one’s priority is to ride more. --- Mr. Subjective, 11-19 PS – Earlier today under dark cloudy skies I rode to a scheduled meeting at the aquarium here. It was pretty cold, maybe 34º. I walked in wearing a black R-3 Stealth suit and holding my gloves and helmet. Another person at the meeting, a bright friendly woman who’s worked with me there for many years, said: “Did you motorcycle in a snowmobile suit?” After thirty-six years, all I could do was smile. PPS – Here is a short essay on ‘The Joy of Wearing Out A Piece of Gear’ which was recently published online by Outside Magazine: https://www.outsideonline.com/2283481/joy-wearing-out-piece-gear. And here is another slightly longer and slightly more philosophic essay about ‘The Life Changing Magic of Making Do’ (about the same thing) from the Globe and Mail website: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-the-life-changing-magic-of-making-do

Is there a Perfect Combo for the TAT? DarienLight Jacket & AD1 Light Pant Review By Luke Boldman, Founder / President of Wild Road Early in fall 2017, my wife (she’s a keeper) suggested we both ride the TAT (Trans-America Trail) on our small displacement dual sports during August & September 2018, and, twist my arm, it was time to start wrenchin’ on bikes and planning our gear purchases!  As an ATGATT (All The Gear All The Time) kind of rider, picking out the right protective gear for our TAT trip was crucial, but it presented a Goldilocks syndrome of sorts due in large part to the varied climate, trail, and geographic conditions we’d face along the way.  Riding/commuting on ADV and sport bikes in Colorado where we live, I naturally had a sexy black ballistic adventure jacket (built by some great folks who also make snowmobile gear), various leather jackets both purchased and handed down to me over the years, and a couple ballistic mesh jackets from when I used to live and ride year round in Hades-like environs of AZ…but in my mind they were either too hot, too heavy, not protective enough, not breathable enough, too flimsy or too bulky for our “nimble” dual sport ride on overloaded 350s in search of TAT nirvana.  I just felt like I didn’t have that Goldilocks combo…. Enter Aerostich, which in my mind has always been the moto enthusiast’s benchmark for riding gear, yet I never had any of their big-ticket items. Bingo! Time to buy. I reached out to the Aerostich team for their input and sizing suggestions and soon found myself a proud new owner of the DarienLight Jacket and AD1 Light pants.  I purchased in lighter colors to keep the heat off, Tan for the jacket and Grey for the pants…and good thing too, the MS, AR, OK, NM, and southern CO portion of the TAT were brutal under the hot sun and excessive UV; Black colors from any brand would have killed me. I’m 5’8”, 155lbs and the sz 40 jacket and 32/Reg pants worked great out of the box, and as a side note, I did not take advantage of any of Aerostich’s custom sizing options. First thing noticed on the gear was the fabric weight and drape; by not utilizing heavy ballistic nylons, the “feel and wear” of the 200d HT Nylon that Aerostich uses was just right, not too heavy and not too light.  As a product designer by profession in the outdoor industry (think camping gear, backpacking gear, travel luggage, etc.), I use 200d high tenacity (HT) nylon all the time for lightweight yet durable backpacks, so I was quite familiar with its material properties, but I must say that Aerostich’s version seemed more robust and thought out for motorcycle applications, perhaps a higher thread count and the Gore-Tex laminate provided that extra oompf factor.  Bottom line, it felt every bit comparable in quality and perceived protection factor as any of my heavier weight Cordura and ballistic gear. Maybe not for track day or running from the law, but suitable for commuting, touring, and ADV travel. Also, I went in for the TF5 Armor upgrade for both jacket and pants and there were no issues there (“used” the armor many times on the trail), although I did opt for a Revit backpanel for a little bit more “implied” airflow and lower cost savings vs the TF5 backpanel (Sorry Mr. Goldfine, but the TAT can get expensive!). As expected, the new gear was stiff out of the box, but daily commuting seemed to make quick work of the break-in process of around 2-3 weeks. And what fun the commute was… despite riding for 25 years, I finally felt like part of the team in my new ‘Stich gear; like I knew something others didn’t.  For better or for worse, materialism, clique-ishness and a healthy interest in the supremely functional will do that to you, and that’s just what the Aerostich gear is: supremely functional, enjoyably cultish, and due to the made in USA quality, proudly materialistic.  This gear is built to last and I think something needs to be said about the timelessness of Aerostich gear, it just looks right on the bike which is a good thing because these are heirloom pieces, you’ll have them for a while. Trends come and go, Aerostich keeps on rolling. But back to the ‘Stich gear… Living in Colorado at 8k feet, even in the summer there’s really no need to worry about temperature control up in the mountains, unless of course that means avoiding the cold!  Some version of winter up here seems to last 7-8 months, so actually for cold weather riding, I’d say the DarienLight jacket is great provided you layer up…I have an old Kanetsu vest and TLTec Soft Shell and they both make for great combos with the Darien jacket.  Perhaps most importantly, it can be 25F during the twenty-mile morning commute and 75F+ in the afternoon, and the Darien has not failed me in those conditions, it’s very versatile for colder weather riding. But relative to TAT riding, I was more concerned about hot/humid conditions which is why I chose the Darien/AD1 combo to begin with…and let me tell you, nothing prepared me for what we encountered weather wise. We started in WV and rode thru the Appalachians for the first 10 days or so. Prior to the trip, my wife asked me what to pack and I scoffed at cold weather gear; we would be riding in the South during August…t-shirts and shorts underneath and our motorcycle gear on top would be fine.  Boy was I wrong….8 straight days of rain, 45F-55F in the Blue Ridge mountains, and then intense 95F+ heat and humidity out in the valleys and rice paddies of Mississippi. Being on 350s and not having a whole lot of room or horsepower to overload the bike, I did not pack a rain suit or bring along my TLTec/Kanetsu accessory wear.  Due to Aerostich’s superb Gore-Tex laminate application, rain was no issue for the jacket and pants and I never once got soaked inside, despite snorkel like conditions in the Smoky Mountains and plains of Tennessee. I was beyond pleased at my choice for not bringing along additional rain gear...more room for camp chairs and tequila (I guess I overloaded the bike after all).  I would, however, in the future bring along more long sleeve layer options for underneath, but that’s no fault of the DarienLight or AD1, just the fault of my own ignorance, arrogance and Charlie Brown lifestyle…always a perfect combo for long range motorcycle trips. Which leads me back to the Goldilocks decision in purchasing the AD1 Light pants and the DarienLight Jacket.  I was critical about comfort in 100F / 90%+ humidity in the deep south coupled with volatile, colder weather in the Rocky Mountains of which I’m all too familiar.  My early spring commutes up at 8k ft already proved that the Darien/AD1 combo would be great in the colder, more quickly changing weather we have here in CO, but I hadn’t any faith in a one suit-fits-all mentality for when it’s a 105F and high humidity at barely sea level altitudes in the Mississippi Delta or hellishly sunny in the deserts of Utah.  Aerostich proved me wrong. The genius of the lighter weight DarienLight jacket is the weather protection offered by the single layer Gore-Tex laminate which on its own already has some texture to keep air flowing at the microclimate level during hot weather, and, inversely, likely retains some heat at that microclimate level during colder temps. Couple that with its large volume zippered airflow vents and greatly adjustable wrist, sleeve and neck collars and the system made for a highly manageable experience. We were averaging 150-180 miles of semi-technical riding on a typical 10-12 hr day, so it’s not like we had the benefit of riding fast to cool us down.  In this case, wetted down t-shirts and water breaks were key and of course I was never shy to shed layers as soon as we stopped under the hot sun (think tube change in MS red dirt at high noon!). We rode like this for days and weeks through the eastern mountains, southern deltas, Ozark Mtns, and south-central plains (Oklahoma was no joke!) back to our home in the Rockies for a TAT re-supply before heading on to Oregon.  But as I mentioned the Charlie Brown lifestyle earlier, alas, we did not finish our TAT trip.  While we were away, we had two corroded water pipes burst in our home and flood three floors. Mr. Murphy has a way of changing one’s goals/plans, but we did complete 3900k miles of day-in and day-out riding, and I threw the Aerostich gear under any and all conditions a motorcyclist could hope or rather not wish for.  Considering that I rebuilt my engine, suspension, and added ridiculous farkles to my bike in preparation for the TAT trip, let’s just say that my Aerostich gear is about the only thing that didn’t fail while out on the long road. There’s a lot to be said about that. So, here’s my pro/con take-away on the DarienLight Jacket and AD1 Light pants for part 1 of our 2018 TAT trip: PROS: Versatile for all weather conditions provided you layer appropriately. I’ve now ridden the DL jacket/AD1 pant combo in temperatures ranging from 25F-105F in light snow, hail, rain, intense humidity, and drought-like, desert conditions. The only discomfort has been while off the bike in 90F+ temps, take the jacket off and be done with it, no worries there. Gear is lighter weight compared to other ADV/Touring options I’ve used or seen and I didn’t feel bogged down like an armored knight. Aerostich’s sizing options feel spot on. As a smaller guy, this was a huge plus as most ADV gear seems built for 6’5” Teutonic overlords and most sport touring gear seems to be built for elf-like Moto GP racers.  I’m somewhere lower in the middle and Aerostich gets it. Tough and abrasion resistant (several 15-25mph get-offs and tank slappers on wet rocks seemed to do nothing to the gear). Great airflow within the jacket, while also allowing for great wind-blocking in colder temps…almost magic. Superb water resistance and body coverage.  You can leave the rain gear at home. Pockets galore (I’m still finding trinkets in my jacket 6 months later).  Pockets on AD1 Pants are best I’ve ever used. Great movement and articulation on both jacket and pants even with robust armor inside. Felt protected, but not hindered unlike my heavier weight Michelin man ballistic gear. Having lighter colors available in Aerostich’s line-up is a huge plus.  Making the choice to avoid the power ranger look in all black was a great decision under the sweltering summer sun. Oddly enough, the Aerostich gear is comparable in price to other high-end options manufactured overseas.  As a product designer whose made his living manufacturing/sourcing gear offshore (and always a bit sick of that fact), I applaud Aerostich’s ability to get this done in the USA, as I know from experience, it’s no easy feat.  Direct to consumer is key here and you’re getting what you pay for. CONS: Gore-Tex laminate started to peel away and abrade inside the AD1 pants around my ankles due to the ratchet clips of my ADV boots constantly moving against it.  I’d suggest double layering the “boot” section of the pants and face a second layer of 200d HT Nylon towards the rider’s boot. I caught it early and used Gear-Aid tape to reinforce the area, so no real harm done, but would have preferred to have avoided that issue altogether. The magnets on the DarienLight jacket collar kept falling out of their sleeve pockets despite the velcro closure.  Luckily, they’re strong as heck, so they just ended up reattaching to their magnetic mate and I didn’t lose any. I think they’re so strong that when they attach to their mate they end up pulling out of their velcro’ed sleeve when you adjust the collar while riding...something you don’t notice until after the ride. Pockets galore (I’m still finding trinkets in my jacket 6 months later).  Maybe there are a few too many pockets, nooks and crannies on the DarienLight jacket.  The catch is, if you give me places to store stuff, I’ll use it, but maybe I shouldn’t be carrying so much! Thanks, Luke, for sharing your review of our gear with us! What's your "goldilocks" combination of gear?

If it can happen, it will (usually)... 1. The farther it is to the next gas stop, the larger the bug that will hit your shield exactly on the sight line. These may help... Cycle Wipes Effective, specially formulated wet wipes for cleaning bugs and grime from visors, shields and bikes. Convenient 12-count re-sealable travel pack stores easily in a pocket or tank bag. The ultra soft, lint-free mesh fabric pre-moistened towelettes are a durable, safe and ammonia free way to wipe helmets, visors and windscreens. They are also perfect for cleaning up your bug blasted headlights and turn signals. Pack of 12 wipes. 2. When you dry out after riding through some rain, it will start raining again just when you begin to feel comfortable. These may help... Aerostich Always-Ready Boot Raincovers Practical and lightweight, these ripstop nylon raincovers self-store in a small, flat pocket that secures via hook and loop to the inside shin area of the R-3, R-3 Light, Classic Roadcrafter, AD1 and Darien Suits and pants. The integrated storage makes them super easy to put on and ensures they are always ready when you need them. 7"×6.5" . M (7–9), L (10–12), XL (13–14). 3. The chance that your bike insurer will find out about that big ticket received in a non-reciprocal state is about 100%. This may help... Radar Detector Remote Visual Alert You’ll never miss this bright 3-LED flash when a signal is detected. Adjustable brightness for day or night conditions. Plugs in to 3.5mm headphone jack on most brands of detectors. Water resistant and compact design can be mounted to any convenient visible location with included straps. 1.25"×.6", 8’ cord. 4. If you run out of gas, no matter which way you decide to push, the closest gas station will always be uphill and in the other direction. Corollary: The likelihood of running out increases when all of the nearby gas stations are closed. This may help... E-Fill Siphon A self-priming fuel transfer system. No matter where you are, this ultra compact system won’t leave you stranded for long. Throw away that length of gnarly old hose and safely siphon fuel from any gas-powered device without getting a mouthful of gas. 5. The chance of your helmet dropping hard onto the rough concrete or asphalt surface is proportional to its newness and expense. This may help... Helmet/Jacket Lockstrap Great for strapping helmet, jacket and other gear to your bike and ensuring it stays there. Locking carabiner means no keys to worry about. Full length steel braided cable runs through strap for added security. 2' long. Sold individually. 6. You only realize the bike's keys are in your pants pocket after you've put on all of your riding gear. It's a good thing Aerostich suits have... Flap covered hip-side zippers Access your keys, wallet, chapstick, etc, through one of the hip-side zippers integrated into all our main riding gear. 7. The more riders around, the more likely you will: Forget the kill switch is in the off position while trying to start your bike; Ride off with the sidestand down; Ride off with the petcock closed; Ride along for miles with the turn signal on; Get stung by a bee and do a roadside crazy dance shedding your riding gear. These may help... BeeSting Ampules After doing said crazy dance, apply one of these disposable swabs. They contain enough Benzocaine to immediately relieve the searing pain so you can ride onward enjoying the rest of the day. 8. Your battery will die at the exact same time something else on the bike breaks and you will think they are related. This may help... Compact Digital Voltmeter Know the health of your bikes charging system in real-time with this compact, waterproof, digital voltmeter. Reads tenths of a volt (12.6, 12.7, 12.8, etc) and is easy to install. Compact, easy to read, waterproof, vibration proof and dust proof. 9. Your first successful multi-gear wheelie will be past a heretofore unobserved police officer who dislikes motorcycles. See #3 above... 10. A bad day of riding is better than a good day at work. This may help... You Are Traffic T-Shirt If you are not moving, get a motorcycle and break free. Make your commute better. Make your day better. Make your world better. Make a statement and ride there. Rain. Shine. Hot. Cold. It's all better. Made in USA. 100% Cotton. M-XXL. White. Share your "Murphy's Laws" moments or stories in the comments below!

The last six or seven weeks have been unusually cold across most of the Midwest, and much of the rest of the USA too. It's been about six or seven degrees below seasonal norms here in Duluth, MN. Which doesn’t sound like that much but when it comes to winter riding the difference between thirty-five and twenty-three degrees is huge. Same for +17ºF and -2ºF. What works best for winter dressing depends on the specific riding application. For all-day low temp exposures have as much electric added-in heat as possible: Heated grips, saddle, jacket liner, etc. There is no substitute for adding heat for long rides in cold conditions. (Though I have seen old men on Gold Wings happily ride all day in freezing weather wearing huge puffy arctic-looking goose down parkas and sitting behind some of the most oversized accessory windshields imaginable, without using any electrical heat supplement. YMMV.) For commuting, everything depends on distance and speed. With a short commute (three to five miles) on surface streets, one can get by with very little, using the ‘thermos bottle effect'. A nice sweater and good gloves, bundle up completely before leaving a warm building to trap heat inside your layers and that’s it. To ride farther, and at highway speeds, requires some additional strategy to stay warm and comfortable, including several layers and some electrically heated gear. Starting with a combination of Merino wool, bamboo or synthetic base and mid-layers is the foundation for keeping you insulated and comfortable. Several Aerostich associates who ride regularly in cold weather plug-in the added warmth of Kanetsu electric gear. A WarmBib is the favorite, because it does such an amazing job of heating your core, in such a small and easy-to-wear package. It takes up almost no space inside your suit or jacket (in case you, um, may not have as much room for layering as you once did…). The WarmBib does a great job of blocking the wind too, and it stashes easily in a tank bag or cargo pocket so you can always carry it with you. Keeping out drafts is an essential part of staying warm in cold temps. There are many options available, from an original Cotton Bandana to a Breathguard mask, or Shellaclava Neckwarmer to an Aerostich Fleece Windtriangle. One of our favorites is an Aerostich Silk Scarf. Worn underneath your suit or jacket it wraps around your neck for comfortable softness and effectively seals out any cold air from leaking inside, especially with your jacket collar snugged up tight and the top of the scarf tucked in-place underneath the chin-strap of your helmet. Still looking for even more ways to add or retain heat? If you want to push your riding boundaries deep into freezing territory then consider adding heated grips or even a heated seat. Several versions of battery powered gloves are also available, giving you an hour or more of added heat and comfort with just the press of a button. We've also found that Triple Digit Glove Covers work great to not only keep your hands dry when riding in the rain, but they are a great wind blocking layer and help retain heat in your hands. Check out the selection of products below to extend your riding all winter. For additional cold weather tips, gear advice and stories, ask for a copy of Zero Below Zero, our account of the first all-winter Duluth electric motorcycle commute, and see how we did it.

Guest post by Kyle Allen Motorcycles ridden for everyday transportation was a normal part of my life growing up in the 70’s and 80’s. With high gas prices playing a factor, I have fond memories of both of my parents riding. Dad had a 500 Yamaha with an aftermarket fairing that he’d ride rain or shine to work everyday, and on weekends would let me swing a leg over the passenger seat for a scenic afternoon cruise on the backroads. Mom rode a Honda 125 that was formerly used by the Shriner’s to put on riding agility displays at local parades. She would use it to ride back and forth to her part-time job while us kids were in school, or to pick up a few groceries or run some errands. As a kid, I viewed riding a motorcycle as just a normal part of everyday life. By the time I was old enough to drive, my parents had sold both bikes (I suppose the logistics of shuttling 3 kids around played a part in that decision, but my Mom also said she felt like drivers were not paying attention to riders), and I ended up learning to drive on 4-wheels, but always with a thought about wanting to ride a motorcycle...someday. Someday came when I started working as part of the marketing team here at Aerostich. After some training and practice, I got my motorcycle endorsement in the Spring of 2009. Donning a new Hi-Viz Roadcrafter Classic one piece, I threw my leg over a borrowed 1971 Honda CB350 and never looked back as I established my roots as a dedicated daily rider. In the early Spring of 2010, I was offered a great deal on a lightly used, ’08 Kawasaki Versys, (that fit into the ‘bike budget’ I had been saving for) and logged the first ride of the season on March 11th, continuing to commute nearly every day that year through the end of November. Out of about 165 workdays during that timeframe, commuting on the new bike accounted for 145 of those days (with a few longer day trips and vacation riding days mixed in too). A quick run of the math proved that after the investment in the bike and riding gear, I was saving a fairly significant (to me anyway) amount of money by choosing to ride over driving a car too! With my Aerostich gear and a determined mind-set, 2012 allowed me to ride (at least a few days) every month this year – not always easily, but enjoyable every time – from below zero Duluth, MN temps in January and February to sweltering heat and humidity in July and August. Riding (anywhere), for me, is always the most versatile, practical and economical (not to mention fun), way to get from point A to B. Gas prices were jacked-up most of that year too, creating an even bigger savings. Flash forward another 5 years and I’m still riding the same Kawasaki (have changed the oil annually and put 2 sets of new tires and brake pads on it over the years) and wearing the same (road grimed) Hi-Viz one piece Roadcrafter Classic. The bike and gear have gotten very comfortable after over 7 years of use, not to mention that every mile and every day that I ride further adds to the long-term value of the investment in the motorcycle and riding gear. Every ride continues to save money over driving the car too. Looking at just the gas savings over the last several years, the economic benefits of riding become pretty easily apparent. The fact that riding gets me from A to B more efficiently, allows easier and more readily available parking options and is better on the environment is nice too. But the personal benefits from riding are where the real reward is. Anytime I ride somewhere, I arrive more alert, aware and ready to take on tasks at hand. If you choose to ride more I’m pretty sure that you would find similar results. Save money, feel energized and healthy and have way more fun! Download this post as PDF

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. 1. Flashlights/headlamps. 2. Cutting, pliering and screwing tools. 3. Scarves, bandana’s and rain glove covers. 4. Maps and guides. 5. Cameras, radios and electronic items. 6. Spare bike-specific small parts. 7. First Aid items. 8. Snack foods. All seems pretty simple, but details matter a lot when you are far from home. Here is one example of a tank bag setup for use on a 2007 BMW R1200 R… Row one, left to right, across the top. The bag itself is an old California-made Rev-Pac, made by a guy named Jim Revely, a firefighter who retired decades ago to make motorcycle luggage and run a motorcycle resort in a friendly small California town called New Cayuma. It’s somewhere in the middle of practically nowhere, and the resort, called the Song Dog Ranch is still there but is no longer operating as a motorcycle resort. Maybe he still makes bags https://www.facebook.com/motomobile/? This one is the Tank-Pack Jr, the smaller of the two available sizes. I just like how it fits me and my bike. Not too large or too small, and like the temperature of the porridge in ‘The Three Bears’ children’s story this bag is just right for me in size, shape and configuration. I’m on my third one. But I digress… The front of this bag has a full-width external pocket just large enough for a pair of sunglasses if the case isn’t too thick, so that’s where my Rx sunglasses ride. The entire map window lifts up from the rear revealing a central zipper from the back up to the front of this bag. When this map case is Velcroed down at the rear there’s just enough room for a lightweight Aerostich ball-style cap (#658), which goes onto my bald head the moment my helmet comes off. At the base where the bottom meets the sides, about in the middle front-to-back, and on both sides I’ve added two little webbing loops from which I attach a lightweight bungee (#944-943) that goes over the top of the map window. This helps hold the map window down over the cap and gives me a place to put my riding gloves at gas stops. On the right side of the top sunglasses’ pocket clips a little waterproof flashlight on-a-leash (#887) for those after dark riding situations when I’m able to unclip it to read a map or check anywhere on the bike…while rolling. Or not. On the other end of this pocket an old-fashioned wax-lead grease pencil (#2340) that I’m able to un-holster while rolling and which is used to write temporary ‘memory jog’ messages or the license numbers of rude cars directly onto the map case window. Later the wax just rubs away with a windshield cleaning paper towel from a gas station. On the left side of the bag is a RAM mount ball (#6284), about two thirds of the way up the side. On the inside of the bag is an “L” shaped aluminum strap from a hardware store which stabilizes the ball nicely whenever the bag is pretty full, which it normally is. The RAM ‘dog bone’ clamp (#6228) is the shortest one available and on top is another RAM ball which is attached to a little clear plastic platform about the size of a playing card. On top is usually either a battery powered AM-FM radio (#3916), an iPhone or a battery-powered radar detector. Next is a small umbrella. Living and traveling on a bike is a guarantee that you’ll be spending time either standing around a wet campfire or walking somewhere (or with someone) in the rain. Carrying an umbrella also reduces the likelihood of encountering rain by at least 82%. Guaranteed. Try it. Below the umbrella is a lightweight cable lock (#1011) and a piece of webbing that can be clipped to two of the tank bag’s mounting clips to allow you to carry it over one shoulder like a messenger bag. The lightweight lock is rarely used…to secure a jacket, helmet or riding suit from growing a pair of legs and then walking away from some seedy location. I can’t remember the last time I used it. Normally all the gear and helmet come with me if the location is even slightly questionable, or out of sight. The tank bags rain cover is next to the umbrella and gets used lots. Even if it’s only slightly threatening rain it’s nice to be ‘ready’ and not have to stop. With smartphone animated weather-radar apps this kind of forecasting is simple. Triple Digit raincovers (#442) go into my Darien Jacket’s side-entry pockets to be similarly ‘ready’ if rain is anticipated. If the road is straight and smooth and there’s not much traffic I can take them off and put them on without stopping, but it’s nothing I’d recommend, because it involves a very wide empty road and a lot of room to wobble back and forth between the lines attempting to steer with knees only. Google ‘counter steering’ and you’ll find dozens of explanations why this is tough. Takes more than a mile but I’ve never actually paid attention enough to really know. It’s always too long and too risky and a relief when the switch is done. The little titanium flask (#4445) holds scotch. Nothing as fancy as the container. Just enough to get drunk once, or mildly high twice. Or to share around a campfire with friends. Or to drink as you are lying near death on the side of some lonely road somewhere beyond the middle of nowhere and its pitch dark after a terrible crash when you’ve just killed some stupidly innocent deer. When I was younger this was a plastic flask (#2014-2015) which held a little more and cost a lot less. Who says you get smarter when you are older? The navy blue zippered pouch is a self-storing ultra-ultra–light hooded rain parka that adds a windproof under suit layer on a cold day and is also good for walkabouts on cool or wet evenings and mornings. The silk scarf (#1549) is great on super hot days when wetted and on cold ones when dry. Provides slippery neck comfort in any conditions, so you don’t need to close your collar quite as strangulatingly close around your neck. Which is nice. The playing cards are like the scotch in the flask. For whenever one might be stuck somewhere waiting for something to happen. Like a tent when it’s raining or under a picnic shelter. As long as there’s someone around to share your misery of not riding, cards work as time-passers. Row two, left to right, begins with the little bungee cord that goes across the top of the tank bag’s map window and the earplug speakers (#3134) that are usually looped around the bungee when they’re not in my ears. Just below is a short coily cord (#2313-2353) which connects to either the radar detector or the iPhone or the radio. A short canister of bear spray (#3563) in a little Aerostich envelope bag (#738) for safety at night in a little tent, from both quadrapedal and bipedal intruders. Never had to use it. Just being superstitious and thinking about Murphy’s Law. Needs to be replaced every year for fullest potency. The little stainless folding poo trowel (#1584) is more than for superstition and means you can stealth camp and hide your and poo just about anywhere you want. Which is nice. There’s enough TP at least one poo, and when more is needed it’s available at the next gas stop. Which hopefully has clean rest rooms so you don’t need the trowel-squat experience in the first place. But if and when you do, there’s no substitute for carrying one of these. First aid kit (#1767) Do I really need to explain? This is another ‘Murphy’s Law’ item. If you carry it, you’ll never need to use it. Next to this the little bottle contains some aspirin, Ibuprofen, Acetaminophen, etc. Various over the counter pills which can be identified visually. Having a headache when you want to do some riding really sucks. And if you want the fastest headache relief possible teach yourself to grind up a straight aspirin tablet with your molars. Chew it to dust. That’s what ‘headache powders’ were in the 1800’s, before tablets were invented. This brings relief much faster if you can stand the momentary mouth bitterness. A swig of water helps wash it down but isn’t absolutely needed once you are used to doing it. Your salivation will be triggered which quickly takes care of this. Some riders take an over-the-counter joint and muscle pain med pre-emptively and swear this helps reduce discomfort and fatigue during long hard ride days. Definitely makes a difference you'll feel. Miscellaneous items within a zippered Chase Harper ‘junk’ pouch (#979): High end Japanese-made lighter/mini-blowtorch (#2509), Mini USB power adapter, 12 v to 5v (#3158), Spare key for 3' motorcycle lock (#1153), Mini liquid filled compass on Velcro strap, Space Pen (#2315), Pencil tire gauge (#3550), spare throttle lock (#1774) in case installed version (#1893) fails, Neutrogena rub on SPF 30 Sunscreen (#2084-2085), pocket change and currency, Mini Carabiner (#4024) Bottom Row, left to right. Aerostich microfiber hat (#658) carried under map window for fast deployment. Small blue Aerostich envelope bag (#738) With spare ear plugs (#1274) and face shield cleaning kit (#1051) Small purple Aerostich envelope bag with spare 12v power cord, spare audio cords, smaller Aerostich envelope bag with spare earplug speakers. Medium size Aerostich envelope bag with AM/FM/Weather radio (#3916) and related cords and connectors. Near the back opening of the tank bag, loose items include a spare tail light or turn signal bulb (#4896) in an old 35mm film canister, a Spyderco folding knife, a Petzl headlamp and a pepper spray self-defense tool (#4623) which is supposed to be transferred from the tank bag to an easy-to-reach place on my riding suit, but I always forget to do this. A green Aerostich envelope bag carries a mini-multimeter (#2939) and a small blue Aerostich envelope bag (#738) carries some spare batteries. Last but-not-least, a yellow zippered Chase Harper bag contains a few jerry-rig repair items that don’t fit anywhere else. A spare CBT boot strap -- I think this is the very last one. I needed one once about ten years ago and have not needed another one since. Murphy’s Law again? Since these are no longer available, we make a strap repair kit (#418) and if I didn’t have this strap, I’d carry one of these. Also in this pouch are a mini roll of duct tape (#756), a short piece of insulated wire, some straps cut out of a motorcycle inner tube, a spare adjustable bungee hook, a spare side release buckle, a stick from a hot melt glue gun that is useful with the mini-torch listed above, a GI can opener (#2068) and simpler model Leatherman multi tool (#3671) and a mini Aerostich bag (#720) with a few bike fuses, I think. That about covers it. The total of the items purchased from Aerostich comes to around $1000 which is what can happen if one gets carried away. On the other hand, most of this stuff was purchased incrementally over a dozen year period. I’ve made three different pre-set up tank bags similarly and this one is for the bike I currently ride on trips. The others are less elaborate. Do you really want to know? One is for an old Airhead I rode for twenty years and the other is for a little 620 Ducati I kept remotely for winter season riding in the Southwest mostly. What’s in your Tank bag? – Mr. Subjective, 6-17 PS - Our company motto in latin translated as ‘better late than never’ could not feel more true. Which is how I feel about this video. I know part of it is that I’ve personally grown emotionally and psychologically in the past several years and this stuff is less important to me now than it was ten years ago. I loved figuring out all the little logistics stuff to the point of being obsessive. Nowadays it feels old (and so am I) and it doesn’t seem as important anymore. But I’m glad we captured the obsessiveness of it all before entropy takes over and these details fade away a little more. I’ll always be OCDish about lots of different stuff, but can’t quite imagine going back and doing this all over again from scratch another time. The two tank bags featured in these two videos, and the smaller one for the bike I once kept in Arizona, are the most recently built tank bags, but before these three were several others starting back in the early 1980’s. The first one was a huge multi-level Chase Harper bag, modified to be even larger with a custom-made map-case ‘office’ attached to the top. It was so big it was practically a fairing. Each successive bag got a little smaller and the contents became more focused. From the beginning one thing all of these bags had and have in common was some way of mounting an audio source or radar detector (or both) to the top left side where it could be easily operated while moving with my left hand. The first item there was a Sony ‘Outback’ ruggedized AM FM Cassette player, and I usually carried half a dozen or more cassettes on most trips. The first attached is a photo of this setup from about 1986 showing a radar detector just below an AM-FM reciever. Also attached is a still from the setup I used for about fifteen years beginning in the early-90’s, which featured several items mounted to a Lexan platform that had some aluminum struts beneath that fit into slots on both sides of the bag, and lastly a couple of screen grabs from the video of the RAM mount that is on my current tank bag.

These photos are of some of the 105 competitors getting ready for the start of this 11,000 mile event. This event takes place every other year. Not sure we will be back to capture images of the riders returning from this challenging ride, but hope you enjoy these photos of some of the riders getting ready to depart! Follow the progress of the riders by going to http://ibr.wvi.com/ To view a selection of gear to make your long distance riding more comfortable, check out our Endurance Rider Guide.

Rand Rassumusen, SEDALIA: A Primer Focused Mostly, but not Exclusively, on Riding and Camping in the Heat One-Hundred-and-ten degrees. Fahrenheit! That’s what the thermometer affixed to my windshield says. Of course, that’s in the direct sunlight; but then, so am I. I mean, really, why would a motorcycle rider care what the temperature is in the shade? Late on this Missouri July afternoon the heat bears down on me with an almost physical weight. Even so, I can still tell when a blast of air has first made its way past a cylinder, and collected it’s extra heat before swooping up my leg and under my helmet carrying an extra furnace blast. I haven’t ridden in this kind of heat for a while—if ever. But it’s okay; I came prepared for exactly this. I had made my decision that I was going to attend the BMW MOA National this year, in Sedalia, MO heat be damned and, anyway, I know how to ride in heat. TIPS for Beating the Heat: Andy Goldfine, proprietor at Aerostich, is fond of saying that, when riding in heat (or cold for that matter) a rider must strive to create a “micro-climate.” That is, a smaller, more hospitable personal ecology in which to ride. People who live in desert nations have understood this for millennia, and it is the reason that we always see desert-dwellers in heavy clothing—which seems counter-intuitive, but is backed-up by much objective science and many years of experience. So, I revert to my own experience riding in heat. I drink lots—actually forcing water, juice and Gatorade; I re-wet my long-sleeved cotton T-shirt at every stop, and I wear a jacket to control the evaporation of my shirt. Controlled evaporation is the key to staying cooler longer. If you wet your t-shirt and wear nothing over it, it will feel really good…for about 10 minutes. But if you mute the evaporative effect with an over-jacket, and venting, you will feel quite-a-bit cooler for an hour or more. That is one of the reasons Aerostich suits are built the way they are, with so many venting options. I have also resorted, at times, to filling the pockets of my Aerostich with ice (a tip learned from my wife, Susan) and sucking on the remaining cubes for as long as they last. But, despite the forge-like heat, I seem to be okay with more basic measures today. As important as the physical adjustments a rider must make when the riding conditions are uncomfortable, is a positive mental attitude. Pirsig was right when he contended that focusing on the discomfort, or worse, complaining, helps no one, and just makes it worse for everyone. I knew what I was getting into before I ever decided to attend this rally, and I chose to come anyway; so I have no one to blame but myself. Anyway, I am very much enjoying the ride—heat and all. My bike seems always to have a positive attitude, no matter the conditions. Right now, for instance. I am running up-hill at 75MPH, pulling my trailer in 110 degree heat, with nary a burp or stutter from the motor, and with speed and power to spare. It makes me wonder how this little 650cc motor can withstand this kind of heat and use. And not just to withstand it, but to handle it. I take a gas break/rest stop at the north end of St. Joseph, MO, and go through my routine: fill the tank, use the rest room, re-soak my shirt and buy lots to drink. If not almost to the rally site, I am at least close. It has been a good ride so far… Tip #2 for Beating the Heat: What you eat significantly affects how much heat you produce. If it is hot, avoid high fat foods like meats and cheeses and go for foods with higher water content, like fruits and salads. I have to admit that I violate this rule all of the time and just order whatever I am in the mood for, but it’s worth bearing in mind if heat is a real problem for you. Also, as good as a cold beer might taste with your lunch on a hot day, it’s not really a good choice. Even setting aside the drinking and driving aspect, alcohol is a diuretic and dries you out more quickly. Tea too (although, again, I often have it for lunch despite my own sage advice.). If you get bored with plain water, fruit juices or club soda gives you a little variety and still gives you needed water. Club soda cuts cotton-mouth better than anything else I know of. I like Gatorade and its ilk occasionally, but the regular stuff has a lot of sugar. At St. Joseph, MO I turn eastward toward Chillicothe. This allows me to circumvent the entire Kansas City metro, and do some other-than-freeway riding for a while. Heading east in the late afternoon, feels no cooler, so I employ another mental technique for beating discomfort; I simply force my mind to concentrate on things other than how uncomfortably hot I am. It can be done. I sing, compose, or think of my grandchildren or other pleasantries to distract myself. Thirty-six, while not exactly a rural road, is nice and rolling, and passes through several small Missouri towns. At Chillicothe I stop for fresh ice for the cooler, several gallon jugs of water, and some groceries. Another reason I like to tow my trailer to rallies: lots of room for groceries. Tip #3 for Beating the Heat: In the original insulated plastic cooler I had bolted onto the tongue of my trailer, the ice would be gone in just a few hours in hot weather. So, I replaced my original cooler with a larger insulated plastic cooler so I would have room to add an inner, collapsible nylon cooler. With the nylon cooler inside of the larger one, my ice now lasts from 12-24 hours depending on how hot it is. You can also increase your cold factor by freezing all your bottles of drinking water on the night before you leave home. If you save empties you can fill them at your home faucet and save a lot of money. Trust me: if you take one out and put it in your bottle holder it will quickly melt enough to drink—too quickly, as far as I am concerned. Arriving a day early to a rally has several advantages. The registration process is a breeze, with no lines whatever. Choice camping sites are also easier to come by. After registering, I talk to Dan about where he is camped. I follow him, but just until I come to a large, shady tree. By scoping out the directions, I calculate that a correctly placed tent will be out of the sun from mid-morning through the entire rest of the day. For the next 20 minutes I talk with Dan and busy myself with the dozens of small details of making camp. Here again, experience pays off when dealing with heat: my tent has 100% mesh uppers. And that means with the rain fly rolled up and tied off I am sleeping in a screen tent which, I guaran-damn-tee is a lot cooler than a regular tent with breathable nylon uppers.. Tip #4 for Beating the Heat: If you are in the market for a new tent, I would strongly suggest buying one with mesh uppers. If you are devoted to your old tent, but are good with a sewing machine, or if you know someone who is, some tents can be fairly easily converted to mesh uppers, without in any way compromising their weather resistance. After my complaints about the heat and humidity at last year’s rally at Chippewa Falls, Susan bought me a small “tent fan.” These attach to the tent using a magnet on the outside to hold the fan on the inside. Tonight is my first use of the fan. What a small miracle! This is not a wind tunnel; but it does provide just enough moving air to keep me comfortable. Its performance is greatly improved by the fact that because of the mesh uppers it is pulling in cooler air in rather than just re-circulating the hot, humid air present inside a normal tent. We’ll see how long the single “D” battery lasts. I brought spare batteries just in case. Sometime about two in the morning I awaken to thunder, and I can see flashes of lightening in the western sky, but I decide that I am not deploying the rain fly unless it starts actually raining, as to do so would obviate the advantages of this tent. I thus go back to sleep and remain so until morning. When I wake up, the fan is still running. Although I never had to cover up during the night, I was comfortable enough to sleep. That alone was an improvement on last year. Tip #5 for Beating the Heat: If you attach your rain fly on one side, and roll it up, you can sleep cooler, and it still only takes a minute to deploy if rain threatens. Tip #6 for Beating the Heat: As obvious as it sounds, the colder the drink and the less you move, the cooler you will stay. Therefore, when I get back to my tent I set-up my sunshade. I take my umbrella and mount it to my fairing with mini bunjis. This gives me 4’ of nice shade in which to sit. And as Colin Fletcher (in his book The Complete Walker) describes it, that little patch of shade makes the difference between hell and, well, something a comfortable half-hitch short of hell. Then I break out cans of cold club soda and start reading my books. Tip #7 for Beating the Heat: If, like me, you enjoy (or at least can hack) getting up in the pre-dawn hours, you can sometimes beat much of the day’s heat. If the trip is short enough, you can be home and napping before the real heat starts coming on at noon. I know some riders who break the day into to riding halves, with a long afternoon hiatus in between. Just before crossing the Mojave, my friends Matt and Joanne Butler rented a hotel room at noon, and napped, read, watched TV, and swam until 10:00p.m. before checking out and starting their ride. Matt told me it was worth the money! I awaken Sunday morning at 2:15. It takes about 20 minutes to pack all of my junk into the trailer. As promised I would make sure Andy knew when I was leaving, so I drive as close to his tent as I can without actually running over his head. I smile into my helmet as I think of him good-naturedly cursing me in his tent. As I connect with north 65 I am surprised at the amount of traffic still on the road in Sedalia, including another rally-goer leaving north on 65. About five miles out of town I pass him/her, and we ride in tandem the 15 miles up to I-70, where she/he goes east and I go west. It feels good cruising along in the pre-dawn hours. Watching the day come on is one of my favorite things to do as a rider. The air, while not exactly cool, is some 30 degrees better than it will be this afternoon, and I am determined to get as far as I can, as early as I can. This is as much psychological as it is physical; if I don’t make some real miles early in the day, I feel like I am behind all day. I take the 435 around KC and connect with I-29 N., with dawn coming on. By 11:30, when I reach Sioux Falls, my thermometer shows 101 degrees, and it feels like it! I buy gas and then drop into an Erberts & Gerberts for a cold sandwich and an air-conditioned rest. As I eat and read, I am also subconsciously preparing for four more hours in 100-plus degree heat. And with that in mind, I go willingly—rather than reluctantly--back out into the heat where my ever-faithful R-65 waits. Across the lot, in the shade of a bank, there is a sinister looking dude eyeing my bike. It occurs to be that he might be casing the banjo strapped to the top of my trailer. I don’t know if that is right, but I do notice that he moseys off as soon as I come out. Tip #8 for Beating the Heat: Sunburned lips are no joke so keep your high SPF lip balm where you can frequently apply it both on and off the bike. The high SPF lip stuff can be hard to find at C-stores, so we always lay in an ample supply whenever we find it in stock, until we have so much of it that I can always find a tube around the house. Always wear a brimmed or visored cap in the sun. I keep mine right in my tank bag and don it as soon as I stop if I am going to spend any time in the sun.