Snow clean up at Aerostich after a blizzard came through last weekend, dropping over 20 inches of snow in Duluth. It's been a wild week. A couple of nights ago I discovered a slowly deflating rear tire on my electric ‘winter commuter’ bicycle. A little sliver of metal had penetrated the studded tire’s casing and innertube. This puncture was easy to find and fix. Sometimes ultra-slow leaks can be hard to find, even with a tub full of water, but this one made a nice stream of bubbles. After the patch had been applied and was ‘self-vulcanizing’ I looked around the garage for something productive to do start-to-finish which would take only a few minutes, just to be positive the patch would be solidly bonded to the tube before putting everything back together. Patching inner tubes is super easy. I’ve done this job too many times to count and being O.C.D. about these repairs is important. Now what to do for the next few minutes? Sweep the garage floor? Naah. It wasn’t that bad. Finish connecting in the Suzuki’s new electric grips?  No, that would be a longer job. What else?...What else? I was surrounded by half-done and long-procrastinated projects and was hoping something would appear which required only the very short time it would take to be sure this patch would be permanent. This waiting is probably unnecessary, but somehow it adds certainty, so any other small garage job requiring between two and fifteen minutes would be fine. Attempting to fix the sticky turn signal switch on my old (94) XR 650L was the most appealing option so I walked over to that bike with a non-JIS Philips to give it a try. Until then I’d never taken any turn signal switches apart, not even once. The button’s sliding action was terrible, with a pepper-grinder’s gritty feeling, and its on-center push-in-to-cancel function was sticky and slow to pop back up. After parking this bike five or six years ago I’d recently decided to start using it again. This involved taking care of the usual older bike-neglect items: replacing its battery, cleaning out the insides of its carburetor, changing out old oil and rebuilding both brake hydraulics. Until I was sure this bike would still be a pretty good commuter it was easy to not even notice its gritty, sticky turn signal switch. (And slighlty too-dry tires.) Fortunately, the Honda turned out to be a good commuter, except for it’s icky turn signal switch feel. Two unscrewed Philips’s later I was looking at a cad-plated internal switch cover held in place by a third slightly smaller Philips. After lifting that away the quarter-century accumulation of dirt and grit was obvious. The button-lever moving part of the switch was held in place between a spacer and a washer, and all three were mounted by a fourth little Philips. With those three parts removed the button lever simply lifted out. All that was left was a liberal spray bath of electrical contact cleaner, a clean toothbrush scrub, another contact cleaner spray rinse and paper towel wipe up, followed by some strategically applied dielectric grease and the sequenced reassembly.  What a difference! I hesitate to compare this little procedure with how people enjoy bathing, exfoliatingly drying themselves, and then sometimes applying various kinds of healthful skin lotions –- But this wasn’t all that different, and the little switch now felt almost as smooth under my left thumb as if one was stroking somebody’s well-pampered and well-lotioned skin. Don’t ask me how many times I stood there idly enjoying sliding that switch from side to side and turning it on and off. I didn’t count, but it was more than twice and less than fifty. Ten minutes later the studded electric bicycle’s winter tire was back in place, fully inflated, and that machine was also ready to go. After the tire patching kit and tools were put away, and my hands were washed, I left the garage wearing a helluva stupid smile, just as very small children sometimes do. It’s always the little things. -- Mr. Subjective, 12/2019

Yesterday for the first time this fall it got down to twenty degrees, well below historical averages here on this date. I rode to work from a heated garage aboard a recently re-animated -- but still seriously old -- 1994 Honda XR650L (photo, left). It didn’t take very long to dress for this chilly commute, either. Nobody else on my fifteen-minute surface street route was riding, but the road was dry, and the sun was shining. I was comfortable the entire way. Everything was perfect. When I came out the sidewalk after five PM it was already fully dark and still only twenty, and the bike just…barely…started. Lighting its ICE fire involved multiple stabs of the button and more than a full minute of worriedly listening to labored slow cranking, despite temp-stable synthetic oil and a brand-new Lithium battery. I was glad nobody was around to witness me standing there worryingly thinking about how I might have to push it into a warm place and then wait until everything warmed up for at least half an hour…and the engine finally caught. Whew! Exhaust condensation puff-puff-puffing from the end of its muffler did look cool. Once again, I’d partly forgotten how many kinds of motorcycles are simply not good for real cold weather commuting operations. Especially big carbureted singles like this nearly vintage XL, which had not seen a twenty-degree commute in probably ten years. A triumph of rose-colored-goggles hope over reality. And another reason to celebrate the near-universal adoption of electronic fuel injection. Engines like this can be harder to start at any time, much less in cold weather. When this model was created back in 1994 (yes, it is a first-year one, and yes it IS hard to believe how long these have now been continuously produced) it was made to be used as a dirt bike in sunny, warm places -- not for commuting through cloudy, cold, dark Minnesota winters. Thus, its efficient and lightweight electric starting system is far too small for winter commuting around here. Last winter my commute-solution was an electric bicycle on studded tires (photo, left) which worked more or less ok, but because it maxes out at 20-25 mph, the commute became ten minutes longer. A motorcycle’s average surface street speed is 30-40 mph, an electric bicycle’s average speed is 15-25 mph, and a pedal-only bicycle’s average commute speed is 10-15 mph. Wintertime = increased commute time. The scientific name for the average length of time people will tolerate when commuting is called ‘the Marchetti Constant’ and this time-value holds at about thirty minutes throughout all of recorded history, and everywhere in the world. This is what limited the footprint of pre-technological cities, and partly explains how modern suburban sprawl, shopping centers, hospitals and schools fit into discrete neighborhoods and boroughs, and how most neighborhoods and wards fit together within larger cities. It also partly explains how prior to the industrial revolution artisanal agriculture-centered towns and villages were separated from fields by ‘x’ distances, and how each of those little villages were ‘x’ distance apart. Thirty minutes, on average. Whenever I walk to work it’s just over an hour and this is always a great time-luxury. And when I motorcycle it’s usually just under fifteen minutes. Pedaling and electric pedaling splits this difference. Co-workers Randy and Kyle figured out their winter-motorcycle-commute a couple of years ago. They share an electric Zero. No matter how cold it gets this bike starts right up and takes them home -- no muss, no fuss, and no adverse impact on normal summer/spring/fall commute times. Reducing one’s carbon footprint is great but even better is not worrying if, at the end of a workday, one’s correctly tuned ‘old-reliable’ ICE bike will actually start when it’s Winter Time. - Mr. Subjective, Nov 2019

Question... “When you finish a long adventure ride, have you experienced strong emotions that you hadn’t planned on? If so, what were they and why?” -- Michael Boton (from the LinkedIn online forum 'motorcycle journalists') Many years ago, at age 43, I took three months off and rode 17K miles from Minnesota to Mongolia and back, via Siberia, China and Japan. I experienced this ride with another rider and learned a lot about myself, geopolitics and people. (1, 2 and 3…) At a basic level, I gained increased proficiency in many ‘adventure’ riding and camping technical skills, since most of the Asian parts of the trip involved long days of dirt roads, trails and rail line right-of-way’s, plus weeks and weeks of continuous camping. A lot of work but tremendously fun. Meeting daily-encountered-strangers as half of a pair of travelers was also a great self-awareness learning experience. Watching how people responded to each of us was a kind of comparative case-study experience which would never happen if one was a lone rider or were traveling among a larger group. Returning home brought what felt almost like a secret (and maybe childish?) kind of superiority, though not in a condescending way. For a couple of weeks processing all the familiar routines of everyday life was a bit more vivid. Lastly, every additional night I slept in my little tent caused it to become a larger and larger dwelling. By the end of the three-month trip it had grown in size to feel like almost a mansion, with abundant space for my every possession, thought and activity. This still occurs -- even after only a night or two on the road, and also when wilderness camping. Your little tent, and all it contains, becomes almost a palace. --- Mr. Subjective, 2-14

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

A few weeks ago, I drained the fuel tanks and float bowls of my two long-ridden old (BMW) airheads, washed and waxed both, aired up their tires, and then put them away inside the basement, not the garage. Also pulled spark plugs and sprayed oil in the upper cylinders. First time I’ve ever formally ‘put a bike away’. Felt like an embalming. Depressing. Had not ridden either bike this year or last, and no plans to use either during the next few years. An admission I won’t be making time to work on or ride them for a while. So, they now rest next to the washer and dryer. They do look sorta cool there. Boxer engine width made both unexpectedly difficult to get through the doorway into the basement – the ‘naked’ R100 took 20 min of wiggling and the ‘naked’ R80 10 min. First snow is predicted this Friday. Goal: Before winter arrives fill the other three currently ridden bikes tanks with 100% no-alcohol gas and a little gas-stabilizer. They are rarely ridden after streets are winter sanded and salted. And I’ll continue to daily ride and commute via a rusty studded-tire winter bicycle. It’s not the cold or the universal winter grime. It’s more the corrosive damage. The two older bikes with petcocks are ridden a short distance with the fuel valves closed until their float bowels are empty. This takes slightly more than a quarter mile. The goal is to run the carburetor totally out of gas, so the engine dies just as you coast up the driveway. Then into the garage with a little fuel stabilizer in the tank and trickle charger for the battery. Last year the beat-up very old XL250 was chained up and left outside all winter beneath only a lightweight cover and about a hundred inches of accumulated snow. Hate leaving any bike outside this way because the range of the daily freeze-thaw cycle is so large. Minus twenty to plus forty. When April finally comes its petcock is re-opened and after giving the stabilized gasoline a few moments to refill the float bowel last spring it started ‘first kick’. Satisfaction (and a little surprised) that day as I sat there in the sunshine happily listening to its familiar engine sound. The other warm-garaged fuel injected modern bike electric-started fine, too. Best fuel stabilizer? Unknown. My friends and I all use one made for (private-labeled?) outboard boat gas tanks, and widely available at big box outdoor sports and marine/marina stores. The last time I kept a motorcycle inside the living area of a house was 1970. I was sixteen. During the first week after my birthday that year I quietly pushed my first street-licensed bike from the garage into my ground-level basement bedroom every night until my mother noticed and put a stop to it. When I asked my wife about the two old BMW’s now stored in our basement, she replied: “they look neat there…”, center-stranded next to the wall just past the clothes washer and dryer. Marry the right person. Always the sweetest MC ride of the year is on that one late-fall day when the streets have not yet been salted and sanded while more-than-a-few light snowflakes are dancing in the air you are riding through. Still mostly dry pavement. This occurs most – but not every -- year. And when you experience this, it’s magic. Especially at night. – Mr. Subjective, 11-1-19

Getting Started: Notes On One’s First Bike Trip Packing your crap... The first few days of travel and dealing with the straps, soft duffels and bags will teach you if your setup is good for you. The idea is to have things secure, semi-easy to get to, and not too much of a problem to remove or re-load. If it takes twenty minutes every morning to load everything when you are wanting to get going, and twenty minutes at night to unload when you are tired and just want to be done, it can be frustrating. At least one pack should be easily opened at gas stations or on a roadside, without untying everything else. Into this should go rain gloves, a sweater, a wind shirt, a hat, and anything that you might need handy for varying weather conditions. And if you buy an extra banana or water bottle at a gas stop, it’s nice to have enough available space for it there, too. Soft bags and duffels are great, but nothing strapped onto the back of your bike is going to be as easy to deal with as hard pannier bags or boxes in terms of speed and convenience. Conversely, no hard bags are as light, simple and compact (and safe if you crash...) as soft bags and duffels. That’s the compromise. Writing journals... There are two ways I've kept daily logs. If I am carrying a laptop or tablet, I try to type a few notes in the evening or morning. Usually not more than the basics: Day, Date, Miles, Location, Weather and anything interesting I experienced or thought about. Some people like to keep exhaustive and detailed expense records, road and turn notations, bike maintenance records and meteorological information. Not me. If something broke on my bike, I’ll note it, and the circumstances involved in fixing it. If I experienced cold, wet or had headwinds, I’ll note those things. Perfect weather, too. Later I can fill in descriptions of briefly noted occurrences and scenes from memory, if I want to. If I am traveling light, I use a little notebook, always bound on the left side (because I write right-handed), and a grease pencil (for lining printed maps and writing on the tank bag window) or space pen (for everything else). Same things recorded as on the laptop or tablet, but longhand. It’s interesting to note the way one’s handwriting changes during the course of a trip. If it is your first-ever on a motorcycle (or on a new-to-you motorcycle), it will be especially good to capture your feelings and ideas. You can only do anything for the first time once. Years from now you may find yourself looking back, and you'll have some idea of the situations you were in, and what you experienced. Some may be embarrassing, but it will bring back the memories and smiles. The kinds of memories any journal brings back are completely different than the kinds of things a photograph captures. A journal holds what you were thinking, on that day. It helps me to write for some imagined reader: anyone you care about is good. Someone to whom you’d want to share with, and who cares about you, is the best. Keeping lists of things to do, post-trip... The other thing to keep in the trip notes is a record of things about your motorcycle and kit to pay attention to later. For example, list little easily forgotten items like: replace lost ear plug bag file off rough edge by seat bar shorten rear view mirror stem buy toothpaste This sort of a list is best kept separately from the daily notes, located above the daily entries in a file on your computer, or on a separate page of a written journal. A personal perspective on this stuff... I'm just trying to figure these things out the best I can, for myself. I always have a list of things needed on my bike, stuff I'd like to fix, upgrade or otherwise address. My personal Aerostich gear seems to work best after it’s a little more worn out and beat up. I go from one day to the next just messing around, and juggling too many things in not enough time. That’s why it always feels so good to finally be rolling away into the horizon...toward somewhere. Time to think, time to wonder, time to ride. (...And if you are heading out into the back country far from everywhere, don’t forget to take along one of these little trowels and some TP.) Share your tips or memories of your first motorcycle trip in our comments below!

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 Older I Get, the Faster I Wuz..." Back in the day when 'Smokey and the Bandit' was in first-run theatrical release, Fuzzbuster (cheap) and Escort (expensive) radar detectors were still pretty new stuff. Lots of drivers had them and also the CB radios needed for talking about all the 'Bears' and 'Countie-mounties'. The era's quaint cat-and-mouse games between speeders and authorities were lots of fun, and occasionally could even be epic -- hard as that is to believe today. Motorcycle 'Track days' and racecourse-based performance riding schools did not exist yet. The universally disliked 55 mile-per-hour energy-saving speed limit helped encourage widespread scofflaw behavior and civil disobedience. Supposedly fast riders would boast: "I never get tickets" and go on to describe in detail their combined stealth-riding tactics, methods, road-wisdom and technology countermeasures. A few even used highly illegal radar jammers. Name: Joe PasquarelloPhoto Location: Outside Anchorage, AKPhoto Credit: Mike NothomStory Behind Photo: Photo taken while I whizzed by our chase vehicle just prior to receiving a Performance Award from the local Sheriff. When asked why I was so far ahead of the group (of Harley riders) I exclaimed: "They're chasing me, they're chasing me!" He chuckled and wrote me up anyway...nice guy though. One time on a road trip to Bike Week in Florida I had a pretty fancy one of those jammers. Never could quite figure out how effective it was at jamming, but it sure was fun to play with other speeding dudes driving radar detector-equipped muscle cars. They'd fly by and get about 100 yards ahead and you'd flip the jammer on and their detector would like up like a Christmas tree and they'd nail the brakes really hard (which was tactically correct). A minute or two later you'd be half a mile or more ahead again and they'd take their Camaro (or whatever) back up to flank speed and blast right by. After they'd gone a little ways farther you'd hit them again with the jammer and the brake lights would pop back on and the entire scenario would repeat as I tried to keep from laughing. Once or twice I even got a puff of tire smoke from the outlaw dude's tires as the car tipped forward into its brakes a little too aggressively. Despite the great amusement of this game, I put this sociopathic toy away after that trip. Permanently. It was just too mean. To all those moto-speeders who liked to boast they were so skillful they could ride really fast most of the time, yet never get tickets... Well yeah, sure. After riding with a fair number of these boastful narcissists I eventually concluded their stories were largely BS, and formulated a private theory: If you think you are riding fast a lot but are not getting tickets once in a while, then you are not really riding all that fast. The only way to be sure you are riding illegally fast frequently and for longer distances is if you are getting tickets occasionally. Really fast riders all get tickets. They are unavoidable. Confirmation of this came one day at the old Jan Cutler - Steve Losofsky Reno BMW store. I was there once only, passing through on my way from somewhere to somewhere else. Jan and Steve were among the hardest-core originals when it came to long distance illegal high speed riding and their shop was a Mecca for many like-minded riders. It featured a wall where hundreds of fast riders had pinned up their tickets, or copies of them. This display was a thing of beauty. A shrine. I stood before and marveled. And today I wonder if anyone back then was smart enough to take a high-res photo of it? No phone-cameras existed so this would have required 35mm film inside a dedicated camera. If anyone has one (?) let me know and maybe we'll make and sell a poster-sized print. It was that inspiring. The only certain way to know you are a too-fast rider is if you are getting enough tickets to be worried about losing your license on points. I'm not there (anymore), and most riders today don't care very much about such outlaw horoics, but even now almost every speeding ticket has memorable story potential. Here's one... About twenty years ago, when the Aerostich company was about ten or twelve years along, I was riding a little too fast on some rural two lane road around southern Ohio. Or some nearby state. Heading back from Bike Week maybe. I've forgotten all these specifics but still clearly remember the exact roadside location, scene and situation. The cop had pulled me over and asked for and received my license and registration and had gone back to his patrol car to write me up while I sat there on my bike forlorn but also a little confused. He'd sure been looking at me and my bike funny while talking about my speeding as I was getting my wallet out. All law-enforcement firm and gruff, but there was also something slightly odd about his manner. I could not quite put my finger on it. He comes back with my ticket, hands it to me and I sign it. Then he says, brightly: "Isn't that one of those new Aerostich suits?" Our innovative riding suits were then getting a lot of coverage in most of the motorcycle magazines. Oh crap I thought, now stone-faced. This hick county cop was a rider! Aaagh! I'd missed it completely while he was talking with me after the stop. Post-signature and now we had a nice conversation (through my slightly gritted teeth) about his riding and the Aerostich suits. At the end I still had the stupid ticket. &%#*?!!! If only I'd been able to somehow figure out he was another rider BEFORE he'd gone back to the patrol car to write out that ticket. It could have been a warning instead. Except he was too professional and I missed it. Without that cop's Aerostich suit interest this ticket incident would be completely forgotten by now, just like so many other long-forgotten tickets from back in the days. One of too many. Now let me tell you about another one. A "100+ mph" big ticket received on the side of California's 1-5 when folllowing at-a-good-distance some guy absolutely flying along, driving a late-model BMW 7 series car...and about one from the OPP (Ontario Provincial Police aka 'Mounties') twenty miles south of Sudbury...and about the roadside warning received only fifteen miles from home on I-35 after deliberately (and very slowly -- only 1.0 mph) passing a MN Highway Patrol car which for some reason had been holding everyone else up at exactly 55.0 mph for the previous seventy miles...and about...and about...and... Share your speeding ticket stories in the comments below! We'd love to hear them...

The Ultimate Poach Camping App. Motorcycle vagabonding in the United States usually involves some camping, occasional couch surfing and a few cheap motels. The camping stuff divides between authorized and unauthorized campsites. Unauthorized means poach-camping. Stealth camping. Finding someplace to pull off the road for the night where nobody is likely to bother you, and hopefully also in an open-enough space so as not to be also appealing to hordes of mosquitos. Hard to find camping spots that are both open and hidden. This app (onX Hunt, illustrated at left) is the ultimate tool for poach campers, and this story is all about poach-camping, which you need to know is illegal and scary. Just how scary and how illegal depends on the site’s particulars, some of which you can see directly, and some you can only see via this app. Regardless of what you know about an illegal campsite, you always need to be ready to leave in a hurry, and stealthy equipment like an Aerostich black ultralight motorcycle cover can help conceal your bike. A blaze orange tent isn’t such a good idea (not to mention that inside such a highly visible structure the orange-colored light filtering through the fabric makes your skin look so cadaverously gray it will make you nauseous). A quiet-ish bike that is lightweight enough to be ridden into a completely undeveloped site is helpful, too. The quieter and lighter, the better. Poach-camping sites will not have showers or pit toilets like an organized legal campground, but when you do find a nice site where nobody has ever camped before it will actually be cleaner than any paid campsite. Paid commercial campsites range from popular and heavily over-used, over-priced, and dirty to seldom used very remote sites with honor-system pay boxes administered by the Corps of Engineers which can be pristine, quiet, scenic and wonderful. There are apps, guide books and directories of all campgrounds to help you find and sort out the options. Experience and common sense means you’ll need to start looking for a suitable poach-camp site with enough time before sundown. Noticing what you are riding past during the later part of the afternoon, and not focusing on squeezing every last possible mile out of the day. You’ll need to think about the story you may have to tell if anyone comes by with questions (hopefully not with an attitude and a shotgun). Once in a while that could happen. We are a well-armed citizenry these days with more tribal and risk-averse paranoid people than ever, thanks (in my opinion) to our near-universally consumed advanced technologies like digital media, digital social networks and enclosed air-conditioned automobiles. Blah, blah, blah. In any encounter with a local you’ll either be asked to leave immediately, possibly angrily, or told to leave in the morning, or invited to their place for a home-made dinner. The outcome may be influenced by the story you tell. It can be helpful to travel with a GF or wife. Next best is to be with one other rider, and third best is to be alone. Three riders sometimes can be ok, too. Once, after a long riding day and a failure to locate a non-existent campground indicated on a Garmin GPS, my riding partner and I decided to camp very late behind a small grove of pine trees on the side of an access road into a rural cemetery just off a country road in Montana. This fairly well hidden site was high on a bluff that overlooked the Platte (or Missouri?) river just outside of some small farm town. The location was deserted but had been recently mowed. We pitched our tent close behind three medium size pine trees, covered the bikes with black Aerostich stealth lightweight covers and fell asleep, thinking we were safe in a perfect poach-camping spot. At 5:30 AM the next morning we awoke when a car went by, heading into the cemetery. Fifteen minutes later, another car, then another two cars. By 6 AM half a dozen cars had driven past our secret spot right into this little cemetery. I looked at my watch, confused. My partner asked me what day this was. “Monday.” I replied. Uh-oh….it was Memorial Day! Yikes! We shook our heads. This place was about to become crowded with people. Of all the nights of the year to poach camp on the access road into a cemetery. We packed and loaded our gear up quickly and rode away before anyone saw us. Or if they did, before someone decided to stop and ask us what the F we were doing there. There are all kinds of poach-campable places where one isn’t likely to be discovered, but poach camping will always be risky. Wouldn’t it be great if there was some kind of app that told you who owned every plat of land in the country? You’d be able to see state and county owned land, parks, and everything else. There is, About a month ago I was reading a story in an outdoor magazine written by a young couple living the modern wilderness life with a couple of mountain bikes and an off-road lifted Airstream travel trailer. The author mentioned an app that would exactly ID every parcel of land in the entire country, instantaneously. On the app store this app was $99 a year. Holy-c_ap! All my other apps were either free or $2.99. This one sure must be something to be worth a hundred dollars a year. Guess what? It is. If you want to poach-camp, it can be game-changer. Look at this: It’s the one in the lower right, ‘onX Hunt’. Designed for hunters who want to know ahead of time whose land they are walking across as they pursue their deer, partridge, or feral pig quarry. Every land owner is listed in the entire country, as is every piece of state, county, city land. Parks, abandoned lands. Everything. It’s important to note that property owners living adjacent to vacant city, county and state lands often consider those places ‘theirs’ so be careful. There’s a couple of these kind of vacant lots next to my residence and if I noticed a tent and a bike in there for more than a day I’d probably call the police. Still, with common sense and this app you can greatly increase your chances for a successful poach-camping outcome. It comes down to being stealthy and unseen, and leaving your site clean. No open fires, burying your waste, being quiet, etc. Here’s a quick zoom-in set of screen shots from near our facility. Note the public and vacant land along the ‘North Shore Hiking Trail’. If you think like a homeless person, poach-camping is doable. In fact, when poach-camping in and near cities you may encounter a homeless person. They are not there willingly. Whenever you decide to poach-camp you become a traditional old school ‘motorcycle-bum’, or ‘poverty rider’. You are joining a long and not-particularly-noble tradition of homeless, vagabonds and hobos. Times change. Practice at your own risk. What's your poach camping story? Be sure to leave a comment below.

Riding from Pickerington, Ohio to Duluth, Minnesota. Between 2000 and 2007 I rode from Minnesota to Ohio and back several times a year, always aboard a 1981 BMW 800. These were wonderful bikes with famously weak electrical charging systems. My outbound route was east across US2 to the Mackinac Bridge then south on I-75 to Columbus. The route back was via a matrix of little roads up to the Ludington Ferry, then across Lake Michigan and then a bunch more little roads across Wisconsin northwest to Minnesota. About nine hundred easy miles each way, spread over two nice nine hour days. 55 and 65 mph two lane speed limits across sparsely settled northern Wisconsin and the U.P., then 75+ freeway south of the bridge all the way down to the Ohio border. Tuesday, August 7, 2007, Pickerington, Ohio Fed Ex arrived at about a quarter to eleven. Spent the morning in the hotel lobby, typing e-mails off line, waiting. Just as I’d unwrapped the bike parts Ken comes down. We have a good fifteen minute talk. He suggests the high speed ferry that takes only two and a half hours and lands at Milwaukee. He looks up the scheduled Muskegon depart time on his Blackberry, and I program the GPS and it says I can make it with 45 minutes to spare. So we forgo breakfast and I take off, zooming along following the purple line of route directions on the GPS and taking only a single fast gas stop (11 minutes from exit ramp to refill, to peeing, to back onto the entrance ramp…) and no food. I think I’ll just make it. Still my mind begins to gnaw on the timing, and the alternator warning light gets worse and worse. Hardly ever coming onto charge mode now, but at least I have a replacement diode board, and hopefully brushes (I did not see them, but assume they are there, inside the bubble-wrapped diode board package…). Things should be ok. After thinking about the time the ferry leaves, 4:45pm, I wonder if it is on eastern time or central time? If it is central, I’m early by 45 min. If eastern, I’m late by fifteen. After pounding butt for six hours, it turns out I’m late by fifteen. I remount and ride along the shore toward Ludington, another 50 miles north to the old Badger ferry and a four hour crossing, arriving in Wisconsin at about 11pm. Twenty miles before town the bike goes onto reserve so I stop to fill it’s tank. Aboard the ferry I buy a salad and bottle of water, and read magazines. I also call ahead for a room at the dockside Best Western in WI. The only thing they offer is a smoking room, at a special rate of $98. Yeah, right. I ask if the windows open, and they say “yes”, so I’ll find out how stinky one of these smoking rooms really is when I get there. It’s been a few years since I was in one. After the magazines were read, I typed this trip journal. The lights of Wisconsin just came into view. I’ll probably try and take the now full gas tank off in the motel parking lot in the morning and see if I can replace the brushes and diode board before riding the last six hours home. If I can’t, I can buy a battery or battery charger and ride home in the daylight in total-loss mode, so there is a ‘plan-b’. That gas tank will weigh about 80 pounds. I don’t remember the last time I took off a gas tank that was nearly full. Eight or nine gallons. Yuck. I hope I don’t drop it or break one of the petcocks. The tone of the Badger’s coal-fired triple expansion steam engines just changed. Must be getting near shore. Wednesday August 8, 2007 Up at 7, clear, sunny, about 75º. Last night, after the ferry landed, I’d rode the two blocks to the hotel with the headlight off, in the dark, hoping there was enough juice still in the battery to keep two spark plugs sparking, and fortunately there was. After checking in (and opening the room’s window wide…) I unwrapped the bubble-wrapped BMW parts and found only the diode board. No brushes. Crap. So I went to the hotel bar and ordered a martini. Then back to the now-slightly-less-stinky room and into bed, where I fell asleep in about ten seconds. The next morning right after showering, I went out to the parking lot wearing shorts, sandals and a fresh shirt, carrying the diode board and the small zippered ‘miscellaneous junk’ pouch from the tank bag. (It has a Leatherman multi-pliers-tool, some bits of wire, a cigarette lighter, a hot-melt glue stick, a small compass, some rubber bands, a mini-roll of duct tape, and various other odds n’ ends.) It’s seven thirty AM on a very fine day. First, I roll the bike about five feet so it is more directly underneath a shady tree branch partly overhanging the pavement. Then I take the front cover off the engine, and remove the outer part of the alternator, called the stator. This is the part that holds the brushes. One of the brushes, the forward-most one, was much shorter than the other. The spring behind it was fully extended, so it was not making a continuous direct contact with the copper ring on the rotor beneath. I was sitting on my butt, cross legged, right next to the front wheel, facing the engine while doing all this. On the asphalt next to me was the bike’s unrolled tool kit, the motorcycle’s unlatched saddle, the tank bag’s ‘junk’ pouch, the Leatherman pliers, and half a dozen engine cover and alternator assembly fasteners and washers. Everything except the saddle was neatly laid out on an Aerostich envelope bag. Right next to all of this and directly on the asphalt was an unused wooden kitchen match. I picked it up and stared at it. With the wire cutters of the Leatherman, I nipped about half an inch from the end. Exactly the right size. Using the tool kit’s small screwdriver, I positioned it behind the worn-out brush, re-installed the brush’s spring, and then put the alternator and engine back together. Then I rolled up the tools, put away the Leatherman, stood up, clicked the bikes saddle back into position and turned the key. Immediate vroom. Immediate 13volts of charging power. Fixed!! Yeayyy!!! This whole MacGyver job took less than thirty minutes. I went back to the room, packed, dressed, loaded the bike, checked out, and was riding north toward Green Bay by 8:15AM, with a nice tail wind, the XM radio on a forties channel playing thru my ear speakers, and a song in my heart. ‘Zip ah dee doo dah…zip a dee day…’ was literally playing. By two thirty I was at Ashland, where I gassed the bike, ate a banana, a hot dog and drank a bottle of water, and then rode the last fifty miles to Duluth. At five minutes to five I stopped at Aerostich and worked there until seven. Then home to read and enjoy a Subway veggie sandwich. The bike will get it’s new alternator brushes and probably a transmission gear lube change this weekend, and then should be ok for a while. The day before leaving for Ohio I’d changed it’s engine oil. – Mr. Subjective. What's your best bodge story? Be sure to leave a comment below.

Back in 2009 I had two flats, both at highway speeds and both due to using dry-rotted innertubes. Luckily no crash resulted. All because of my own negligence and ignorance. Somewhere along the way I’d forgotten that one should always put a new tube in when installing a new tire. In hindsight I don’t know what I could have been thinking. For many years I replaced a worn-out tire on this bike about twice a year, and not the tube. How did I manage to forget or un-learn this? Today I had a flat tire on my motorcycle. The first in more than ten years. I was traveling southbound on US 53, just north of Wascott. This road is now fully four lane divided with a 65 mph speed limit and that’s about the speed I was going. Sunny and nice. Light traffic. Mid-afternoon. At first the bike started to steer funny. It was subtle — as if I was riding on a worn-out road with depressions where heavy traffic had thinned the pavement. The highway looked perfectly flat so I moved over toward the center of the lane to see if it was my bike or the road. A flat tire was the very last thing on my mind. Hmmm. Bike still wiggly. I looked again extra carefully at the road surface. Still looked pool table flat, so I slowed down to about forty five and it seemed to go away. When I sped back up the wiggles came right back as if the frame, swing arm or a wheel had somehow broken, so I slowed back down to about 30 and started riding on the foot-wide paved shoulder. In about two blocks there was a little gravel side road and I took it. Ten feet in I stopped and looked down. The rear tire was nearly flat. I slowly and carefully rode another twenty feet to a nice spot on the side of this gravel road and now the tire was fully flat. The next stuff was routine but it had been a long time since I’d done most of it: Switch bike off. Get off bike and hoist it onto center stand, harder than usual because the bike was now 4" lower. Gloves off. Helmet off. Jacket off. A nice pile on the grass. Saddle off. Tools out. Wheel off. Spare inner tube out. Tire irons out. Tire off rim on one side. Tube out. No apparent flaws. No nails in tire. Just a giant tear in the tube maybe a foot long. 30 minutes elapsed, but I’m not hurrying. Just keeping track. It’s a warm, sunny perfect day. Spare tube in. Tire back on rim. Dig clearance hole in sandy dirt beneath where the tire will go and slide the wheel onto the hub. Bolt on loosely. Get out engine inflator - a hose that goes from one spark plug hole to the tube’s Schrader valve. (You start the engine, which runs fine on only the other cylinder, and in a minute the tire is full.) Except the attachment that screws into the spark plug hole is ruined. Twelve years rattling around in the bag on the rear fender have removed it’s threads. There is no way it will work. Plan ‘B’ is an old bicycle tire pump zip-tied to the rear frame, hidden beneath the saddle. It doesn’t work either. I fiddle around with it for fifteen minutes but the rubber ‘o’ ring seal that goes on the tube’s valve stem was all dried out and would not make a seal. Now it’s back to the thing that works off the spark plug hole. I wrap duct tape a couple of layers thick around the worn-threadless end and connect the other end loosely onto the tube - twisting it only a single turn and then I put on my riding gloves. Ready. Feel slightly like Mr. Spock working on the dilithium injector alignment trying to save the Enterprise. Key on, start the bike. Chuff! Chuff! Chuff! strong blasts the air out the open spark plug hole. I’d forgotten. The bike idles good enough on one cylinder. With my left gloved hand I force the duct-tape-gasketed pump device as hard as I can against the spark plug hole while with my right hand I’m screwing the other end onto the tire valve stem. It works! 34 psi and two or three minutes later I have done what felt like the impossible. Boy that little chuff-chuff inflator gets hot really quick. Even with a glove, it was hot-potato-drop-it as soon as I unscrewed the other end from the valve stem. Now I can bolt the wheel back up tight, put away the torn tube and tools and I’m off, gingerly at first. An hour twenty, start to finish. “Luckily no crash resulted. All because of my own negligence and ignorance.” Midway through this job, but as I was levering the tire’s bead off the rim, a Subaru Forester passed heading into the adjacent northern Wisconsin forest. (Forest? Forester?). That was the only vehicle passing on this little dirt road the entire time. I could see and hear traffic on the nearby divided four lane Hwy 53 whooshing past. The Subaru went about forty feet past me and then I hear gear whine as it reverses, so I stopped levering and looked up. An old thinnish, long-bearded man was driving and as they got next to me his wife was looking downward out her just-lowered window. I was on my knees by the tire, looking up at her. “Need any help?” the old country hippie-ish looking guy asked. “No, I think I’ll be ok.” I replied. Steady eye-to-eye contact. Pause. Then we smiled at each other and nodded very slightly. A moment of bilateral reflection, then they drove off to their presumably reclusive homestead hidden somewhere farther into the deep northern woods. My guess is he plays a fiddle or guitar and every fall she cans produce from their garden. I rode the rest of the way to my destination without incident and enjoyed a nice dinner with some friends. After I got home at about 9 PM I took the tools out of the fender bag and removed the rear wheel again and let the air out and then reflated the tire to make sure the earlier-replaced tube was straight inside. I also got out a new spare tube and left it on the saddle, ready for it’s place inside the back fender bag. Tomorrow after work I’ll replace the ‘plan B’ bicycle pump and the threadless ‘chuff’ thing with new, and probably will also the tube repair glue and patches. The old tube went into the garbage. I bet it had been taken out, inspected and put back in ten or twelve times as I’d changed tires over the years. Never changed that tube. What a dummy. “I can’t be having a flat again — I just had one.” While fixing that tire I never took out my mobile phone to check if there was a signal. And when I reached my destination, a lake home a few miles farther down US 53, I was really glad I’d not needed to ask anyone for a rescue. Happiness is, among other things, the ability to successfully fix a flat tire on motorcycle out in the middle of nowhere. It had been a long time. The lesson was simple: Twelve-year-old inner tubes are neither reliable or safe. They wear out from age just like the tires do from wear, even if they don’t show anything visually like a tire does. This tire repair happened on a Sunday and the following Thursday I’m riding down Interstate 35, heading to Minneapolis at five at seventy five miles an hour. About five miles north of Hinckley the back tire goes flat again. This time I instantly know what is happening and just ride along for half a minute in disbelief, thinking “I can’t be having a flat again — I just had one.” This time there’s no nice quiet gravel side road available, just a sorta steeply sloping mowed shoulder. Freeway traffic is much more intense, too. I am traveling with another rider, and get the bike pulled over safely, but with the suddenly flat tire the bike won’t go onto it’s side stand so I’m holding it up and directing my friend down into the steeply sloping ditch to see if the ground down there is wet, dry, hard or soft. He finds a semi-dry, semi-firmer place about five feet from a semi-wetter semi squishier place and I roll the bike diagonally down the shoulder, stopping right were the mowing ends and the tall grass begins. At least I’m not going to be inches from the continuous high speed Interstate highway traffic. This time the tire change goes much faster, just fifteen minutes start to finish. Right before leaving Duluth I’d packed a fresh new inner tube, a new replacement ‘chuff chuff’ device (it’s spark plug threads protectively taped) and a new bicycle tire pump. I’d picked these up on Tuesday and Wednesday and had rushed to pack them as I was getting ready to leave on this ride. The new ‘chuff chuff’ thing worked fantastically well. What a breeze. The other rider was impressed, and so were another motorcycling couple who’d stopped to see if we’d needed help. They were from Texas, heading home aboard a newer BMW, and I was smiling as I worked because I knew I was giving this little audience a lesson on how to manage a quick flat tire repair on the side of a road. And was doing everything so easily it looked as if I’d just been practicing the moves. As I pulled the still-warm four-day-earlier-replaced ‘spare’ tube from inside the tire it literally came apart in my hands. It tore in almost every direction, as if it were paper. During the years it had been packed inside the little bag strapped on the rear fender it had completely dry-rotted just like the tube that failed inside the rear tire four days earlier. What a dope. From now on, I’ll know better. I’ll become an inner-tube-fanatic, always changing tubes whenever I change tires. No exceptions. This whole experience had me thinking about the knowledge-base which underlies this tire/tube changing skill set. It’s a near-obsolete collection of information about task sequencing, physical manipulation and material science, and performing before these other riders it all felt like I was the operator of a steam locomotive or some other type of archaic technology more than a character in a Star Trek movie. Nowadays car and motorbike mobility involves so little of this kind of knowledge. Vehicles don’t come with tools or inner tubes. Many tires are ‘run flat’ so there’s not even a spare. New motorcycles use cast wheels and tubeless tires, so inner tubes are only necessary with old-fashioned spoked wheels. When tubeless motorcycle tires go flat it’s usually due to a nail in the tread, and they usually deflate slowly enough that there’s plenty of time to find a safe place to pull over and stop. Today’s roadside tubeless tire remedy doesn’t involve removing a wheel and levering a tire from a rim. A simple pliers is used to pull out the offending nail and then a reaming tool is used to clean out the hole and another reaming tool is used to jam an adhesive-coated plug into the hole. The insertion tool is then removed and the plug’s still protruding rubber is cut away flush with the tread. A small electric air compressor is connected to the battery and the tire is reflated. Much less fiddling around. Times change. What's your flat tire story? Be sure to leave a comment 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.

Nearly everywhere you’ll ever camp you’ll find all kinds of combustible hot-burning biomass. Sticks and twigs the size of your thumb and smaller. This stuff is way faster and easier to light and to cook with that you’d think, burns nearly smokelessly, and will reliably provide more than enough heat for all kinds of trail cookery. But why go Neanderthal now, with all those ingenious little gas stoves available? Because A) it’s less stuff to carry so you’ll travel lighter, and B) it’s nearly as fast to gather the fuel and then heat a liter of water as it is to do the same job with a hissing stove. And C), it’s a lot cleaner than you’d think. Soot is confined within the ‘chimney’ of samovar-kettles so you never touch it, and flat-folding stoves come with fabric storage sleeves. What if it’s been raining all day and everything is wet? Uhh…Dead limbs still attached to trees usually remain dry enough to ignite quickly with only a little help from an accelerant like a small piece of dry paper or a few drips of gasoline, or one or two Esbit fuel tabs (#4133). After they are going the heat provided will dry wetter stuff added later. But when it’s really raining super-hard find a motel and eat at a diner -- (even if you are carrying a gas stove). About the only places you cannot quickly and easily find sticks and twigs are a few high desert locations. —Mr. Subjective

Our Irrational Attachments Many years ago I read a story in a British motorcycle magazine about a fellow who’d ridden the same bike for almost his entire life. A quintessential quirky Englishman. I liked this story so much that I transcribed and saved it back in 2002, because at that time I didn’t have easy access to a digital scanner. It was an incredible story…Some fellow had bought a new bike in 1929 and then ridden it continuously and as his only transportation for the next 70 years until he died. Sometimes Aerostich customers -- and some motorcyclists-in-general – form long attachments to their gear and motorcycles, but nothing like this. Perhaps today it is textbook-simple for any modern psychologist to explain this kind of long-term loyalty toward things inanimate which have been wonderfully ‘faithful’? Emotional transference? Or? Whatever the explanation, an understanding appreciation doesn’t actually change one’s situation. I can sort of trace threads of my own such irrationality as perhaps descending from a few long-ago (and long forgotten) childhood experiences, but any limited self-awareness here does not salve or mitigate these materialistically-anthropomorphizing behaviors. There are dozens of examples of faithful artifacts from my life for which I’ve developed some kind of irrational attachment, particularly my long-used gear, motorcycles and tools. Examples surround me and range from an old practically worthless aluminum snow shovel which has been repaired and ‘rebuilt’ several times simply because I like how it ‘feels’, to long-faithful motorcycles, tools and related gear. (About that shovel…For maybe thirty five years I’ve removed winter’s snow with that stupid thing. Duluth averages about 85” a year x 30-plus years with this shovel = who cares?...it’s moved a lot of snow. Back when I was a kid I hated to shovel, doing so at least once by parental command: “Get out there and shovel! Right now!”, and yet today I’m lovingly maintaining a stupid old shovel…) I know others who can only cook their family’s meals on their beat-up rickety worn-out kitchen stove surrounded by an otherwise beautifully remodeled and modernized kitchen, and others who are cooking-fluent only with some familiar and beat-up old cast iron pan. No parental memories were in any way ever involved with my motorcycling, as neither parent rode and both were neutral on this activity, but to this day I sure love ‘dancing’ with the familiar crappy old bikes I’ve long ridden and maintained. Whether this dance involves old motorbikes, gear, kitchen stoves, fry pans or whatever, neurologically it probably all is about the same as Willie Nelson’s relationship to his famously beat up guitar ‘Trigger’, except in most cases enjoying THC (…weed, marijuana) isn’t quite as connected. The story excerpted below is thin on psychological speculation about emotional transference (?) or whatever, but still amazing, and indirectly reveals something about why Aerostich gear is made the way it is, and why it may be worth this level of attachment. We work everyday here to update and improve Aerostich products, but this is not always enough to trigger a replacement purchase from someone with well-worn Aerostich gear. You would hardly believe what we sometimes receive for refurbishment these days. Beloved beat-up old riding gear that’s been long used and cared for. Stuff that remains both comfortable and protective, and a well-experienced rider’s faithful tool…A faithful and silent witness to years of motorcycling experiences. “But the newest Aerostich gear is WAY better.” We say. “Bah, just do the best you can to fix up this one..” They reply. And so we usually do. Long Service Model Excerpted From ‘The Classic Motorcycle’ (UK), February 2002; by Roy Poynting http://www.classicmotorcycle.co.uk “Bill Shepherd bought his James brand new in 1929. It proved a shrewd purchase as it served as his main transport for the rest of his life. Roy Poynting samples this fully documented, original and unrestored vintage two-stroke.” “….I guess we all keep some paperwork about our bikes. If only to look back at, and wonder why we bankrupted ourselves to buy some worthless old hack. But imagine being so satisfied with your purchase that you kept it until your death, and along the way, you kept all the paperwork which went with it. Bristolian Bill Shepherd was such a man. A life-long bachelor who never drove a car, he was apparently fiercely independent and was reluctant to even accept a lift. In old age he sometimes resorted to public transport, but otherwise, he went everywhere on two wheels. In 1927, he bought a Rudge Whitworth pedal cycle, and kept its bill of sale among his records. Then in 1929 he went to Tinklin and Daish, motorcycle agents of Cleveland, Bristol, and ordered a Model A9 James. And that was that! The Rudge cycle and the James motorcycle were his sole personal transport for the rest of his life. It didn’t restrict Bill Shepherd’s activities, though. He thought nothing of taking a week’s holiday and riding the other end of the country to watch the Scottish Six Days Trial! When he had had the James a mere 32 years he proudly wrote to Villers saying how happy he had been with its two-stroke engine. At that time-less than half way through his ownership-it had propelled him over more than 100,000 miles! But to return to the historical records, Bill Shepherd meticulously kept them all. They begin with an individually typed letter from Tinklin and Daish-dated 25/6/29, and signed by Mr. Daish-stating that: ‘we beg to inform you that we have placed an order and hope to be able to notify you of its delivery in the course of a week or so.’ The delivery date was slightly optimistic, but on 15/7/29 Mr. Daish wrote that: ‘We beg to inform you that we now have had delivery of your James motorcycle...We shall be pleased to see you at any time that is convenient to you.’ Bill duly took delivery-he even kept the guarantee card which had been dangling from the handlebars - and registered his purchase with the manufacturers. On the 1st of August, the James Cycle Company sent a typewritten personal acknowledgement promising: ‘Should you at anytime require information, or other assistance, our Services Department will always give you prompt and careful attentions’. How sad that we have abandoned such leisurely courtesy in just one man’s lifetime.” “…I can’t deny that mixing oil with the petrol tends to produce an exhaust haze, but if he’d wanted to Bill Shepherd could have forked out another two quid for Villier’s sophisticated automatic lubrication set-up. Speaking from experience, I think he was wise to opt for the less temperamental petrol system. Anyway, smoke is not a great problem with modern oils, and they have all but eliminated the old two-stroke bugbears of coking up and plug-whiskering.” “…The lighting system is undeniably pathetic. Six-volts and very few watts - direct from the flywheel are shared between a dim 4 volt headlamp bulb in series with an almost invisible 2 volt tail lamp. But otherwise, comparison of the James A9 with a rigid 200cc James from the early Fifties, leads to the inevitable conclusion that our engine and frame manufacturers had been marking time for a quarter of a century. Bill Shepherd would not have been human if he had never considered changing to another motorcycle. But such thoughts would have soon evaporated, because he obviously belonged to the ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’ school. He added a few items to the basic specification on purchase. The carrier was a factory option costing eight schillings and sixpence (42 1/2 p), and the fork dampers were quite an upmarket feature at 18/6 (92 1/2 p) extra. Thereafter, changes to the James’s original specification are few and far between. Notably the silencers are not the originals. Again, speaking from experience with my own James, he may have changed to ones which ere more easily decarbonised. He also swapped the lever throttle control for a twistgrip. Bill apparently initially spurned the factory option of a factory-fitted lighting set (three versions were offered at prices ranging from £1 10s to £5), but within a couple of years he fitted an aftermarket set made by Miller. For the next 60-plus years, Bill Shepherd confined himself to essential maintenance. The original instruction book and spares list are among the documents, and make their own contribution to the historical records. For one thing, they are devoid of the filthy fingerprints that point to the unskilled tinkerer. Equally tellingly, the few items neatly underlined in the spares list show that the only cycle parts he needed were cup and cone bearings for the steering head and the wheels. When Bill Shepherd wrote to Villiers in 1961, he owned up to replacement of a few engine parts. Four sets of small end bushes, piston rings and gudgeon pin end plugs, together with one gudgeon pin and a couple of carburetor needles was the sum total. It was a pretty modest list by anybody’s standards, and at that time he estimated that the James had cost him a penny-farthing (1/2p) per mile to run. Villiers were delighted with the story, and ensured that it ran in both the weekly magazines in May that year. Reliability and economy, what more could somebody obviously unconcerned with speed or status want? And the James continued to deliver more of the same. Amazingly, even today, the James is still on its original bore, and only those gudgeon pin end plugs have needed replacement...again. I’ve heard of other cases where a motorcycle remained in the same ownership for many years, but I’ve never come across a story like Bill Shepherd’s. It bears repeating that for nearly 70 years, the James was his only mechanized transport! Not a family heirloom, not a sentimental relic, not a toy, but an actual working motorcycle. And what makes Mr. Shepherd even more unusual is that while he was still running his old motorcycle because of its reliability and economy, he also realized its historical significance. Bill was an early member of the Bristol Section the Vintage Club; and while others were restoring Big Ports and V-twins for Sunday best, he was actually riding his vintage James day in and day out. As he approached the end of his long life, Bill Shepherd wondered what to do with his unique motorcycle. It would have been unthinkable to entomb it in a museum, or sell it to somebody who would change or not appreciate it. The answer was close at hand. His friends in the Bristol VMCC knew and revered the machine, and Bill simply left it to them in his will so that it would continue to be used in the proper way. He also left them the Rudge cycle, which he kept equally roadworthy and original. So far, six members of the Bristol Section have ridden the James, and it is now in the guardianship of retired electronic mechanic Trevor Wells.” “…Apart from have the unrecognizably scruffy tank re-painted, Section members have done little to the uncomplaining little workhorse, other than pile yet more miles onto a total which must now exceed 150,000! On their advertising material and tank badges, the Birmingham company immodestly referred to their products as the ‘The Famous James’. Sometimes that was a bit far fetched, but if ever a James deserved the adjective, this is the one.”

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.