The Motorcycle Obsession

"OK," I said. "I want one."

"Well, you know, maybe you should ask your wife first."

"She loves Triumphs," I said.

"Still, Chris. You should give it a think. Go home, discuss it with your wife, give yourself a chance to think clearly. After all, this is one of Triumph's most popular models; there's plenty of stock available."

The voice of reason in that conversation was Drew, the salesman at Bevan Motorcycles. He was doing his best to talk some sense into me after my test ride of the 2014 Triumph Bonneville. I was wild-eyed and yammering like a teenage boy who has touched boobies for the first time. This, my friends, is what the Bonneville does to you. It is an instantly rideable, instantly enjoyable, instantly lovable motorcycle that surprises you in just how good a simple motorcycle can be.

The Bonneville, of course, is a storied machine that's been around in one form or another for 55 years. It is a classic. Partially because of that, some part of me was expecting the Bonneville experience to be equally "classic" -- and "full of character," and various other cliches that are tactful ways of saying "not terribly pleasant."

Another reason I thought this is that the Bonneville produces the same amount of power and torque as the Harley-Davidson Sportster 1200: a bike I absolutely loved riding but which had a few "character" issues that would make it difficult for me to love in the long term. Specifically, I am thinking of how unpleasant was riding at high speed, and the Sportster's ergonomic ability to make me sore in all kinds of places (knees and back, primarily).

The Sportster, too, has a heritage extending back to the late 1950s. So, I suppose that's what I was expecting when I hopped on a Bonneville and set out on a quick tour of the Vale of Glamorgan last week. But it turned out to be something rather wonderfully different. The Bonneville is nimble, fun and sexy, feels lighter than its weight would suggest, and is just so damned easy to ride.

Over and over, when the bike leapt to well above the speed limit, when it flowed through curves, when it danced through traffic, when it cruised at 70 mph without strain, I was hit by the impression of just how easy it is to ride a Bonneville. This is what motorcycling is supposed to be. Rather than asserting your will over the fire-driven dandy horse -- as was my experience in riding Harley-Davidsons and is even the case when muscling my Honda CBF600SA through certain tight spots -- you simply connect with it. You think; it does. Simple. Beautiful. Easy. Indeed, those three words sum up the Bonneville perfectly.

Simple

The stock Bonneville is, admittedly, a no-frills affair. You get wheels, an engine, brakes, a seat and not a great deal else. The dashboard consists of an analog speedometer face, within which is contained a small digital odometer. That digital display has two trip settings and a clock. Also within the same face is a tiny low-fuel warning light. Next to the round face are four lights to tell you: when you are in neutral, when your turn signal is on, when your high beams are on, and when you're running low on oil.

There is a tremendous selection of aftermarket goods available for the Bonneville, so a tachometer can be easily had for those keen to spend a few hundred dollars/pounds/euros more.

The aftermarket caveat applies to every aspect of the bike, but in stock form the Bonneville also lacks any wind protection. However, I found this to be surprisingly less bothersome than I would have thought. Perhaps because of the seating position I felt the wind most at my stomach and did not feel a need to keep a death grip on the bars. Leaning forward just slightly made it even more tolerable and I felt I could comfortably handle a solid 40-60 minutes of nonstop motorway riding before needing a tea break. By comparison, I would expect to last 60-90 minutes behind the windscreen of my CBF600SA.

The brakes consist of just two discs -- one up front and one in back -- and there is no anti-lock option available. This is probably my greatest concern about the Bonneville, but the brakes perform so well that I find myself willing to overlook it.

The single seat offers plenty of room to move around when riding, and for a human-sized passenger. It's a good bet passengers will feel more comfortable on the Bonneville than on other bikes because most will be able to touch their feet to the ground. However, it has to be said that the seat is quite firm, as are the standard shocks. I deliberately hit pot holes on my test ride and can confirm that doing so is not terribly pleasant. As a regular cyclist (on a road bicycle that has no suspension), I didn't find it unbearable, but those of a more sensitive nature may want to factor in the cost of a new suspension when considering this motorcycle.

Beyond a grab rail on that seat there aren't a great deal of places to strap things to the standard Bonneville. But, again, the aftermarket comes to the rescue with endless racks and sissy bars and panniers.

Beautiful

There's no denying that the Bonneville is a joy to look at. It is a machine that elicits a sort of warmth and approval from everyone. Or, at least, that seems to be the way of things in Britain. It has a certain quality that draws the eye, that makes you want to trace the lines of the frame and fenders and handlebars. It is the sort of bike that men speak to and whisper "baby" at: "Come on, baby, let's show 'em what we can do."

Jay Leno often says he prefers a motorcycle you can see through, meaning that it is uncluttered by body work, and that is certainly true of the Bonneville. The parallel twin engine serves as a showpiece, with the exhausts swooping forward, then dipping below your feet. Indicators and lights have utilitarian beauty. Everything is there because it's supposed to be. Even when it's not; the carburetors are purely aesthetic on this fuel-injected bike.

I found the sound of the exhaust to be delightful: growling enough to let me know I'm on a motorcycle, to send those silly manly shivers up and down my spine, but not so loud or obnoxious that it would upset my 75-year-old neighbours.

Easy

The Triumph Bonneville has an incredible get-on-and-go quality. With anything -- a car, a motorcycle, a bicycle -- there is a certain space of time in which you adapt from one version to the other. For the Bonneville, that adaptation time consisted of seconds. Everything was just there, it just worked. It felt right. It was instant zen.

The bike weighs 225 kg (496 lbs.), roughly the same as my Honda CBF600SA but somehow manages to wear that weight so much better. That is true both in terms of handling on the road and in physically moving it about. After the ride I hopped off the bike without putting down the kickstand; the bike started to tip but I caught it, one-handed, and comfortably pushed it back upright from an angle that quite possibly would have been the point of no return on my own bike.

And, as I say, the same lightness shows up on the road. Corners and curves were easily navigated; roundabouts suddenly became fun. When I wasn't aiming at pot holes for the sake of testing the suspension, they were no trouble to dance around.

In city sections, filtering was so natural it felt almost like filtering on a bicycle. Jumping from the line (i.e., accelerating from a traffic light) put me well ahead of traffic and out of danger, and did not require rapid gear changing. First gear goes a lot further than on my existing bike, probably even further than I realised because I never heard the engine strain.

Getting up to motorway speeds was, in fact, easier than on my bike and holding that speed put no strain on the engine. Drew, the aforementioned level-headed salesman, made the comment that the Bonneville can "cruise the ton all day" and I'd certainly believe it. I pushed the bike to 90 mph at one point (a) and could tell the engine still had plenty more to give. The engine was not screaming, the way a Sportster does at such speed, nor was there any noticeable vibration (beyond the obvious vibration that would occur on any object travelling that speed).

I felt confident the Bonneville would have no trouble delivering Jenn and I to the beach or a country pub. With a little aftermarket love, it would be equally up to the task of carrying me across the length and breadth of Europe. And certainly I wouldn't be the first one to try such a thing. In looking more into Bonnevilles I find that quite a few people choose them as touring bikes.

And in that sense the Bonneville is easy to transform into whatever motorcycle you want it to be. Need a bike that makes you look cool? This is it. Need a bike you can beat to hell going back and forth across continents? This is it. Need a bike that can zip you through traffic and tiny filtering gaps? This is it. Need a bike that won't look silly in 10 years (as opposed to any sport bike)? This is it. Need a bike you can actually afford? This is it.

Only two complaints

As I alluded to above, the Triumph Bonneville is not the perfect motorcycle. My main issues with it are:
1) I don't own one (yet)
2) Anti-lock brakes are not available.

But for me, the overall experience of the bike is so incredible that I find myself almost willing to overlook my set-in-stone rule for bikes and brakes. I felt totally confident in the Bonneville's standard brakes and I am notoriously cautious in my riding. Perhaps. For such a wonderful machine, perhaps I'd break my old rule...

So, that brings us to the three questions that must be answered in any ride review:

1) Will it fit in my garden?
Effectively this is a question about practicality, i.e., am I able to incorporate this bike into my existing lifestyle? But whether you want to interpret the question literally or figuratively, the answer is yes. It is small enough and manoeuvrable enough to fit into the tiny space that is my garden shed. It is adaptable enough that it can fit my lifestyle.

2) Does it put a grin on my face?
Oh, hell yeah, it does. Salesman Drew had to calm me down. I spent the evening afterward showing pictures of the bike to my wife. I am sitting here, several days later, still grinning.

3) Is it better than my current motorcycle?
Yes. There are a few points my current bike could score on a stock Bonneville in terms of heated grips and wind screen, but these are items that can be added. Beyond that, the only other sticking point is anti-lock brakes. But some part of me feels that perhaps the reason I've been so religious about ABS is that, deep down, I've not really felt 100-percent in control of my CBF600SA, especially in terms of its top-heavy nature. The Bonneville, meanwhile, feels lighter and made me feel more confident. Additionally, it is a better-handling motorcycle than my Honda, the pull of its engine is more thrilling, and its sexiness is infinitely greater.

The Bonneville has shown up quite a few times on my What I Want list. Now that I've finally ridden one I am very, very, very seriously considering taking it out of the realm of wishing and into reality...

_______________

(a)If you are a member of South Wales Police, this is a lie told for entertainment purposes only. I never exceed the speed limit.

2014 Triumph America

Find yourself a sofa -- the comfier the better. Take a seat on the edge of the cushion, in such a way that sweet tushy of yours is supported but your thighs are not. Keeping your feet flat on the floor, now recline your back until it just barely touches the back cushion, but do not put any of your weight on it. At this point you should find your abdominal, back and neck muscles straining to support the weight of your torso. Welcome to the strange core workout that is riding the Triumph America.

It breaks my heart to tell you of how unpleasant is the experience of riding an America. I would almost prefer to lie, or narrowly focus on good things whilst conveniently ignoring any negatives. Like the seat. Golly, that seat is comfy. Oh so lovely and comfy. Sure, it is angled in such a way that you need the abs of King Leonidas to be able to sit on it for more than a few minutes, but in and of itself, it is a great seat.

The reason it breaks my heart to speak ill of the America is that I have loved this bike from the very moment I saw it. Before this blog even existed, the Triumph America was at the top of my wish list. The image of the America served as a nucleus around which my plans to get a bike were formed. Then, about a year ago, I spotted its almost identical twin, the Triumph Speedmaster, in a car park in Bristol and the beauty of the machine almost spoke to me.

The Speedmaster became a go-to dream bike. Search through this blog and you will see it mentioned over and over again -- even more than the Victory Judge or Indian Chief Classic. I love the look of that machine; it is a piece of art. And it was the Speedmaster that I had asked to ride when I went up to Bevan Motorcycles recently. But they didn't have a demo Speedmaster available and offered the America instead.

I happily agreed. After all, the Speedmaster and the America are almost exactly the same bike. Even more so than the Victory Judge and the "new"Victory Gunner. Basically, the only differences are paint and chrome. But because I did not actually ride a Speedmaster, I am going to cling to the desperate hope that it is still, somehow, the perfect bike for me. Whereas the America is not.

In fairness, you could resolve the America's seating issue by simply forking out the extra cash to get a different seat -- one with a back rest, perhaps. There are plenty of aftermarket options available. But the discomfort of the standard ergonomics seemed to open the floodgates for me. Slogging through corners and feeling the ache in my lower back intensify, I found myself having flashbacks to riding the Harley-Davidson SuperLow 883 and the Harley-Davidson Sportster 1200.

In those test rides there had been some intangible thing that had kept me from thinking, "I need this in my life." I loved them, but did not really find myself thinking seriously about replacing my Honda CBF600SA, as I have with the Triumph Bonneville. That intangible thing is this: I don't like cruisers.

Gasp.

I remember exactly where I was when those words formed in my head. Trauma has burned the moment into memory; I almost pulled to the side of the road and wept. Because it is not really that I don't like cruisers, but that I don't like the way they handle. As things to look at and hear, I love them. But as things to ride, I find them awkward and unpleasant.

In fact, so strong is my love for the cruiser aesthetic that I am refusing to accept my own conclusions. I have decided that it is not that I don't like cruisers, but that I don't like cruisers in Britain. Roads here are surprisingly narrow, crowded and in increasingly poor condition (a). Here in Wales, I am willing to bet, not a single road exists that offers a full mile of straight.

So, when you look at a bike like the Triumph America, the clue is in the name: these are machines made for a different country, a different continent, a different attitude. A place of grids and straight lines, where a large hunk of metal with all the responsiveness of a sedated horse makes sense. Take this motorcycle to the smooth, straight back highways of Minnesota or Texas or the like and it will be comfy bliss (assuming you have a backrest).


Only good on British roads if those roads have been closed for photography purposes.

In another place, the America would be a lot of fun to ride. Gears are announced with a reassuring "clunk" and there is a comforting grumble within the bike's stock exhaust. It is loud enough to sound like a cruiser but not so much that it hurts the ears or will damage neighbourly relations. Sitting behind the enormous chrome headlight and gripping the bike's wide bars, I felt a bit like Flash Gordon on his weird flying motorcycle thing. The machine has a commanding presence.

The engine's power is similar to that of the Triumph Bonneville, which is not surprising because, you know, that's what a Triumph America is. Indeed, in some circles the America is known as the "Bonneville America." The engine is exactly the same and pulls with with the same useful strength. You have roughly the same amount of torque as with a Harley-Davidson Sportster but it is delivered in a more pleasant way; you don't feel as if your arms are going to be ripped from their sockets; motorway speeds are comfortably achieved, maintained, and exceeded.

At that speed, the bike made my heart ache for the wide concrete rivers of home. This thing would be so wonderful to ride up to my friend's cabin in Forest Lake, Minnesota, gently navigating the I-35 up from my parents' house in Bloomington, or even trundling up via Highway 61. In the clogged tributaries and streams of Britain, though, constantly shifting was not made easy by the America's stiff clutch and occasionally hard-to-find shifter.

Meanwhile, with the exception of the speedometer, dashboard information is placed on the tank, where it is completely invisible to a rider in motion. What's the point of having a neutral light if you have to be stopped and staring straight down to see it?

Although the bike's weight and bulk made me feel a little more authoritative on the road, it did not leave me feeling as if I could tackle the road with authority. The brakes required more force than I would have anticipated, and on one occasion I found myself floating out into a roundabout because the bike simply was not able to stop in the space I had given it.

And it was more or less at that point that I gave up on the America. In another roundabout I stalled the engine trying to get the bike to jump too quickly from the line and I learned it has a rather stupid safety feature of not being able to start when in gear -- even though I had the clutch pulled in. So, I had to stare down at the tank and dance the shifter until I found neutral, then start it up and put it into gear, by which time the tiny window of opportunity to enter the roundabout had passed and the patience of the driver behind me had utterly dissipated.

I felt frustrated and completely deflated. Maybe my expectations had simply been too high. Having been so near and dear to my heart for so long, maybe no machine could have actually lived up to what I had hoped for the America. But at the end of the ride I found myself quite happy to get off and walk away without so much as a backward glance.

So, you can guess it doesn't fair well in answering my three question test:

Does it belong in my garden?
No. I'd love for it to be there, for me to look at, but it would almost never get used. This is not a bike for this country. I don't fault Triumph for that. In their launch of the latest Thunderbird models they have flat out said they are targeting the United States with their cruisers and aiming to one day be the no. 2 company in the cruiser market there. That's fine. More power to them. And if you are reading this in the United States, I'd suggest giving the America a test ride (just make sure you allocate plenty of space in which to stop). In Triumph's home country, however, these bikes are not fit for purpose.

Does it put a grin on my face?

Yes. That may surprise you to hear me say that. Objectively, though, I enjoyed riding the America. It was a huge disappointment for me because of what I wanted and what I expected, but in and of itself the riding experience is a lot of fun. The engine is smooth and powerful, but just better enjoyed in a standard Bonneville.

Is it better than my current motorcycle?
No. It sounds better, has a (potentially) comfier seat and looks cooler but it is outperformed by my Honda in all the ways that matter to a person riding bad roads on an overpopulated island. In terms of braking and manoeuvrability it is even outpaced by the Harley-Davidson Sportster.

Maybe the Speedmaster is different. Maybe, somehow, it doesn't feel as heavy and the riding experience is more nimble. Maybe, somehow, it stops better. Maybe. Perhaps, though, I'll just hold onto the dream of it as a perfect bike, rather than ever test riding one and risk learning otherwise. The America was enough heartbreak for now.

___________________

(a)Seriously, roads here are awful and many councils have admitted they are simply giving up on maintaining them.

Lake District National Park

When I first applied for my current job, the phrase that stood out to me most in the job description was: "Occasional travel required." My mind looped and soared on the implications of such a statement, because I have always wanted a job that demanded I not stay in just one place. Unfortunately, it turns out my business travelling is rather less occasional than I would like, but, hey, I still get paid to go awesome places.

And in May I'll be going several awesome places back to back, which is resulting in the potential to have quite an awesome adventure. I plan to take my bike.

This will be my first trip to Scotland

I generally think it's a bad idea to mention one's employer on one's blog, but I may have slipped at some point or you may have guessed, so I should stress that standard policy in my office is to travel as sustainably as possible. More often than not, this translates into our getting places via trains and buses. But in working out logistics for this particular trip I've figured out that it will be cheaper, more efficient and thereby create a lesser carbon footprint for me to travel via motorcycle.

Sorry, I just felt obligated to point that out. Anyhoo, in May I'll be heading to Lake District National Park and Perth, Scotland, thereafter. If you're not too hot on British geography, the Lake District is in the northwest corner of England, and Perth is roughly 200 miles further north. Heading there and back (making a deliberate detour through Northumberland National Park) will see me tackling a hearty 1,000 miles.

For those of you playing along in the United States, that round trip from Penarth to Perth and back is roughly the same as the distance from Bloomington (Minnesota) to Bozeman. Or Nacadoches to North Charleston. It is 200 miles greater than the distance from Portland to Provo, and double the distance from San Diego to San Francisco. It is a long-ass stretch, in other words, and will require back-to-back days of riding, as well as covering one-day distances greater than I've ever done before.

I have for a while been working to improve my riding endurance but now I have a specific reason for doing so, as well as the challenge of planning for a big road trip. I've got a solid three months to plan this trip, but even with all that time I feel a little overwhelmed and don't really know where to start. That's where I'm hoping your advice will come into play.

I'm incredibly excited, as I've never really had a chance to explore either place and the conferences I'm attending will allow me to do that. In total, I'm going to be away for eight days. Though, obviously, I won't be riding for the majority of those days. For these conferences I'm going to need business attire, clothes and gear for hiking, and casual clothes. That's going to eat up a lot of space on my bike, so I've decided not to attempt camping on this particular trip.

I probably don't need to pack this much.

Where I'd like your advice is on what else to bring. Rain gear, obviously. And chain lube. I suppose it might be a good idea to bring a tire pump. What else, though? What makes sense, and what should I leave at home?

Additionally, on one day I have no choice but to tackle 250 miles. So, I'm wondering how best to prepare. (Keep in mind that travel time tends to double in the UK over what it would be in the United States, because of the poor state of our roads)

So, what would you do? What would you avoid doing? I'd like to know.

People in cold places love motorcycles.

The other day I read an interesting article on Asphalt and Rubber that highlighted where America's motorcyclists are to be found -- both by volume and per capita. By volume, there is nothing surprising: California, Texas and Florida take the top spots. Shocker. California, Texas and Florida are also the most populous U.S. states.

So, the existence of lots of motorcycles in these states isn't necessarily a comment on the states' consistently good riding weather or the attitudes of people there; it is just a reflection of a large population. More people means more things.

Per capita numbers, however, give a better sense of how popular something is. And in those we find that motorcycles are most popular in South Dakota, New Hampshire and Iowa. One in 12 persons owns a motorcycle in the Mount Rushmore State. Whereas the numbers are 1 in 47 in the Golden State. Sure, the actual number of motorcycle owners in California is almost equal to the entire population of South Dakota, but one could argue that it is in the latter state that motorcycles are more relevant.

Yes, bogglingly, motorcycling is more important in a state that is mostly flat and quite often intolerably cold than in one with famously good weather, world-class mountains and legal traffic filtering. And within that are a certain number of truths that I think say a lot about motorcycling in the United States. Chief among them is that the Upper Midwest is America's motorcycling heart; and it is to there we should look when we ask what motorcycling in the United States is and what it will be.

Asphalt and Rubber offers a list of all 50 states, plus Washington, D.C. Per capita, the top 10 motorcycle-loving states are:

1) South Dakota

2) New Hampshire

3) Iowa

4) Wisconsin

5) Wyoming

6) North Dakota

7) Vermont

8) Montana

9) Minnesota (woot!)

10) Alaska

The states I've highlighted are those which comprise the Upper Midwest: flat states where snow can be found for at least a quarter of the year. Considering that the majority populations of Montana and Wyoming live in similar conditions (that is to say, both states have mountainous regions but most of the states' people live in areas that are flat [a]) I think it's fair to loop them in as well. I can't really speak to Alaska, Vermont and New Hampshire, because I've never visited those states, but it's worth noting that all of the Top 10 states for motorcyclists are those that experience real winters.

So, let's start there in trying to find the similarities, trying to figure out what truths can be offered about the American motorcyclist.

Where I come from, bigger is better.

From growing up in the Upper Midwest, I know that those brutal winters mean that a lot of people don't tend to vacation too far away from home. After suffering months of icy slings and arrows, Upper Midwesterners feel deeply entitled to the good weather of spring and summer. They don't tend to want to "waste" their home state's good days by heading some place else.

And from this you can see the value of a motorcycle. Firstly, what better tool with which to enjoy and indulge in the simple joys of not freezing to death? But secondly, because the average Upper Midwesterner isn't trundling off to, say, Europe, perhaps he or she is more willing to spend money on a vehicle that, for most people, has a limited range (i.e., most people don't tend to ride more than 300 miles in a day, whereas they would cover double that in a car).

Meanwhile, it's a good bet you could thin the population of Los Angeles by at least half by holding a gun to people's heads and asking them to identify the Upper Midwest on a map. And by and large Upper Midwesterners are OK with that. They're Americans, and fiercely proud to be so, but they're content doing their own thing, existing in their own space. They are independently minded in a true sense.

So often, when we say someone is "independently minded" we mean that they are hard to get along with or they don't want to fit in. Upper Midwesterners are perfectly happy to fit in (especially if "fitting in" means drinking beer and eating a lot of heavy foods) but they are accepting of those times when they do not fit in, and relatively tolerant of those who do not fit in with them -- as long as that tolerance goes both ways [b].

In other words, Upper Midwesterners are happy doing their own thing and they are happy doing their own thing. They're not necessarily averse to change or variation, it's just that often they don't see a point in it. And if someone comes along and insists upon a seemingly unnecessary change it can feel irksome. I mean, if I have steak every Thursday and I like having steak every Thursday, why the hell should I listen to someone who butts in and insists that I try salmon en croute? OK, maybe it is good. Fine. But I like steak. I had no problem with eating steak; just go away and let me enjoy my steak.

And inasmuch, is it any wonder that Harley-Davidson is based in the Upper Midwest? Does it not make perfect sense that the region is also home to Indian and Victory?

There is an old saying: "As California goes, so, too, the nation." But in the case of motorcycling I don't think that's true. I think we need to look to the Upper Midwest to understand what motorcycling is and will be in the United States.

The people amongst whom I was raised like heavy, loud machines; they dislike helmets; and that's just how things are. Those can be frustrating truths for people who see the value of a machine like, say, the Honda NC750X -- they simply are not the steak to which Upper Midwesterners have grown accustomed -- but accepting these truths is, I think, the first step toward seeing American motorcycling progress.

So, for instance, if you want to initiate positive changes in handling, performance, fuel efficiency and safety, you have to do it in a way that is palatable to Upper Midwesterners. If you want to see filtering accepted outside a niche of California riders, you have to figure out how to sell it to Upper Midwesterners. If a company is trying to develop products that will pull motorcycling from the hands of old white men, it needs to develop products that will appeal to young Upper Midwesterners. And if the exciting ideas of manufacturers like Brammo and Zero are ever really going to get off the ground, they will need to do so in the Upper Midwest.

Better roads and better weather may be found elsewhere, but America's motorcycling heart is to be found in its geographical centre.

__________

(a)Honestly, Billings, MT, and Fargo, ND, are almost indistinguishable from one another.

(b)My friend, Kristin, is a quintessential Upper Midwesterner. She doesn't care what a person does or thinks, as long as that person never, ever, criticises what she does and thinks.

The Chieftain's fairing is inspired by Streamliner trains.
It is also quite train-like in size!

I got a chance to see the new Indian motorcycles in the flesh today –– both the Chief Classic and the Chieftain. They are incredibly beautiful machines, but great googly-moogly are they massive. It is comically huge. I mean, this thing is gigantic. Colossal. Monumental. It is an informal monster.

Take, for instance, the Streamliner-esque fairing on the Indian Chieftain. It is beautiful and stylish, but it also contains a dashboard larger than that which you would find in an economy car. It is just this whopping great console right in your face. It is so big, and so loaded with bits of information, that I'd be worried about its obstructing my view. Since you really sit "in" a Chieftain rather than on one, it seems the Chieftain's dash would eat up 40 percent of your vision.

The Chief Classic struck me as even more enormous. Its alien laser cannon of a headlight is incredible. In-credible. It is too large to be a credible bit of a bike. I'm pretty sure that headlight assembly is larger than the entire tank on my Honda CBF600SA.

Beautiful and ridiculous. And in that Indian is the most American motorcycle I've ever seen. It is a perfect representation of a beautiful and ridiculous country. There's no doubt that I love both the Chief Classic and the Chieftain, but I'll admit my heart sank a little upon seeing them. Because there is no way in hell I would buy one.

At least not in Britain. As I mentioned in reviewing the Triumph America, cruisers are not well suited to the roads of Her Majesty's United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Omnipresent roundabouts, and needlessly twisty, pothole-ridden narrow roads mean constantly having to shift a bike's weight and launch it into teeny gaps. I suppose a spirited and determined individual could perhaps get away with manoeuvring a small cruiser like the America around (I'm keeping hope alive for one day owning a Triumph Speedmaster), but anything larger is a fool's game.

On this tiny island of rain, I feel the Chief or the Chieftain would be an idiot's game. You could only ever ride the thing on the motorway –– all other roads are too small. Though, in riding back from the dealership I found myself on the motorway and even there thinking how inappropriate are Indian's products for this landscape.

Traffic on the M4 backed up to an almost complete stop for at least 12 miles. I slipped easily between the lanes, filtering, and passed car after car after car after car after car after car. At one point I found myself squeezing through a space in which my shoulder actually touched a semi-truck (it was stopped) and one of the guys in the van opposite (also stopped) said through the window: "Ya got balls of steel, mate."

That, and I've got a bike that can fit in such tight spaces. I'm pretty confident I could have cut the same line through traffic on a Bonneville. I might have been able to do the same on a Harley-Davidson 883. But had I been astride a Chieftain, I would have been several miles back, waiting in line with everyone else.

It got me thinking about what bike Indian will next produce. There are rumours that a new Scout is on the horizon, though only one website has reported the rumour. And there's no idea of when it might exist or what it might be. I know I've talked about this before, but my deep, abiding hope is that Indian will produce a machine to rival the Bonneville and 883 –– a machine that I could actually ride in Britain.

If they don't, I'll have to keep buying Hondas...

Mission RS - Is this the mainstream future?

I tend to get pretty excited by the prospect of electric motorcycles. First of all, there is the fact they sound like a TIE fighter. How could you not want that? Sure, there is something cool about the low-rev grumble of a cruiser, but, dude: a TIE fighter.

Then there is the whole environmental aspect. I've been on the planet nigh 38 years and have seen it change in that time. I have seen cities expand, trees and fields disappear. I have seen former swimming holes turn toxic. I have seen the black dust of car exhaust gathering on my doorstep and eating the mortar of my home. The pessimistic side of me says there's not much I can do, that the best hope is in the fact nature has always proved more resilient than any one species. So, human beings will probably kill themselves off but the toughest of microbes, plants and cockroaches will survive and slowly thereafter reclaim everything and make it beautiful for insentient eyes.

I love motorcycling, I love the freedom and sense of independence it brings, but I will admit it induces in me a certain guilt. Sure, I feel less guilty than if I owned a car -- the fuel-efficiency of my trusty Honda (57 mpg) means less fossil fuel burned. But it would be nice to not burn any (a).

Meanwhile, rapid advances in technology mean that in terms of performance, some electric motorcycles are already capable of beating internal combustion engine bikes. They can be incredible rip-your-arms-from-your-sockets monsters in both torque and horsepower. The Brammo Empulse RR, for example, produces 173hp and 166 lb.-ft of torque. It's that last number that cruiser riders usually point to, the thing they care about. And the Triumph Rocket III, which has the largest production ICE engine on the market, has less torque than the Empulse RR! (b)

So, any time I read a story aboutBrammo or Zero or Mission or Lito Sora or Lightning or Energica or Voxan or Brutus or who knows how many others, I get all excited and think: "This is it! This is the future! And it's almost here!"

I'm not the only one. Many people feel we are only 10-20 years from seeing electric motorcycles as part of the mainstream. That would be an awesome thing because it would mean motorcyclists were leading the way (I think the days of mainstream electric cars are much further away). And certainly it's not an unrealistic prediction. Think back 20 years ago to 1994. Did you or anyone you knew own a mobile phone? I didn't. Did you or anyone you knew use the internet? I didn't; I was still a year from sending my first-ever email. I remember my father coming back from a conference in which they discussed the possibility of one day being able to transmit video to computers and both of us thinking: "But why?"

Twenty years ago, DVDs did not yet exist. CDs were still an emerging technology. And since then, both have peaked in popularity and gone into dramatic decline. So, if you ask me to look forward 20 years, to imagine what my 58-year-old self will be riding around on, I don't find it at all difficult to picture an electric future.

Zero S

But people have been declaring the imminent death of the internal combustion engine since before my parents were born; and there are some serious challenges to overcome. In terms of performance and look electric motorcycles have arrived but four major obstacles stand in the way of mainstream motorcycling acceptance:

Range

Obviously, how hard you push your bike affects how long it will go on one charge. Under ideal conditions, a Zero SR will reportedly deliver 171 miles on a single charge. At highway speed, however, that's reduced to just 88 miles. Fair enough, the Harley-Davidson Seventy-Two of which I am so famously fond won't get you much further than that on a single tank of gas. But it only takes a minute or so to "recharge" the Harley. Getting the Zero back up to 100 percent will take 9.9 hours (on a standard 110V charge). In other words, with the Zero you need to be content doing about 80 miles of riding in a day.

The claimed mileage is similar with most other electric bikes. If you account for the usual jubilant optimism of vehicle manufacturers, it probably means you'd be feeling some deep battery anxiety in trying to ride from one end of the Chicago metro area to the other. And perhaps some people are happy with that. When I was a teenager, rarely doing more than travelling between lakes and girls' houses, that sort of range probably would have suited me just fine.

Most motorcyclists, however, are going to expect a bit more. Though, not terribly much more. From my own experiences and from talking to other people, I'd say that most riders prefer to ride no more 200 miles in a given day. Yes, there are those Iron Butt moto-gods who cover five times that amount. But I think it's fair to say that if a bike could actually and reliably deliver 200+ miles on a charge, many riders would seriously consider it. I certainly would.

And here is where I feel motorcyclists can lead the way to a mainstream electric future. At the moment, electric cars like the Nissan Leaf struggle to deliver the range of lighter electric motorcycles, but even if they could it wouldn't be enough -- we expect more out of our cars. I think they will need to achieve upward of 500 miles on a charge before they are accepted as mainstream transportation options.

The good news for motorcyclists is that there is already one electric motorcycle company claiming that all-important high mileage capability. The Brutus V9 claims an impressive range of 280 city miles and 210 on the highway. I'm assuming it has a bigger range simply because it is bigger. It is the only electric motorcycle I know of that is built as a cruiser, which allows for more space to hold batteries. If it really can deliver 210 highway miles I would want it as my next bike.

Cost

Or, well, what I just said about the Brutus isn't entirely true. I think it's a relatively cool-looking bike and I suspect I could live with its range, but there's no way in hell I'll buy one. Or, indeed, any electric bike. Not at the moment, at least, because they are ungodly expensive. Take the aforementioned Zero SR, for example.

Brutus V9

In spirit and styling, I feel its closest internal combustion engine competitor would be something like the Yamaha MT-07. The SR has more torque, and the MT-07 has a little more power, but, you know, close enough. If you wanted the version of the SR that can manage 88 highway miles you will need to fork over $19,500. The MT-07, meanwhile, is not yet sold in the United States, but, if you did a straight conversion of its UK price, would cost only $8,500.

That Brutus V9, meanwhile, with its larger range, will cost a whole hell of a lot more. The small-engined version will set you back $32,500. Considering that the Zero SR increases in price by 14.7 percent when you go with the long-range option, that means a 210-mile-capable Brutus would cost at least $37,200. In its look the Brutus V9 reminds me just a teeny bit of the Harley-Davidson Street Glide. That machine will set you back $20,400 and almost certainly has dozens of features superior to those offered by Brutus. Meanwhile the super-fast Mission RS electric sport bike will knock you back $59,000.

Oh, sure, in the United States you get a $2,500 credit for purchasing an electric vehicle but that hardly makes a dent. The price difference between electric and ICE is so extreme that to purchase the former you have to either be an idiot or so rich you no longer comprehend the value of money.

The good news is that the cost of electric bikes is very slowly dropping (very slowly) and the strong competition between brands may help a little more. But as a consumer, if I take into account the issues over range I can't help but feel that electric should actually be cheaper. At the very least, an electric bike needs to cost roughly the same as its ICE equivalent. I'm willing to inconvenience myself for the sake of the planet, but this level of inconvenience would make me bankrupt.

Infrastructure

One of the greatest inconveniences in owning an electric bike at the moment would be figuring out where to charge it. I mentioned above that it takes 9.9 hours to charge a Zero SR on a standard 110V charge. That's the sort of charge you would get from plugging the bike into a wall socket at home, as if it were an appliance. This time can be reduced to 5.8 hours if you install a 220V hookup in your home similar to that used by a washer or dryer.

Charge time can be reduced even further by hunting down a CHAdeMO station. This is the type of system used by the Nissan Leaf and is probably the fast-charging system that will, eventually, be used by all electric vehicles. Though, it is not at present. Different manufacturers use different systems. So, the very first hurdle to overcome in terms of infrastructure is getting manufacturers to accept a universal method of charging.

Once that's accomplished it will be easier to ensure enough charging points exist. It seems reasonable to me to say that charging points need to be at least as prevalent as gas stations, if not more so. At the moment, charging points are few and far between. I just checked a map and the number of charging points here in South Wales can be counted on one hand. In my beloved Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul things are markedly better but there exists yet another problem: where the charging points are located.

Brammo Empulse

If you can find a CHAdeMO charging point, Zero says it will take just 90 minutes to get your SR back on the road. Allegedly, CHAdeMO is word play on a Japanese phrase that means, "How about some tea?", which offers an idea about where charging points should be located.

Bringing electric vehicles into the mainstream will require a shift in thinking about "refuelling" a vehicle. At present, charging points are often located at gas stations and car dealerships. But who in their right mind wants to just hang out at a car dealership for an hour and a half? On a regular basis?! Instead, charging points should be set up outside restaurants, coffee shops and shopping centres -- places where people can leave their bike charging whilst doing something else. It is really only then that one can honestly start to imagine electric motorcycles as a part of the mainstream. Credit to Ikea for already having figured this out.

Home viability

But even once you have your affordable electric motorcycle that is capable of 200+ miles, which you can leave charging outside your favourite restaurant while you take in a leisurely lunch, there's still a big problem: what do you do with the bike when you get it home?

If you own your own home and have a garage, the answer is: put it in the garage and plug it in. Simples.

But the majority of people -- especially those in urban areas, where an electric motorcycle makes the most sense -- do not live in houses. They live in flats or apartments or condominiums or town houses, etc. And as such they are unlikely to have a spot where they can conveniently run an extension cord out to a motorcycle. That would be especially true here in the United Kingdom, where even people with homes often do not have places to park a car or motorbike, since many homes were built long before anyone invented a reason to have a driveway.

And when I look at the issue of viability, along with the other obstacles facing electric motorcycles, I can't help but lose a certain amount of my enthusiasm. Suddenly, the electric future seems quite a bit further away. Things can change, infrastructure can be built and attitudes changed, but when you take everything in it certainly seems like a lot of work.

Maybe my 57-year-old self won't be whizzing around on a TIE fighter after all...

__________

(a)A common response to the green claims of electric vehicle proponents is to point out, correctly, that most electricity is generated in plants that produce all kinds of carbon. But if you live in a deregulated market like the UK, you can choose your provider and thereby the type of energy you use. Jenn and I get our power from a green energy provider.

(b)Admittedly, not much less. The Rocket III produces 163 lb.-ft of torque.

You know what would be really clever? If Harley-Davidson dealerships could issue false invoices that you could show to your wife. So, you could come home with, say, a $15,000 motorcycle but produce for your life partner a receipt claiming you had paid only $9,000.

"Yeah, babe," you could say. "I talked 'em down."

In truth you would have paid full price, plus the Stage 1 tax, but your wife would never know. Except for your refusal to buy new clothes for the next decade or so.

In fairness, this is not something I would need for my wife. Recently I found myself thinking very seriously about getting a Triumph Bonneville, and even got all the way to the point of scheduling an appointment to go in and work out the financing. Over and over I gave Jenn the opportunity to kill the decision by telling me it was impractical. But her argument was that owning a motorcycle is in its nature sort of an emotional thing, so it's difficult to discuss the issue of practicality. She was supportive of the idea and, I suspect, looking forward to riding on the back of a Triumph. In the end, it was fate that waved me off the plan. My office was hit with lay-offs and though I'm not under threat I felt it best to wait until I'm sure I'm not under threat.

Maybe in autumn. Maybe in winter. Maybe next spring. We'll see. But not getting the Bonneville has initiated some heavy rumination on whether it's really the bike I want. I mean, no ABS. That is a real problem for me.

Last summer, I found myself making use of the anti-lock brakes on my Honda CBF600S when approaching a semi-truck at high speed on a typically gravel-strewn Welsh road. In thinking about the ABS-less Bonneville I tried to tell myself that I had been particularly inattentive that day and that I was really green in terms of riding. But the fact is, I am still pretty green and you cannot choose your panic situations. Every time I mention anti-lock someone rolls out a story about some MSF super-pro who can stop faster on standard brakes. But I'm not that guy, and that guy is not me. He's got 30 years of experience and is stopping under ideal conditions; he's not an easily distracted newbie in Wales, in the rain, on a tiny road that has been abandoned by maintenance teams.

And really, it is stupid and lazy that Triumph has not equipped the Bonneville with anti-lock brakes. The technology exists on all of the company's other models and as of 2016 will be legally required as a standard feature for all motorcycles sold in the European Union. Really, Triumph should have by now accepted the way of things and added the feature. Harley-Davidson has with all of its bikes.

You were wondering when this was going to get back to Harley-Davidson, weren't you?

I know that I keep saying cruisers aren't terribly well suited to UK roads but I don't seem willing to believe it. I don't want to believe it. I want to ride a cruiser. Surely it must be possible; according to a recent story I read on VisorDown, there are nigh 41,000 Harley-Davidson motorcycles on UK roads. And lately I've found myself thinking a lot about the Harley-Davidson Sportster 1200: the bike I got a chance to test ride last August.

I think a lot about how my riding style has developed since then, how I'm far more comfortable in terms of manoeuvring, road position, etc. I'm more confident in my actions, more sure of what I'm doing, and better tuned to the general experience of riding a motorcycle. And with this knowledge I find myself looking back at my criticisms of the Sportster:

I didn't like the fact that it did not have anti-lock brakes. But a week or so after my test ride, Project Rushmore was launched and over here in Europe ABS became standard on all Harley-Davidson models.
I felt the Sportster was a bit heavy. But not so heavy that I was really uncomfortable. Indeed, I filtered through traffic on my test ride -- the bike's low centre of gravity gave me confidence. And the fact is, at that time I was really green and still often feeling awkward on my Honda. So, it is entirely possible -- in fact, likely -- that I now wouldn't be too greatly affected by the Harley's girth. Or I could very quickly adapt. Either way, I think the Sportster is just "small" enough to manage a solid 90 percent of the traffic filtering situations that I tackle on my present bike. And for those other situations there's an argument that the presence of a Harley-Davidson would open up traffic gaps more effectively than the presence of an economy Honda.
I didn't like the fact that the Sportster is air-cooled. But, dude, I live in a country that is always cold. I can think of several times over the past few months when I would have loved to be able to reach down and warm my hands on a H-D engine.
I didn't like the fact that it does not have a tachometer or other dashboard information. But again: Project Rushmore. The Sportster set up now comes standard with a digital tachometer and gear indicator.
I didn't like the fact the Sportster has no wind protection. OK, I still don't really like that. But that wasn't stopping me from wanting a Bonneville. And, of course, the H-D extras catalogue offers dozens of screen options.
I didn't like the fact it doesn't get good gas mileage. But, turns out I was talking without checking facts on that one. According to Fuelly.com the Sportster gets similar MPG to my present bike (less but not a whole lot less).
I wasn't sure I'd like the engine's sound over long periods of riding. But at the time I wasn't regularly wearing ear plugs when riding. It's a good bet I now wouldn't notice (I am that one person who doesn't feel a Harley-Davidson needs to be any louder, so I wouldn't install new pipes).

Also, apparently unique to H-D dealerships, I was treated really well by Swansea Harley-Davidson. And being treated well is the sort of thing that sticks with you. It makes you want to return. If you're treated really well, it makes you want to find ways to spend money.

And the more time I have to ponder upon the thing, the more I find myself thinking: "Yeah, actually, that Sportster was an OK machine. Maybe, just maybe, I'd like to have one of my own."

The view from my house, before things got bad.

Fog is a part of the British experience. It works its way into countless Charles Dickens and Arthur Conan Doyle tales, serving as a sort of plot device to allow terrible things to be done unseen. In the late 19th century and early 20th century, pollution-laden fogs known as pea soups brought inhalant death. In 1952, a crippling fog that hung over London from the 5th to the 9th of December ended up killing upward of 12,000 people.

Even without pollution the fog kills. In 1991, a heavy fog in Berkshire resulted in a 51-car crash that killed 10 people. In 1997, a 160-car fog-induced pile up killed three people in Worcestershire. Just a few years ago, seven people were killed in a 51-vehicle crash that occurred within a great abyss of fog and smoke from a nearby bonfire.

That last one took place just a few miles from where I was headed Thursday night.

I was going to Bristol, to a literary event at Cube, in the city's centre. Lately I have been trying desperately to kick start my literary career, trying to make happen my dream of being a professional author (rather than just someone who writes a lot) and part of that process is forcing myself to attend things like this.

Most literary events in Cardiff are poetry-driven and I hate poetry. I'm a prose guy. So, I widened my net and found events in Bristol and Bath. And, in a way, that feels appropriate. I am trying to make something happen, wanting to put my all into this goal, so why not drive 50 miles just to be able to listen to some folks read some things what they wrote? And why not do it in the fog?

When I woke up on Thursday my phone's weather app claimed the fog would burn away and yield to brilliant sunshine within a few hours. Those few hours passed, the fog remained, and the weather app updated to say that the fog would burn away in a few more hours. And on and on through the day. Looking out my window at work I watched the building across the road disappear and reappear into grey-white mist but the fog never lifted.

You will, know, of course, that riding in heavy fog is poop. Give me rain over fog any time. In rain, at least, the water pushes along the curve of my helmet's visor and my vision isn't too badly affected. From time to time I may need to wipe the visor with a glove but generally progress continues unimpeded. The mist of fog, however, attacks the visor. It covers every micro-pixel of vision with watery residue and leaves me hurtling forward into a complete unknown. You can wipe it away but usually it will return even before you put your hand back on the handlebar.

Sitting in my office in Cardiff, I considered abandoning the event, but traffic cameras on the Severn Bridge, which I had to cross en route to Bristol, showed clear sky, so I decided to head out –– the last fragments of daylight fading away as I began my way toward the M4.

For those of you playing along at home, the route from Cardiff to Bristol is: A48 to the M4, across the wide and tumultuous Severn delta, then down the M32 to the heart of Bristol. The Severn Bridge is a mile long and crosses over a river with the second highest tidal range in the world. There are times when the tide changes so dramatically that it causes a phenomenon known as the Severn Bore–– a great rolling wave that pushes for miles and miles. Here's a video of some surfers riding the Severn Bore for roughly 20 minutes. None of this has anything to do with my ride. I just find it really interesting.

Crossing over the Severn was uneventful. It had turned dark but visibility was good. Someone from Minneapolis would say the traffic was heavy; someone from Bristol would say it was light. I moved along easily until just before the exit for the M32. Then, suddenly, rolling out from the trees, a great, heaving mist swallowed up the road. Brake lights illuminated in the cloud, everyone slowed and I thought of that crash just a few years ago. I kept an eye on my mirrors, searching for whatever might be coming up behind, and another eye on every available gap ahead of me –– every possible route of escape.

I flipped up my visor to allow myself to see. Within a second my face was completely wet, my eyes watering from the wind and the cold. The fog was rolling in great plumes and I couldn't even read the road signs as I passed underneath them. Within a few minutes, the traffic had come to a complete stop. I slipped into a corridor between two rows of cars and began to filter along at 20 mph, through an eerie tunnel of hazy orange and red and white light. It was quiet, and even though I was riding through endless rows of cars and trucks and buses I felt totally alone.

In hindsight, I am particularly glad I had chosen beforehand to park at Cabot Circus, a large shopping area about half a mile from Cube. Sure, I could have parked closer to the place I was going but Cabot Circus has an enormous, well-lit, safe parking structure that is easy to find. I had never gone to Cube before and didn't want to be riding around in a busy city in the dark, amidst notoriously impatient British drivers, trying to find a good place to put my bike. The fog ended up reinforcing this decision. As did the discovery that Cube is atop a rather steep hill, and the road leading to it is narrow and cobblestoned.

Additionally, Cabot Circus parking for motorcycles is great. There is a designated space for bikes between two low concrete walls, which means cars can't get near your bike to accidentally knock it over. Additionally there is railing to chain your bike to, and lockers that are specifically for helmets and gloves. There are attendants walking around all the time, it is clean and very well-lit. Oh, and motorcycles are allowed to park there for free. Choose Cabot Circus for all your motorcycle parking needs.

But walking half a mile to Cube resulted in an extra adventure later in the evening. As the event was taking place a heavier fog rolled in, turning the city into the stuff of Victorian horror fiction. When I stepped out of the building, I could barely see across the beer garden. Within a few steps of walking down the cobblestone road I was totally disoriented; there was nothing ahead of me, nothing behind me –– just a mysterious orangeness from unseen street lights. I got down to a road wide enough for two cars and couldn't see across it. There were voices of people going about their evenings but all of them unseen. And soon I was lost. I found myself having to stand almost within touching distance of shops, staring at them and thinking: "Did I pass this way?"

The enormous roundabout I had walked across to get to Cube, the towering Holiday Inn I had passed, the courts building -- all of them had been swallowed whole by the fog. A group of guys emerged from the nothingness singing "Flower of Scotland." I walked past them, then felt perhaps I was going the wrong way. I turned around and they were gone but for their voices bouncing off unseen buildings. Eventually, I had to navigate back to my bike using the Google Maps on my phone: eyes down, watching the little arrow move toward its destination and hoping the signal was accurate, that I really was where the phone thought I was.

I did make it back to the bike. I took my time getting geared up, and clicked on the sat-nav ("GPS" for those of you playing along at home) to guide me home. I couldn't see road signs or landmarks. I had to put all faith in the 4-inch screen of a TomTom.

According to that screen, the road I was on had a 70 mph limit. I was uncomfortable going more than 30. My visor was up and the freezing mist stung my soaking-wet face. I flicked on my hazard lights and slipped on and on into the ethereal unknown, keeping an alert eye on whatever might be coming up behind me.

Before long, the streetlight-orange tint disappeared. I was far enough away from the city centre that there were no street lights. Now it was just darkness. I was a tiny ball of white and orange light, the blinking lure of a deep-sea monster. There was no sky. No anything. Every once in a while, a great wall of light would come up from behind me and slowly, slowly a car would pull up in the lane next to me. I would look over at the driver, staring intently into the nothingness, and ease off the throttle to make sure we weren't riding abreast. Everything was quiet, and slowly they would slip away.

I thought of the stories of the Mabinogion -- Celtic tales from more than 1,000 years ago -- and the heavy fog that would descend upon entering Annwfn, the other world. I watched the cars' tail lights fade and imagined them as eyes of the hounds of Gwyn ap Nudd, out hunting for mortal souls.

A group of Harley enthusiasts smash up a Honda.
No doubt the Honda still ran afterward...

"Sounds to me the CBF600 has everything you want in a bike except for the image you seem to be looking for."

That's a comment from Steve Johnson in response to a previous post about reconsidering my opinion of the Harley-Davidson Sportster. It's always interesting when someone is able to do that: when they're able to deliver an absolute truth in a single sentence. When they're able to get at something about you faster and more directly than you could.

Because, yeah, what he said is pretty much dead on.

The other night, I found myself riding along the motorway in the clear quiet of late evening. It was the middle of the week, the moon was out, and I had the road pretty much all to myself –– to the extent I was able to relax a little, to expand my thoughts beyond the constant spinning of: "What's in front of me? What's behind me? What's beside me? How's the road surface? How fast am I going? What's in front of me? What's behind me? What's beside me? How's the road surface? How fast am I going? What's in front of me? What's behind me? What's beside me? How's the road surface? How fast am I going?"

I was able to look up at the vastness of the night sky, take in the gentleness of my Honda's 6,000-rpm thrum, appreciate the constant steady feel of the motorway, and so on. I was able to enjoy motorcycling on that very basic, "natural" level. And in that moment I looked down at the glowing dashboard of my bike and said with melancholy: "There's absolutely nothing wrong with you."

It was a statement made with a feeling of sadness because, even as I'll sit here and acknowledge that the bike I have is, technically, the bike I want, I'll also tell you that I am actively plotting to get rid of it. There's no reason to get rid of it. On paper, it ticks all my boxes. It can do all the things I want it to do, and it can do them well. But it lacks that something, that whatever it is, that je ne sais quoi.

I thought about this as I sped along the cold and empty M4: the dichotomy in my thinking about motorcycles. Ask me what I want in a motorcycle and I will usually end up describing something like the Honda CBF600 SA –– the bike I have. But if you change the wording of the question slightly and ask not, "What do you want in a bike?", but instead, "Which bike do you want?", then mention of the CBF600 and its ilk (such as the Yamaha XJ6 or Suzuki SV650S) will completely disappear.

This, I decided, is the Great Harley-Honda Dilemma. The battle between heart and mind, between art and reason, between style and substance. And it is a dilemma I find myself incapable of resolving. It is a dilemma that extends across every brand of motorcycle (would I prefer a Yamaha or a Moto Guzzi?), but that I think is best represented in the differences between those two massive brands sharing the eighth letter of the alphabet.

The Honda NT700V ~~Snoozeville~~ Deauville
A great machine, but not likely to help you score.

We're painting in broad strokes here, of course. But overall, Honda machines occupy that left side of the brain. They are machines –– things that do. And in the case of Honda, things that do quite well. A particularly keen long-time reader of this blog might have noticed that I no longer refer to my bike as "Aliona." It was a too-exotic name that just didn't fit. The CBF600 is a piece of machinery. It is an object of function with wheels and gears and metal and plastic and rubber. It sits without sentience in my garden until I make it do something. It is a large chunk of invariant mass, and nothing more.

In truth, the exact same is true of a Harley-Davidson. But it doesn't feel that way. A Harley-Davidson has a certain intangible something, or an idea of something –– a spirit. You may not like that spirit. You may think that spirit is one of corporate nonsense. But most people agree that there is something there, as if there is an extra, magical ingredient in the paint: an aura to which a rider can connect on varying degrees, depending on desire to connect.

That's a big part of what Harley-Davidson sells: story. Triumph and Indian do the same thing –– the mystique of "authenticity." Even when that "authentic" and "classic" American or British machine was manufactured last week in India.

I have a relative who fixes clocks for a living. People come to him with little boxes of gears and springs that are in some cases hundreds of years old and he returns them to working order. The other day he was telling me about how each of these clocks have a personality of sorts.

"I don't mean that you carry on conversations with them or any such thing," he said. "But it's as if they carry a residue of experiences. You get the same thing with old watchmaker's tools. Bits will have been worn away by human hands and in some inexplicable way you can feel the story of those hands."

This past weekend was the first time I had met this relative. He is the husband of the daughter of the wife of the uncle of my wife; it generally requires a very large family gathering to run across a relative so extrinsic. But my wife had been keen for us to meet because he, too, is a motorcycle enthusiast. Able to list off an alphabet soup of sport bikes he has ridden and crashed, he grew far more poetic in talking about the 1995 Harley-Davidson Low Rider that he had ridden from England down through France across the Pyrenees into Spain and back.

The New Harley-Davidson Low Rider
The brakes should be a little better now.

That Harley had a front brake that was "useless" in the rain and a rear brake that was "either on or off, no in between," but he loved it. That bike was more than a machine, it was a symbiotic narrative device telling a story about the rider, who was at the same time helping to write the story.

I sound like I should be working in H-D's marketing team, don't I? But there's a certain truth of it. That kind of motorcycle is one that is easier to make "your own." You see it in just the options available for customisation. The ways in which you can change the look of such a bike are practically limitless. For example, let's say I give in to my desire to buy a Sportster and thereafter decide that I, too, want to ride to the mountains of Spain. A quick look at VikingBags.com shows me some 54 different types of saddlebag to suit the Harley-Davidson XL1200.

Whereas there is just one universal saddlebag option for bikes like my CBF600. On a side note, Viking Bags recently sent me a set of those AXE saddlebags for my bike and I plan to use them on my trip to the Lake District next month. I'll do a full review of the bags thereafter.

Also, temporarily sticking with the whole saddlebag theme and the idea that the multifariousness of bags somehow equates to the dynamism of a bike's character, it's worth noting that Honda sells far more cruiser models in the United States than here in Her Majesty's United Kingdom and the corresponding luggage options for those cruisers are equally diverse.

And I suppose that speaks to a possible response to all this ethereal Harley blather suggesting that Hondas are without personality and spirit and story. First of all, there are many different types of Honda; perhaps I've just not encountered the ones that are true storytellers.

Or maybe Hondas simply tell a different story. Imagine two motorcyclists pulling up to a set of traffic lights: one is astride a brand new Harley-Davidson Road King Classic, the other is sitting on a brand new Honda F6B. Be honest with yourself: if you were told that one of those riders was an advanced riding instructor, which one would you say is which?

The Honda "spirit", I feel, is one of efficiency –– of having all the right tools in the right order. True professionalism. And I'll admit that appeals to me as much as the "Being your own person (in a very corporate way)" message of Harley-Davidson. I look at a bike like the new CTX1300 and I think: "That's the guy I want to be. I want to be riding around on my CTX, wearing all the right gear and always prepared with Leatherman tools and multi-use lubricants. I want people to look at me and think: 'That guy really knows his stuff.'"

There's something appealing about that. About being Mr. Prepared. Mr. Efficient. Mr. Johnny On the Spot. I like having anti-lock brakes. I like having wind protection and lots of backlit dials on a dashboard. But then, there's also something appealing about the guy on a rumbling machine, not really knowing or caring where he's headed. The Great Harley-Honda Dilemma. Which story do I want to tell?

And do I really need any specific bike to tell it?

Honda NM4 Vultus

EDIT: This bike is set to arrive sooner than any of us would have thought. My local Honda dealer is already taking orders.

"Sometimes we make a certain machine simply because we can and because we want to." -- Keita Mikura, project leader for the Honda NM4 Vultus.

First of all, take a moment to think about just how bad ass that statement is. Sometimes Honda makes a certain motorcycle simply because it can. Because it is bigger and better than everyone else in the game. Who's this bike for? Who cares? Honda will build it just because it can. Has Harley-Davidson ever done that? Would it? Could it? Nope. Nope. Nope.

Honda can. Honda does. That is rock n' roll. That is Bob Dylan saying "Play it fucking loud" in response to the folk purists who called him Judas for plugging in his guitar. That is when arguments of the Great Harley-Honda Dilemma fall apart. Because maybe those of us who think Honda isn't cool are just so stupid and so stuck in a singular mindset we just can't see it.

And perhaps that's something to keep in mind if this blog post is the first time you've heard of the Vultus. I'll admit that my first reaction was something of a groan. I saw a little picture of the bike on the CycleWorld website when reading a ride review of the Harley-Davidson Street 750 (really a shame to hear the brakes are so crap), and I thought to myself: "What is that? I don't even."

But the next day, I looked at it again and I decided the Vultus is, in the craziest sort of way, a really cool motorcycle. Really cool. Take a moment to stare at it. Here's a large image of it: take a moment to really examine the bike. Look at every feature; it grows on you, doesn't it? After the initial visual shock something creeps into you and thinks: "Ooh, I want to ride that thing."

Shotaro Kaneda and his bike

Upon reading of the philosophy behind it -- that some dudes at Honda were sitting around watching Akira and thinking: "Dude, Shotaro Kaneda's bike is awesome. We should build that bike. No, dude, we should totally build that bike! Simply because we can and because we want to." -- I found myself liking it even more.

For instance, I like the idea of a lit-up dashboard. Perhaps it's a cheesy gimmick, but the Vultus has LED highlight trim on the dash that can be adjusted in 25 different shades to suit the rider's mood. That strikes me as pretty cool. I realised I like this sort of thing recently, when riding at night with my sat-nav on ("GPS" for those of you playing along in the United States). The eerie glow from the screen added to the feeling of being ethereal as I glided along the M4 toward home. I can just imagine sitting "in" the Vultus and speeding through the night with an LED glow just at the bottom of my field of vision.

Well, you know, speeding as fast as 54 bhp will carry you. The Vultus engine is the same one used in the popular NC series of bike (e.g, the NC750X): a 745cc parallel twin that's fuel-efficient and placed in such a way to create a low centre of gravity.

Like the NC series, the Vultus also comes with a fair bit of integrated storage. That huge front end is not just for show; there are compartments on either side of the fairing, one of which offers a 12v DC adaptor with which to charge phones or the like. There are also some pretty slick, seamlessly fitting panniers that can come with the bike, furthering the futuristic, covered-up look. It's hard to tell from photos whether it will also have the instead-of-a-tank compartment that exists on the NC750X and NC750S (a). If it does, this thing will be a beast for storage. And if all the bike's storage were not enough, imagine how cool it would look with a Kriega bag or two strapped to the back.

To fit the bike's futuristic look are a number of modern bells and whistles. Study the bike's dashboard and you'll see there are lights indicating it comes with anti-lock brakes and electronic traction control; heated grips are available as an extra. Honda's press release says the Vultus will get 66 mpg.

Coming in at 540 lbs., the Vultus weighs about 60 lbs. more than the NC750X, but with all that storage space I guess it's to be expected. And having kicked the tires of the latter machine, I'm pretty sure the Vultus' low centre of gravity will mean additional weight is hardly noticeable.

Honda NM4-02 -- the Vultus with panniers

All of this makes me think the Vultus would be the perfect tool for a road trip: fuel-efficiency and storage galore, combined with a massive front end to block the wind. Seating is feet-forward, so you very much sit "in" the bike in a cruiser-like, sitting-on-the-sofa position. If you've read my review of the Triumph America, you'll know I have my doubts about sitting in such a position because there's no support for your back. Honda has remedied this by having a passenger seat that flips up to serve as a backrest. Additionally, the backrest can be adjusted a bit to suit people of different heights.

Honestly, the more I look at this bike, the more I like it -- the more excited I am about the idea of it. I want it to exist now, so I can test ride one. Though, as I say, it took me a while to come around to that way of thinking. And perhaps therein is one of the most appealing aspects of the Vultus: for some people it is simply beyond their capacity for comprehension. It is future beat poetry and they will never get it. You can see this in the comments sections of websites that have done stories about the bike. Some people respond to it with such intense vitriol you'd think the Vultus had bullied them as a child.

It would be kind of cool to own a machine with that sort of punk spirit. Perhaps I'd add a different exhaust to give it a little more growl than Honda would likely allow such a machine to have. I could give it the Shataro treatment and put a load of stickers across that wide front. Rolling around on that thing, I would be pretty damned unique.

That all said, however, there are some possible drawbacks to this bike:

1) It has a chain. Look at this machine, yo. Does the chain look at all easy to access? Honda says in its media release that it is targeting young, tech-savvy types with the Vultus; is that really a demographic you think will want to get its hands dirty? By covering everything up, Honda clearly expects people to adapt a "take it to a mechanic" attitude toward maintenance and service. But does it actually expect people to go to a mechanic every 600 miles? This thing should be belt drive or shaft drive.

2) It has Dual-Clutch Transmission. I've written about automatic transmission motorcycles before and as I said then, I'm not inherently against them. In fact, living in a country where we are so tightly packed in that one is constantly shifting gears, I can really see the benefit of life without a clutch. Especially considering that Honda's dual-clutch transmission is not CVT; there are real gears and real revs and the real feel of a "real" motorcycle. In his review of the Honda CTX1300, Adam Waheed even laments the absence of DCT in that particular model, saying the feature offers "thrilling acceleration."
I've read positive reactions to Honda's DCT system in other reviews, as well. Plus there's the fact that if you really feel so inclined, you can shift the gears with buttons on the grip. In which case, really all you're doing is transferring control of the gears from your left foot to your left hand. But, still, there's some nagging part of me that persists in thinking: "Gee, I don't know..."
Maybe that's just me being an old man, lambasting the new or the different solely because it's new or different. That kind of mindset is how you end up with 90s nostalgia (b). Or maybe I'm not secure enough in my manhood and subconsciously believe that my ability to flick a piece of metal with my foot is a statement of virility. Whatever my hang up, I'd need a decent test ride to really make up my mind on DCT.

The dash of the Honda NM4 Vultus

My concern about the DCT on the Vultus, though, is simply in placement of the buttons. Take a look at the picture on the left; you may want to click on it to enlarge the photo to be able to study it. When you do, focus on the left grip. There, you see buttons for shifting up in gear (the button on the back of the housing which would be pulled with your index finger), high and normal beams, hazard lights, horn, signals, and down shifting. That's a lot of crap in one space.
If you've ever ridden a Honda, you'll know that the signal and horn buttons are pretty close together, and that signals are cancelled by pushing the button in. This means that if you are wearing winter gloves, or are just being a bit lazy, you will occasionally find yourself honking the horn to alert everyone that you've completed your turn, i.e., you accidentally push both buttons at once. So, what happens when the down shift button is there?

3) She's a big girl. According to the Honda media release, the Vultus is 3 feet wide from mirror tip to mirror tip. That's quite a lot of space, yo. Great for wind protection, but not so much for filtering. I suppose it won't matter in places like the United States, where the practice is no-go in 49 of 50 states, and will help add to visibility. But here in the Soggy Nations, one of my favourite aspects of motorcycling comes in being able to squeeze through traffic.

4) Only 54 bhp, though. I don't want to be a horsepower snob. The fact is, I'm not the sort of person who goes all that fast in the first place. I still have not pushed to the 100 mph mark. My CBF600 is fully capable of hitting t least 150 mph, but its rider is a little shy of such things. But, still. Only 54 bhp. With all its luggage and such, I'd expect to use the bike for road trips; would it have enough horsepower to manage long stretches of motorway/freeway? I'd like to see at least 10 bhp more, if not 20.

5) They should have kept the original name. Apparently, Honda originally planned to call this bike the Blackcrow, which is a pretty bad-ass name.

__________

(a)EDIT: I've found a photo that suggests it does not have tank storage but, in fact, just a gas tank.

(b)My Facebook is littered, nay befouled, by people I went to high school with incessantly posting links to witless Buzzfeed-esque lists positing the idea that the early 1990s were somehow the golden era of anything. When the fact is, it was a terrible, lulling decade for everything. No, genuinely, everything. Take music for example: things were so bad that we thought the discordant feckless caterwauling of Nirvana was cutting edge.

You could have been mine...

I never really told the story of my almost buying a Bonneville, did I? Back in February, I took a test ride on the Triumph Bonneville and was instantly enamoured with the idea of owning one. Triumph's TriStar financing would have been necessary to make it happen. The sales guy drew up a quote for me and I went home to mull it all over.

In my retelling of the test ride on this blog, I took a little literary license in expressing my enthusiasm. I would like to point out that, in fact, I had arrived at the dealership having already decided I would not make any buying decisions on the day.

Still, I did love the bike, and it took a while after I got home for me to get my head into a balanced state to really consider things. First off, there's that whole issue of financing; I'm not against paying for things on credit, but all those years I lived with a Mormon (they don't see debt as outright sin, but they're pretty strongly against the idea where it can be avoided) had their effect. Also there was the issue of no anti-lock brakes, and the Bonneville's rather stiff suspension. I waffled for days.

Then it was announced that one of the people in my office was being made redundant ("laid off," for those of you playing along at home). My job, I was told, was safe, but I took the experience as a sign from Jeebus that it might be a good idea to hold off on big purchases for the time being.

A few weeks later, I took my trusty Honda in to have the brakes serviced. When I picked it up afterward, the mechanic complimented me on how well I kept my bike.

"Genuinely can't fault it, mate," he said. "You know, we kinda look for extra things to fix. This one's solid, though. You must tuck it into bed with you at night or something; she's like new."

This was, in a way, disheartening to me. Especially in the face of my desire to buy a Bonneville. I mean, yes, my Honda CBF600 is 9 years old, but it is in "like new" condition with only 11,000 miles on the clock. And, compared to the Bonneville, it is more powerful, it has better suspension and better brakes, and it has wind protection and heated grips. There is simply no good reason to rid myself of it but for the fact that I just really want to.

So, begrudgingly, I formulated a plan to put into a savings account the money that I would have spent on financing each month. Keeping in mind the nature of Hondas and my apparently excessive nurturing of mine, it is safe to assume that by the time my bike actually gets to the point where getting rid of it makes sense I will have saved up a deposit greater than the bike's present value. In other words, I should stick with the plan I had a while back of waiting until my 40th birthday to buy my next bike (I turned 38 last week).

Something worth waiting for?

Emotionally, I hate this plan. Me want new thing now. Me want buy new growly thing go BAHROOM! This is what I was trying to get at in my post about the Great Harley-Honda Dilemma. I think a lot of people read that I was pissing on a particular brand of motorcycle. No, the rules of this blog are that I will do my best not to piss on anybody's choice of machine (unless it's a Boss Hoss, in which case, you are everything that is wrong), and, in fact, there are many Hondas that I like. The dilemma is one of trying to come to terms with those conflicting emotions of wanting and not needing.

But there are some things that help me stay the course. Beyond simple financial sense, there are reasons to wait a few years, reasons to look toward the future. For example, from 1 January 2016, anti-lock braking systems will be mandatory on all motorcycles above 125cc in Europe. I know some readers feel I'm being silly in placing so much importance on that particular feature, but, well, I'm sorry. It's really important to me. And sometimes safety features have as much value in peace of mind as in actual use. Airbags, for instance. I have never had one deploy –– hopefully I'll never be in a situation where one would need to deploy. But that doesn't mean I'd buy a car without airbags. As Jesus is for the Doobie Brothers, safety is just alright with me.

With this in mind, as well as the knowledge/hope that I should be in better financial standing in two years, the imagination begins to stretch out a little. It mixes with emotion and delivers me again to the door of Victory motorcycles.

And as it happens, that company is giving me some good reasons to wait. I'll explain what they are in my next post...

Victory Judge

In my previous post, I talked about how I'm struggling with the concept of delayed gratification. After flirting with the idea of chaining myself to challenging monthly payments for the sake of a brand new Triumph Bonneville, I've decided instead to hold onto the objectively superior bike I've already got, ride it into the ground and in the meantime set aside money for something I really want.

I've wanted a Victory Judge ever since they were first introduced, but it's been off the "Bike I'll Get Next" list because of, primarily, two things: cost and the absence of ABS.

Give it two years, and at least one of those issues will definitely be resolved. Recently, I wrote to Victory (which already offers ABS on its tourers) to ask about anti-lock brakes being made available on its line of cruisers. Obviously, they're not going to share specific secrets with some random fan boy who emails in, but they did tell me this: "Victory have always been applauded on their handling and brakes... [but] yes, our R&D facility do keep tabs on EU rules [a] and we will always look to work within guidelines."

It other words, ABS is coming within at least two years. That gives me time to save up.

Although, by then I may no longer want a Judge. The Minnesota-based company may produce something even better. Recently, a rumour came out that Victory is working on a new water-cooled engine. That's exciting news not because of the presence of water cooling (after all, Victory bikes have been oil cooled for quite a while now), but more for the fact that a new engine means Victory is moving forward.

After the launch of Indian last summer, the immediate question that came to the minds of a lot of people, including myself, was: What now for Victory motorcycles? With both it and Indian owned by Polaris, how was it going to differentiate itself?

"Keep moving forward," Polaris VP Steve Menneto told Forbes last year. "When we acquired Indian, that allowed Victory to really go all out."

The Gunner, the first Victory offering to come in the wake of
Project Rushmore and the Indian launch, was a disappointment.

However, it certainly didn't seem like that recently when Victory announced the addition of the Gunner to its lineup. Little more than a Judge with a different seat, it was a real disappointment to me. I mean, I'm sure it's a great bike, but I had high hopes for what would be first out of the gate in the post-Indian world. I was imagining a bold step, a statement of difference. In writing about the future of Victory last summer I opined that they could draw on the expertise of their parent company and build an adventure bike of some sort to rival the BMW R1200GS.

In fairness, I suppose history has shown that bold steps don't often work for American vehicle manufacturers. And Victory simply doesn't have the wallet to take gambles like, say, the Honda NM4. It has to know that what it makes is going to sell. And in the God-blessed United States of America what sells –– especially in the Upper Midwest, where Victory is based –– is a cruiser. But I was still disappointed by the Gunner.

So, news that Victory is working on a new powerplant is encouraging. They're not just sitting around redecorating old bikes. They really are moving forward. And it's exciting to think of where it could lead. At present, Victory is a one-engine company; all its bikes run on the Freedom 106 engine. Please don't ask me to explain anything about engines. I don't have a clue. I think it would be cool, though, if this new water-cooled engine were added as an addition to the lineup. Rather than simply replacing the Freedom 106 in all the bikes.

From the leaked sketches obtained by Motorcyclist, it appears the new engine will go in a Judge chassis. Again, please don't ask me to explain anything about a chassis. I am just regurgitating stuff from Motorcyclist so I can point out that, in some way, Victory are following my advice from last August. At the time, I suggested improving and then keeping the Vegas 8 Ball as the "iconic premier machine of the marque"–– the philosophical heart of the Victory lineup, if you will. It appears Victory is doing that, but with the Judge.

Good call, Victory. That makes sense. The Judge, with its lesser rake, is a more manoeuvrable machine than Victory's other cruisers, and that fits with what Steve Menneto told Motorcyclist in an October 2013 interview: that Victory intended to "focus on performance and innovation as core brand values." Yes, you have to take that with a grain of salt, since it's performance and innovation within the cruiser context, but it's still exciting.

A sketch of a possible design for a new Victory.
Will this be my next bike?

So, what will the future hold? Will Victory make something on par with the Ducati Diavel? The Moto Guzzi California? The Honda F6C? Will the lineup have two different engines?

Personally, I'd like to see the new engine be lower displacement, so Victory could offer an affordable bike like the Harley-Davidson 883, or the Triumph America, which serve as "gateway" bikes to draw people into the brand. At present, Victory doesn't have that. And I think that's something that hurts them. They are a relatively unknown cruiser brand whose cheapest product costs thousands more than the cheapest product of the best-known cruiser brand in the world.

Also, on a side note, I have trouble believing that Victory's cheapest product, the Vegas 8 Ball, is appealing to anyone who doesn't live in a trailer park. It looks cheap with those rims. The Judge and the Gunner (and, sort of, the High Ball) are stylistically right. I'd like to see these style cues followed on a more affordable machine.

What will happen, though, is anybody's guess; only time will tell. I just hope it will be worth the wait.

––––––––––

(a)From 1 January 2016, ABS will be mandatory on all motorcycles above 125cc sold in the European Union.

The Fleece Inn

A few miles from the quaint Cotswold market town of Evesham lies the Fleece Inn, a pub with a history stretching back more than 600 years. I'm a sucker for that sort of thing. I love the idea of sitting in a place that's been around since before any Europeans even knew that the American continents existed. I love the Fleece Inn especially because it belongs to the National Trust. For those of you playing along at home, the National Trust is kind of sort of like a privatised version of the U.S. National Park Service.

Though, whereas the U.S. National Park Service is best known for looking after large swathes of natural land and is lesser known for taking care of historic buildings and property, the reverse is true of the National Trust. I'm veering into my day job here, but seriously, y'all: wherever you live, it is a whole hell of a lot more interesting than you realise. Get on your bike on go see the amazing stuff that surrounds you.

Too many people in the modern world lack a real, vested interest in the space around them. And that results in their being bad citizens. I think motorcyclists are a little less guilty of this because it is inherent in the experience of riding that we want to explore. We pick a spot on a map and we ride there just because. The side-effect of going to that spot is that we develop an appreciation for the space between.

But think about all those people you hear yelling for the sake of yelling on political TV and radio. How invested are they in their region? How much do they actually care about anything beyond their own, personal comfort? How have they served their country or their community? How much have they explored? How much do they actually know about the history and culture of the places where they live?

Forget about going to Gander Mtn or Cracker Barrel; go someplace that means something. Learn the history of your place. Help protect it from the great waves of unimportance that drown cities in chain restaurants, shopping centres and business parks by showing that where you are is a place worth being.

But I digress. The point is simply that I rode out to the Fleece Inn on Friday. I had been there before and the long journey there had worn me out so much that I almost rode into the back of a semi truck. Now with more riding experience under my belt and a long trip to Scotland coming up at the end of the month, I was keen to do the trip again and gauge my ability to handle that much riding (a little more than 230 miles round trip).

I'm happy to report that I held up well. I felt alert and relatively comfortable at all points in the journey and am confident I could have pushed on for at least 60 more miles, which would put me into the 290-mile range that I will need for one of the days on my Scotland trip. Taking breaks every 60-70 miles definitely helped me stay focused. Also, I am riding with a back protector

these days, which helps improve my posture and eliminate some fatigue.

Though, I am still somewhat worried about my timing. I operate on the theory that rushing a break defeats the point, but that means my breaks are quite leisurely. And that makes it difficult for me to guess how long it will take me to get places, other than saying: "A lot longer than Google thinks it will take."

On the first day of my Scotland trip I need to be in Lake District National Park by 4 p.m. and I'm not really able to decide what time in the morning I will need to set off. Google suggests I'll need to get on the road by 10:45. I know that estimate is ridiculous, but how many more hours should I add? If I stop every 60 miles, that results in four stops. Assume three of those stops will take 20 minutes and another –– my lunch stop –– will take an hour; that means I need to leave by at least 8:45. But that still feels pretty ambitious. Also, it puts me in rush-hour traffic. So, at the moment, my thinking is that I will try to be moving by 7.

The ride home saw me stopping by Thunder Road in Cwmbran, where I got a chance to sit on the new CTX1300 and be amazed by the fact it looks a whole lot better in person than in pictures. But at £15,000 I'm not entirely sure it would be the bike for me.

The kids are alright.

A lot -- in fact, most -- of my connection to the wider motorcycling world comes via the interwebs. And I've talked before about the fact there are a number of revolving themes within the internet side of that community: helmets, and filtering, and holding a vociferous opinion on Harley-Davidson, and so on and so on.

One of the themes that shows up quite often, an opinion that will show up several times in the comments section of almost any web story about the launch of a new/revamped model of motorcycle, is the one that goes: "We need to get more young people riding."

Do we, though?

I mean, really: does it matter that the median age of motorcyclists in the United States is 40-ish?

That's a surprisingly difficult to clarify statistic, by the way. Though it frequently gets dragged out to show the dire state of things -- that motorcycling is doomed. I'm not able to find a recent, reliable source for the statistic but it generally ranges between 42 and 49 years old. Old enough to legally have sex with someone half your age. Old enough to be a parent. If you're a Mormon, old enough to be a grandparent. And, dude, that is soooo old.

But here's a question, a genuine question to which I am not really suggesting an answer: If motorcycling in Western countries like the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom has become an activity dominated by people in their late-summer and autumn years, is that really such a bad thing?

I can definitely see the advantage of getting more people into motorcycling. More is better. It encourages innovation, a wider variety of products and broader acceptance/awareness of motorcyclists. And I'm especially in favour of encouraging a wider diversity of people, i.e., not just white men. But do those people need to be young?

Or do we just wish they were young so we can feel young by association?

Certainly that's a fair enough desire. I'm 38 years old and I'll admit that I do certain old-man things like telling the university students who live upstairs to turn their music down, or making a conscious effort to eat enough fiber. I'm not necessarily proud of these facets of my personality, though. I don't want to wave the flag for old man-ism. I still feel quite youthful mentally and I'd like to think that the things I do are more an extension of that. So, you know, if the overall image of motorcyclists was a little more youthful and a little less white guys burning their khakis on the tail pipes of their fringe-adorned Harleys(a), I guess that would be OK. I guess that in some way that would make me feel young and hip by association.

Maybe. But beyond their second-hand cool, what do young riders bring to motorcycling? Are they the consumers driving innovation in new bikes? These days technologies like ABS are filtering down to the lower-priced bikes that would likely be of interest to a jobless millennial, but they didn't start there. Technology tends to start at the high end, the stuff most often being bought by the chap who, when shopping for a new bike, considers how the seat will affect his prostate.

Young man, you will throw your back out doing that.

Additionally, young riders, if they are anything at all like I was as a young driver, are highly unlikely to improve the overall reputation of motorcyclists. Perhaps we might like for the people around us to think that the person beneath the helmet is young and hip, but we almost certainly want the irrational rage and discrimination that young people often find themselves being the recipients of.

Or, maybe we do. Maybe that is all young people need bring to the table: attitude and enthusiasm. Spirit.

Ever been to a classic car show? Row after row after row of the finest versions of the fastest cars in history... all lovingly buffed and polished by torpid, pot-bellied old dudes who will never, ever, push said cars to their abilities. Those guys are the antithesis of why the cars were made in the first place. They are the motoring version of smooth jazz. I sometimes see the same thing in motorcycling and it makes me feel sad.

So maybe we do need young people. Not for the sake of motorcycling, but for motorcyclists. What do you think?

__________

(a)I don't mean to make fun of that guy. I don't know him and I'm sure he's a very cool fella. But you get my point.

A rare bit of straight on the Cat and Fiddle road.

I ended up getting to put your advice to work sooner that I had thought. After my longish ride to the Fleece Inn, many of you offered tips on how to improve my timing, last longer in the saddle and make the most out of breaks. I'm thankful for that, because the day after I wrote that post I got a call from Visor Down asking if I could be in Stoke-on-Trent by 10:30 a.m. the next day.

Visor Down is a UK-based motorcycle website and I had won a competition to be a part of the launch event for Michelin's Pilot Road 4 tires. The prize included getting to learn all about the new tires (more interesting than you might think), getting to put them to the test by taking a Michelin-provided bike on a 130-mile tear through Peak District National Park, getting put up in a hotel (along with food and booze), and receiving a free set of Pilot Road 4 tires to put on my own bike. All I needed to do was get myself to Michelin HQ.

The distance from the Welsh seaside town of Penarth to the Midlands city of Stoke-on-Trent is roughly 160 miles. According to Google, those miles can be covered in 2 hours and 39 minutes. But Google is a liar, and its estimates don't take into account my tiny bladder, so I knew it would take longer. I decided the journey would, in fact, take 4 hours, which meant getting on the road by 6:30 a.m. I should have aimed to leave sooner but didn't want to have to wake up any earlier.

As it turned out, when I finally started rolling the clock on my dash said 6:55. Strapped to the seat was the old Nike gym bag I use for overnight trips. It had occurred to me this adventure presented a great opportunity to test the AXE Saddlebags that Viking Bags sent me recently, but one of the wisest bits of Iron Butt advice that I've seen is: "Avoid adding accessories or doing maintenance immediately before a trip."

I had not tried out the bags yet, had not even put them on my bike. Figuring out how to secure things when I was pressed for time would have been a bad idea. Additionally, the bags add a little width, which isn't really something you want when you have to ride through the second most populous city in Britain -- at least not until you're able to account for that extra width when filtering.

Most of the traffic at that time of day is flowing into Cardiff, so I was out and onto the motorway quickly enough. Pegging my speed at 80 mph (a) I was soon also across the Severn Bridge and away from the heaviest of the Bristol-bound traffic, too.

There are roughly 70 million people in Britain -- twice the population of Canada -- all squeezed into a space the size of Oregon. Many of those people are on the roads, so you don't tend to hold speed for long. Because traffic may come to a standstill around the corner, it's hard to gauge progress, hard to guess how much time you have to linger when taking a break.

The Cat & Fiddle. Sort of a British equivalent of the Rock Store.

On my first break, I set a time limit of 10 minutes. Which, it turns out, is roughly the bare minimum needed to stop at the services (similar to a rest area, for those of you playing along at home, but run by corporations and usually featuring a gas station, at least two food outlets [e.g., McDonald's] and a convenience store), wrestle off the multiple layers of gear necessary for riding at high speed in 4C (39F), do a little tinkle, wrestle all your gear back on, check your pockets 700 times to make sure no zippers are open, and get back on the road. On the second break, I allotted 20 minutes which was enough time to do all of the above and gulp down an outrageously priced pot of tea (£2.44!!).

I pushed hard and arrived at Michelin HQ at exactly 10:30. There was tea and lunch and a quick explanation of why Pilot Road 4 tires are better than their competitors and predecessors (they have good grip in wet weather and last 17 percent longer), then I was handed the keys to a Triumph Tiger Explorer XC. Expect a review of the bike soon, but suffice to say, it's an almost-great machine.

We set out into Peak District National Park, which is home to some of the most famous motorcycling roads in the UK. I suspect that's to do mostly with the fact a huge proportion of the UK population lives nearby. The roads there are good, but no better than those we have in Wales. And by "good" I mean "really curvy and full of blind corners," which isn't actually my personal definition of good. I prefer long, gentle sweeps with quality sight lines, but amongst UK riders I seem to be in an extreme minority.

We took on the Cat and Fiddle road and Snake Pass and plenty of other roads that caused my neck to go into knots. In part because I have no friends in this country who ride bikes, I suffer a knowledge gap when it comes to taking corners. You can read about cornering and watch YouTube all day, but that only goes so far. It would be nice to be able to go out with someone who could say: "This corner you can hit at xx mph," and "Right there is where you should enter the corner" and "Here's how to pick a line" and so on.

But as things are, hard cornering stresses me the hell out. I am extremely comfortable on my bicycle but have a lot of trouble transposing that to the speed and weight of my motorcycle. I tense up and lose my nerve at points. Especially on corners of the ilk found in Wales and the Peak District. They are utterly blind, without any signage to suggest adequate speed. You're just supposed to know how to hit these ridiculous bends that were originally cut in the 1800s for horse carts.

Toward the end of the day, however, I was starting to get the hang of things. Sort of.

There was a large group of us and I had gotten slightly ahead of everyone but the guide thanks to a procession of tractors I managed to pass before a heavy section of tight bends. Ahead of me there was only the group's guide, a former motorcycle cop. UK motorcycle cops are some of the best high-speed riders you will ever see. This particular retired officer, who I'd guess to be in his late 60s to early 70s, was keen to have some fun, not dawdle for the sake of leading some nervous American. So, in the moment he decided I would not get lost in the upcoming stretch, his BMW went into hyperdrive. He simply disappeared.

The view from my Tiger Explorer XC

Suddenly I was on my own. Which is really how I'd prefer to be tackling corners, rather than feeling pushed by other riders behind me. Able to relax a little, I reminded myself that, hey, this Triumph wasn't mine and it also wasn't a test ride. If I crashed it, Michelin would be footing the bill, not me. So, I pushed. This corner I managed to take at the speed limit; that corner I managed to go 5 miles over the speed limit (a). Little by little, I was starting to feel more confident and better about myself.

The posted speed limit was 50 mph. When I came around a bend at 65 (a) I did a little celebratory cheer. Then, out of nowhere, a guy who is an engineer at Michelin screamed past going no less than 100. I felt emasculated again.

So, it was appropriate perhaps, that the hotel Michelin chose to put us up in was Splash Landings, a very kid-friendly part of the Alton Towers resort. Alton Towers, for those of you playing along at home, is sort of the British version of Disney World. But colder, wetter and without internationally beloved characters. My room had bunk beds and a view of the indoor/outdoor water park.

Having tackled nigh 300 miles in a single day, I was exhausted once I got to my hotel room. I took a shower and contemplated going straight to bed. But I wanted dinner, and in Her Majesty's United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland one never misses out on free drinks. Really. Booze here is more important than football in Texas -- more important than Jesus in church.

I headed to the bar, where Budweisers were readily shoved in my hand and I got to talk to folks from all over the country. I also got to take a bit of stick from them. At one point, a bloke from Northern England was chatting with a woman who said she wanted to get her motorcycle license but worried she wouldn't be any good at riding. The Yorkshireman pointed at me and said: "Love, trust me: You can't be worse than him!"

Dinner was from an all-you-can-eat buffet. Snide comments about sodium-laden tasteless food goes here, but you can't really complain when the food is free. Besides, more beer was delivered throughout the meal and I got a chance to talk with some cool people. They joked about my weak riding but also gave me a few pointers that I've been able to apply since. And as much as I criticise the food I certainly ate my fair share of it. That night I barely slept, so full was my belly.

The view from my hotel room.

I made the effort of showing up for breakfast the next morning but didn't actually consume anything other than a mug of tea and two mini pain au chocolat. The sound system was blaring generi-Caribbean music at a volume that made me feel sick. I pocketed some muffins and returned to my room until it was time to take a shuttle bus back to Michelin HQ.

Once returned, the Michelin representatives shook my hand and said they'd get in touch about having my tires sent to me. I found myself feeling weirdly sad at having to say goodbye. There was this part of me that just wanted to hang out and talk about tires. Imagine how delighted Jenn was that this part returned with me and she was that night subjected to a lecture on the qualities of the Pilot Road 4...

The first part of the ride home was a challenge. I stopped at the first services I came across and was desperate for rest. Through luck, an attractive woman who had been hired by Red Bull to hand out free cans to hapless men happened to be there. As a rule, I detest Red Bull, but on this morning I made an exception and washed it down with a bottle of water.

From there, the ride home came easy. The day warmed and I zipped down the M5 without incident. At one point I passed a bloke who had rigged a side car to an old Moto Guzzi California and we exchanged happy, stupid waves at each other. A woman on a big yellow CBR gave me a thumbs up. I wish this were my life -- travelling up and down the country feeling a goofy kinship with people who choose the same means of transportation as me.

Though, when I finally got home I was happy to be there. I had travelled roughly 450 miles in less than 48 hours. Nothing approaching Iron Butt territory, but enough for me. And a great adventure to let me know that I am ready for my trip to Scotland in May.

__________

(a)Law enforcement officials please note: This is a lie. In fact, I always obey the speed limit.

Beautiful but flawed.

I used to be a delivery cyclist. Clocking up roughly 40 miles a day, darting through traffic, dodging buses and hitting gaps you would not imagine, I could push upward of 30 mph and stop on a dime. I'm not bragging when I say this, just being honest: on a bicycle I am really good. Probably better than you. And even though I now have an office job, I still cycle every day to work. I tell you all this as preface.

Recently, I was zipping down Paget Road, a steep hill that is part of my daily commute. Without pedalling I can hit 24 mph on that hill (my bicycle has a speedometer). This morning being dry and sunny, and with me in a good mood, I'd reckon I was going close to 35 mph when a cat decided to jump out in front of me. Which initiated a sequence of events that all occurred in less than 2 seconds:

The cat stared at me in terror. This particular fellow, however, did not appear to be blessed with the reflexes for which cats are so famous. He chose instead to just stand there.
This left me as the responsible party, so I quickly shifted my weight to allow for a hard stop, firmly applied the brakes -- front first, easy on the back -- and...
The back wheel locked and went shooting to my left side. It wasn't just a wobble; the rear wheel kicked out a solid 30 degrees.
But ability, experience, speed and sheer luck righted me.

The noise of the skid, meanwhile, awakened in the cat the sudden ability to act.

Had he not leapt out of my way at the very last second (I felt his tail on my leg), he might now be dead and I might have come off my bike. I would now probably be covered in cuts and bruises; I might also have a few broken bones. And this, my friends, is why I make such a stupid big deal about anti-lock brakes. Because cats happen.

You can have an incredibly experienced rider in perfect conditions and still a domestic pet has the potential to mess everything up. In the words of Aaron Kaufman, if you're gonna have a lot of "go" you need a lot of "whoa."

Therein lies my only real criticism of the Victory Judge: there is just not enough "whoa." The single-disc front brake is spongy, demands a full-handed grab to be deployed and is overall not as effective as you need it to be when you're sitting astride a 700-lb. motorcycle. The rear brake is more substantial but the combination of both still leaves you covering a lot of ground before coming to a stop. Add to this the fact the brakes are not anti-lock.

The uncomplicated view from a Judge

I know that cruisers are notorious for having brakes that don't compare to those of sport bikes but I have ridden both Triumph and Harley-Davidson motorcycles that had better stopping power. I am not the only one that feels this way, in a recent review of the Judge Motorcycle.com singled out brakes as the biggest problem.

It is a heartbreaking problem because otherwise the Judge is a very, very nice bike. I mean very nice.

Like all Victory machines it is beautiful to look at. Pictures simply do not do these bikes justice. In the flesh, there is something about them that induces staring. You follow every line, take things in from dozens of different angles, hold your hands close to the massive Freedom 106 engine to feel its aura. The bikes are made by a Minnesota company and as someone who was raised there I can feel that spirit coming through. Indeed, at one point I actually heard in my head the voice of a Minnesota girl saying: "Oh, hey. This is classy."

The Judge is, in my opinion, the toughest-looking of the bunch. Although it remains very much a piece of moving art there is something about it that makes you want to push the bike, makes you want to find situations where it might suffer a scrape, a ding or some dirt that never really washes away. It is a bike that looks like it will age well even when given tough love.

That's a personality that continues once you press the starter. Especially if you have the Stage 1 exhaust, as did the demo bike I rode. Dude. Get the Stage 1 exhaust. That is a sound you will never get tired of. The sound is not of the annoy-the-neighbours variety but a low, devilish growl that causes all kinds of involuntary whooping when you first hear it.

On the move, the bike has great, usable, power that is delivered in long gears. That is to say, you can go a hell of a distance in first before feeling the need to shift. I found that when launching the bike from a stop it was happy to be pushed to 40 mph before even beginning to audibly signal that I should change gears. Unfortunately, sound and feel is all you get; there is no tachometer. Though, I've checked the accessories catalogue and Victory will happily sell you one if you are so inclined.

The bike has six gears but the first five are so efficient that the highest gear almost feels unnecessary. Though, I didn't get a chance to push the bike up to British motorway speed (i.e., upward of 80 mph), so it would likely be useful there.

Similarly, I can't speak to the effects of wind blast at that speed, but at 65 mph I found myself perfectly comfortable. Wind hit my chest but the massive headlight seemed to block out the roughest of stuff. After-market screens of all sizes are available from Victory but none of them look very cool. They might as well have "Grandad" printed across the top. If I had a Judge, I'd probably invest the time and energy hunting down some Arlen Ness bullet fairing for the thing.

A slightly blurry photo.
The camera man may have been shaking with excitement.

And while you're hunting down expensive after-market gear, you might as well fork out the cash for a new seat. As is, it's pretty comfortable for one, but the passenger accommodation is useless unless you're toting around a child. Actually, no. Most of today's children are obese. They wouldn't fit. A Furby maybe. If you roll with a Furby as your homie, then no worries. Anyone else and you'll need something more substantial.

According to the aforementioned Motorcycle.com review, Victory is changing the rider triangle on the Judge to be more in line with that of its other cruisers, which means pushing the pegs forward 3-4 inches. That's a shame because the seating position on the Judge I rode didn't give me that notorious cruiser back ache. For a 6-foot-1 rider such as myself there was still plenty of room and the closer pegs allowed me to sit a little more as I would in a chair. It may be that Victory has some sort of kit that would allow you to move the new Judge pegs back to the position of the old Judge pegs.

Overall, the riding experience is pretty intuitive. It is different, obviously, than on my 600-cc Honda sport tourer but those differences are quickly and easily learned. It moves into corners with an ease you might not expect of such a heavy machine. Though, I will say the weight never really goes away. It is wholly manageable and not a cause for concern, but it is not something you forget about. "Sprightly" would be well down on my list of adjectives to describe the Judge.

Which brings us back to those awful brakes. When I first drew back on the front brake lever I felt nothing and experienced panic at the thought they might not be there. By grabbing hard, though, I was able to get a tiny bit of mushy, unhappy "whoa" that struck me as little more than icing on the rear brake's cupcake. The brakes simply are not adequate.

And as I say: that is heartbreaking because it is an otherwise fantastic bike. I find it devastating to admit to you that there is no way in hell I would own one in its present state. In two years, Victory will have to equip all its new bikes with ABS to adhere to EU regulations. Maybe then I'll give the Judge another look. In the meantime, I'm sorry to say, it's off the list.

The other day, on the way back from riding out to the Fleece Inn, I took a detour to the Cwmbran location of Thunder Road, the official Honda dealership here in South Wales. I have an unsteady history with Thunder Road, having visited their Bridgend location several times and never really coming away with a positive feeling. To their credit, they once tried to make good on a negative experience by calling and apologising to me in person but on consecutive visits I still found myself being wholly ignored.

But, you know, I still love all motorcycles and the Cwmbran location was more or less on my route home, so I dropped in to stare at a few things. And, of course, it was an experience that served to remind me of that old truth that one does not equal all. Separated by more than 30 miles, Thunder Road's two different locations are, you know, different.

A saleswoman, Mel, started chatting with me (not in a pushy way) soon after I wandered in. We talked about the new CTX1300, which looks so much better in person than in pictures. She let me sit on the bike and I'll admit that I cooed for the thing. The seating position is car-like comfortable and the exhaust pipes make it look pretty bad ass. It's £15,000 price tag deflates my enthusiasm (a) but if someone were to give me a CTX1300 for free I would be very thankful.

But, also there's the fact that I tend to go for a certain aesthetic: cruisers and standard/retro machines, or what my wife refers to as real motorcycles. I fear that makes me somewhat old and busted, that I have allowed myself to be duped into overvaluing the past, but I can't help it. That's what I like. So talk soon turned to the CB1100 and its newly revamped guise, the CB1100 EX.

"I don't see one out on the floor here," I said. "Are they not out yet?"

"We just got one in yesterday," Mel said. "Some of it's still wrapped in plastic, and it has a bit of that Saharan dust (b), but come on back and have a look."

So, back we wandered into a part of the service department that was neatly crowded with tools and wires and countless parts for countless bikes. And there, sitting on a pedestal, was a dusty CB1100 EX. I couldn't help feeling this was the way it should be displayed. I imagined that the Saharan dust had been earned –– that the bike had been ridden all the way from Japan rather than shipped in a crate.

Because it has that essence to it. It looks really well built. The fenders are metal, everything is solid. There is nothing extraneous, nothing unnecessary. It looks like a bike to be ridden. And ridden. And ridden. Amid all the motorcycle bits of Thunder Road's service department, the CB1100 EX felt timeless, as if it had existed before all those parts and would exist still long after they had worn out.

But, of course, it is a modern machine. Equipped with two discs on the front and one on the rear, the brakes are anti-lock. It's 1,145-cc inline four-cylinder engine is oil and air cooled, and produces 88 bhp and 67 pound feet of torque through a six-speed gearbox. Cleverly hidden within its analogue-style dials are all kinds of things that would be missing on the classic machines being emulated here, such as a gear indicator, trip computers and so on.

The CB1100 was introduced only a year or so ago, but the EX, in my opinion is a superior version. The tank and seat are a little less angular and the wheels are now wire spokes. It has the look of a bike that can be ridden forever but also has a lot of style. Trust me on that. As is the case with the CTX1300, it looks infinitely better in person than in pictures.

Mel told me that Honda would be holding an event at Thunder Road in June, and may have a CB1100 EX that I can test ride. That is dangerous information. The chance to actually get on the bike may tip me over the edge. Because it strikes me as a serious contender for The Bike For Me. It has a classic look but the kind of brakes and performance that are so ridiculously important to me.

That price, though. Here in the UK, the standard CB1100 EX will set you back £10,000 (US $16,790). Putting that money together would be an extreme challenge for me and inherently begs the question of long-term value. I suppose, in terms of the quality I saw in the bike and the reputation of Honda's reliability, that is a sort of fair price. There is the unhappy knowledge, however, that if you end up selling it a few years down the road you'll get only a third of that if you're lucky.

But maybe that's the point. Maybe this is just a bike you never sell. Famously, Robert Pirsig still has the 1964 Honda CB77 that he road across the United States. The CB1100 EX recalls the spirit of that sort of machine. Maybe it is something you aren't ever supposed to let go...

––––––––––

(a) If I'm going to pay that much for a bagger, I'll get a Victory Cross Country.

(b)Britain had been recently hit with a particularly bad spell of pollution that was exacerbated by the presence of dust that had kicked up from storms in the Sahara and drifted all the way here.

Is this the Victory Fatty?

Not too long ago I wrote about how excited I am to see what Victory Motorcycles has up its sleeve for the future. At the time, some sketches had leaked to various motorcycle publications showing multiple styles of bike all sporting a liquid-cooled engine.

In that post, I pointed to two bits of information that might suggest what will come next from the Polaris-owned marque. First was a 2013 interview with Polaris VP Steve Menneto in which he said he expected to see Victory focusing on "performance and innovation" in the wake of Indian's revival.

It's the general feeling amongst motorcycle journalists and laymen, such as myself, that with Victory sharing its parent company with legacy brand Indian it should avoid trying to compete for the hardcore H-D rider's money. That's Indian territory now, and Indian is so far doing really well. It will be fun to see where Indian goes from here. I would like to see another Indian model introduced at Sturgis (a) this year, but I think it's more realistic to think that will come in 2015.

The second bit of information came from Victory's UK offices. I wrote to them a while back to ask if there were plans to put anti-lock brakes on the cruisers, their absence being my only real objection to great bikes like the Judge. In response, Victory assured me that its R&D facility keeps tabs on EU rules and "will always look to work within guidelines."

These two bits of information gave a lot of credence to the rumours of a new powerplant from Victory. Not only will 2016 see ABS required on all new bikes sold in the EU above 125 cc, it will also usher in more stringent Euro 4 emissions standards for motorcycles (b).

Then, at a Victory demo event a few weeks ago, I got a chance to chat with one of Victory's engineers.

"Please put ABS on the Judge," I told him. "A second disc up front wouldn't be a bad thing, either."

"Ah, well, that's chassis," he said. "I'm more on the powertrain side of things."

"Oh, so you're one of the guys working on the new liquid-cooled engine they've been talking about," I said.

He said nothing. I have chosen to interpret the silence as an acknowledgement that I was on to something and he wasn't entirely sure that I should be privy to such knowledge.

I like the wheels.

"The thing they're reporting in the motorcycle press," I said.

"Oh, right. The sketches and that," he said. "Yeah, well, you wonder where they get those things. I've not seen any of those sketches come across my desk."

Again I chose to read between the lines and interpret his comment not as a denial of a forthcoming new engine but simply as a suggestion that what they were working on was not what those of us in the public had seen. And it seems that was the correct interpretation. This week, Polaris registered a design patent with the EU for a Victory cruiser that features a big ol' radiator up front. Meanwhile, it has already filed in the United States to trademark "Fatty,""Rogue" and "Magnum." as potential names for future models.

I really hope they don't go with that last one, which is already the name of an extra large condom, an ice cream bar and a cheesy 1980s TV detective. None of which are spirits you want to invoke for a motorcycle. Well, OK, maybe Magnum, P.I., but only if they somehow incorporate a moustache into the Victory logo. I'd prefer to see them go with "Fatty" solely so they can make an advert that makes use of "Lip Up Fatty" by English ska band Bad Manners.

But I digress. To my untrained eye, the motorcycle in the most recent sketches looks a whole lot like a Gunner. Which, of course, is really just a Judge with a solo seat. Which makes me think that maybe, again, this isn't really the bike that will eventually come out. Or, if it the sketches are accurate, maybe it's not the bike that some people are predicting.

Visor Down is positing that the next offering from Victory will be a performance cruiser -- something to rival the Ducati Diavel. Based on these sketches, though, I'm not buying that. Going back to the wisdom of Aaron Kaufman, a performance cruiser is going to have a hell of a lot of "go," which means it is going to need considerably more "whoa" than that offered by the single front disc brake pictured in these sketches.

Also, are performance cruisers really that big of a thing? Victory bikes already produce upward of 100 bhp, which is more than every other bike in the cruiser/bagger/tourer class (except Indian). Is the market for performance cruisers like the V-Rod, the VMax, the Valkyrie and the Diavel really so large and profitable that Victory would want to spend its limited resources developing an all-new powerplant for it?

Lip up, Fatty.

Is it possible, instead, that what we're looking at here is a smaller bike? Something that can serve as an entry-level machine? Think about the Harley-Davidson Iron 883, the Star Bolt (aka Yamaha XV950), the Triumph Bonneville (and its attendant variations, the Scrambler, Thruxton, Speedmaster and America), the Moto Guzzi V7, and so on. Think about the upcoming Harley-Davidson Street. Especially the H-D Street. Take a look at that bike, then take a look at these sketches.

At present, Victory does not have an entry-level machine. The Vegas is the cheapest of its line-up but remains far too expensive to serve as a "gateway" to the brand, in the way the bikes mentioned above can. Presently, all Victory bikes require a financial investment that many people are not willing to make on a relatively unknown product. I'm willing to put that money down (if I had it) but that has a lot to do with the fact that I am fanatically devoted to Minnesota. Not everyone is in my same boat, including even a lot of Minnesotans.

So, maybe the upcoming Victory Fatty will be an affordable machine aimed at that young/new rider audience that wants an authentic/classic motorcycle look without having to pay up the wazoo for a ginormous machine they can't really control. I'd love for that to be true. Indeed, if Victory were to produce such a thing I'd be first in line to put down a deposit (c).

Time will tell.

__________

(a)Famously, Sturgis was originally an event dominated by Indian riders, its founder, JC "Pappy" Hoel having owned an Indian dealership. From the 1950s it slowly became much more of an H-D affair but Indian stole pretty much all the attention with its launch last summer. I think it would help to embolden the legacy brand feel of Indian if it were to choose the Sturgis rally as its "home" and create a precedent of delivering its major news and reveals at the event. Though, it doesn't have to be Sturgis. If there were a large rally in Minnesota or Iowa that would make more sense. I just like the idea of Indian full-on using the weight and legacy of its brand to create traditions.

(b) It's worth noting that motorcycles will still be behind the curve. Euro 4 was implemented for cars nine years ago.

(c)Assuming it has anti-lock brakes.

The before picture. Note the open Haynes manual on the ground.

Let me just say right off the bat that I don't begrudge anyone earning a good wage. Life is hard and if you can earn enough money to make it just a little bit easier on yourself and your family, then more power to you. Especially when the thing you do has intrinsic value, like teaching or curing illness or fixing cars/motorcycles. Often when we see discussions of motorcycle maintenance and repair we fall into the trope of portraying mechanics as Shylocks.

This is silly. My brother is a mechanic (a), so is one of my very best friends, and I've hung out with plenty of other guys and gals from all sides of that world: mechanics, auto body technicians, painters, tire guys, and so on. They're just people who, like any right-thinking individual anywhere, want to make a good living doing stuff they're good at. If you're being critical of that you need to consider whether what you're actually feeling is jealousy.

As a side note, kids, take it from your ol' pal Chris: Consider a career in auto tech. I have a bachelor's degree and master's degree from one of the top universities on the planet. In my particular degree, it is ranked first. My brother, meanwhile, has just one semester of community college credits to his name. Annually, he earns four times more money than I do.

All of this said, however, I hate giving my money to mechanics. And any time I can avoid doing so fills me with a joyful sense of accomplishment. This past weekend provided just such an opportunity. The Honda's odometer hit 12,000 miles recently, which, according to my owner's manual, meant it was due a service. I'll admit my original inclination was to take it in to a garage, but in flipping through my Haynes manual it occurred to me that there was not actually a whole lot to do. I decided to tackle the job myself and set aside the money for the 16,000-mile service, when I definitely will take it to a mechanic because that job involves valve clearances.

Replacing the air filter.

In researching what, exactly, I would need to do for for the 12,000-mile service I came across a handy list of all the work my local Honda dealership, Thunder Road, undertakes:

Replace oil
Replace oil filter
Check fuel lines
Check throttle operation
Check idle speed
Check cooling system
Check secondary air system
Check chain wear and adjustment
Check brake fluid
Check clutch fluid
Check brake pad wear
Check brake system
Check light operation
Check tire depth and condition
Check wheel bearings
Check suspension
Check bodywork condition
Road test
Lube locks
Lube pivots

The good folks at Thunder Road will charge you £130 (US $220) for all that. If you read between the lines, of course, really all you're paying for is an oil change with the addition of having a professional do a thorough version of the pre-ride checks you're supposed to be doing every time you ride (b), as well as spray a few bits with lubricant. Remove the £50 cost of a new oil filter, 5 litres of oil and a can of GT-85, and you're paying a mechanic £80 (US $135) for his or her time. As I say, I don't begrudge anyone a good wage; it's nice work if you can get it. But, you know, I'm happy to avoid being the one to pay for it. Meanwhile, in addition to all of the above, I also:

Replaced the air filter
Lubricated the clutch cable
Adjusted the headlight alignment
Replaced the switch on my heated grips

The Oxford heated grips my father had bought me for Christmas had gone kaput only a month after having them badly installed by a Penarth mechanic. A while later, in chatting with a mechanic from Fowler's of Bristol, I learned that a common problem with that particular model of grips (version 8) is that the switch is prone to shorting out.

"Just throw in a new switch is what I'd do," he said.

With the seats and side fairing removed.

The fact he said this without suggesting I take it to his shop to get the work done made it sound really easy. And, I suppose, all things considered, it was. A kind of "really easy" that took me several hours to accomplish, but that's probably more to do with the fact that I am an idiot.

All told, the work took me three hours from start to finish, and that included roughly half an hour of experimenting with adjusting the seat's height.

It's a fair bet it would have only taken a professional mechanic one hour to do all of the above work. It's an equally fair bet he or she would have charged me for at least two. Total up the cost of parts and service, and I suspect I would have been looking at a bill of somewhere around £250 (US $420). By doing the work myself, it cost only £80.

Though, I will admit it was stressful. Taking apart the fairing and lifting the gas tank was causing me to suffer little panics as I thought to myself: "There is no going back from this. You will have to put everything back together. And you will have to put it all back together before you run out of daylight." (I have a very tiny covered area to store my bike but I have to work on it outside.)

It was a time-consuming and surprisingly delicate process that involved gently nudging free dozens of little things that you wouldn't expect to be so fragile on an object capable of going 150 mph. It is certainly something to store in my brain for the next time I'm hurtling down the motorway: "Hey, remember how this thing is held together by super-easy-to-break trim clips and pegs? Stuff you could break with your fingers? And now it's being hit by 90-mph wind. Contemplate on that, motherhugger. Wheeeee!"

I mean, good lord, are planes held together like this? Next time I go back to the States I may choose to swim.

Replacing the switch for the heated grips.

But, I suppose, because things are so fiddly it is comforting to know that I am the person who dealt with these things. It being my motorcycle, upon which I ride, I inherently took great care in every little thing. An example of this came when replacing the switch for the heated grips.

When I had paid someone to install them, he had simply stuffed the excess wiring up under the tank. Re-doing the work, I now took the time to neatly zip tie things and meticulously wrap it all in gaffer tape. If the switch shorts out again I will know it is because that version of grips is crap and not because putting wiring in a rat's nest just above the carburetors somehow led to a fault.

I will know when I ride that each of the bolts and screws and clips and pegs on the bike were checked and rechecked to make sure they are secure. I will know that the person who did the work didn't cut any corners, didn't say: "Yeah, well, that's good enough."

And the feeling of accomplishment from having done all this work myself is immense. I am not by nature very mechanically inclined. There is some fault in my brain that I very quickly get confused and upset by stuff that is childlike in simplicity to people like my brother. When I'm able to overcome that, though –– when I'm able to strip away bits on my bike, rewire things, and put it all together again –– I feel so incredibly proud.

Jenn came home just as I was clicking the final bit into place. I pointed with glee and said:

"Look, babe. I just spent three hours working on the bike."

"It looks the same as it always does," she said.

"Exactly," I said. "I did it right."

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(a) I feel the need to go out of my way to tell you how much I love my little brother. Ignoring the fact that he is awesome and funny and could kick your ass, I estimate he has saved me several, several thousands of dollars in car repair costs over the years by either doing the work or very patiently explaining to me –– in simple terms so I can understand –– how to do the work myself.

(b) Though, in fairness, who really does all that every single time they ride?

The day I finally earned my UK license.

Exactly one year ago today, I earned my UK motorcycle license. Traffic to this blog has increased considerably since then (thank you for reading), so some of you might not know the whole story leading up to that moment. In short, I had earned my U.S. motorcycle endorsement in a YMCA parking lot when I was 18, but thereafter done nothing with it. Years later, I became obsessed with the idea of getting a motorcycle to combat the interminable dreariness of British life.

That meant, however, I needed a UK motorcycle license. It's a separate license here, not just an addendum to your driver's license, and thanks to Europeans' love of circumlocutory bureaucracy getting it is much, much more difficult than it had been in Minnesota. Admittedly, the process here instilled in me considerably more riding knowledge than I had gleaned from doing circles on a CG125 and watching Wheels of Tragedy(a).But the unexpected challenge of completing that process was borderline traumatic.

No, really. One of the reasons I initially decided to pursue my UK license was for the sake of an "easy win." At that point in my life, I had not held down a full-time job in 6 years (thanks for destroying the European economy, Great Recession), my university degrees had turned out to be utterly useless, I was stagnant in literary/creative terms, and I felt socially isolated. I wanted to be able to do something; I wanted an accomplishment with which to boost my plummeting morale.

But instead, I failed my Mod 2 exam on the first try, and again on the second try, and within it all I burned away all kinds of money that I did not have. I maxed out a credit card (still paying it off) and everything was just hell. So, on the one-year anniversary of that great big poopy process finally coming to an end, my first line of thought goes to the questions of "What if...?".

I am happy that I now have my license; ultimately, I am glad I went through the process. But could I have done it differently? If so, how?

Often I tell myself I would not have gone immediately down the Direct Access route. For those of you playing along at home, the motorcycle licensing structure here is stupidly complicated. Look at this chart and you'll see there are five different categories of license, broken up according to a person's age and what, exactly, he or she is keen to ride. And all of those categories mean testing.

Training often involved lunch at a greasy-spoon cafe.

I mean, sweet baby Jesus on a surfboard, do they go crazy for motorcycle testing over here. If a British 16 year old wants to ride a motorcycle, he or she will be subjected to no less than seven tests before attaining the type of license I now have (b). Because I'm over the age of 24, I was able to "fast track" my way there with only five tests (c). This is known as the Direct Access route.

Either way, though, both routes require the CBT. Compulsory Basic Training is the first step in your motorcycle journey in Britain, and for many people it is the only step. After a one-day CBT course you are allowed to ride a 125-cc motorcycle, and in many crowded British cities that is all you'll ever need. You're not allowed to carry a passenger or ride on the motorway, but otherwise you are free to roam for a full two years before having to subject yourself to the ridiculous testing process.

This, I claim with hindsight, is how I would have done things. I would have gotten my CBT and with the inordinate amount of money I spent training and testing for my full license I would have instead bought a Chinese 125 and spent time getting good at riding. When I felt confident, I would have borrowed a 600-cc bike and taken the test without fuss.

Jenn, however, points out that this imagined scenario is woefully flawed. And she is right. Firstly, I don't have any motorcycling friends in this country; I don't know anyone from whom I could borrow a 600-cc bike for the sake of taking the practical tests. More importantly, the part where I maxed out my credit card by failing lots and taking loads of extra training days was not part of the plan. To say that I should have instead spent that money buying a throwaway motorcycle assumes a Doctor Whovian future awareness.

And I suppose that's one of the main things motorcycling teaches you: to live in the present. To focus on what is, not what could be or should be. Focus on what's there –– that car, that curve, that pothole –– and let go of the things that aren't there.

Another lesson I've gained from motorcycling, or, rather, from my particular motorcycle journey since starting this blog, is that things are attainable. It is actually possible to identify a goal and work toward it. Slowly, occasionally with setbacks, often with compromise, and even more often in ways you don't anticipate, you can get from the Point A of being a guy with no license, no money and no bike, to the Point B of planning a 1,000+-mile adventure to the Scottish Highlands.

Riding to Hay-on-Wye last summer

Both of these lessons I try to incorporate into other aspects of my life. For example, the not-dwelling-too-much-on-a-past-I-cannot-change thing has helped me to shake off some of the deep bitterness I feel toward the Welsh-language community. The persistent-forward-movement-toward-a-set-goal thing means Jenn and I have saved enough money to visit my home state of Texas this summer -- my first trip back to the United States in 3 years.

Three years. That much homesickness leads to madness -- actual thinking-crazy-thoughts madness. But there motorcycling helps again. My stalwart Honda CBF600 SA brings me a tiny sense of freedom on this island of rain, a feeling of being in control of my own self, and an ability to seek out the kinds of places and things that originally made me want to move here.

Over the past year I've become a slightly better rider. I've become, too, a slightly better person. There is plenty of room for improvement in both aspects, but I'm looking forward to seeing what's on the road ahead.

__________

(a) Not really, but we did have to watch some safety films in my motorcycle course in Minnesota. Sadly, none were as amusing as 1960s driver's ed films.

(b) Also, he or she would have to wait until their 24th birthday.

(c) Well, five tests in theory. Of course, in actual fact, I ended up taking seven tests because I failed the Mod 2 twice.