I've only bought two new motorcycles in my life. The first was a 1963 Honda C110. The other is my current 2018 Honda Gold Wing Tour DCT. I paid $263 for the first one and $36,500 for this one — it listed for $28,000, but that's not what it really costs by the time you walk out the dealership door. Helmet, insurance, license, tax, accessories: all part of the true cost, and that was mine.
I've always said I buy my bikes to ride, but I still like to look at them. Two days after picking this one up, I set off on a short trip — fifteen hundred miles — just to learn the machine. It was so different from anything I'd owned that I spent thirteen hours the next day just trying to work the navigation. Thirteen hours later, I'd mastered nothing. Couldn't even enter my own address, let alone a destination.
This was a yearly ride we'd been making for years, and the first stop was where the Arizona contingent gathered. Rather than visit with the guys, I sat there working the nav screen. Finally I gave up trying to be clever and just typed in the city of Kingman.
It took.
Obviously those thirteen hours of intense, irritating, vocabulary-building work were paying off.
During the trip I learned a lot about the new bike — some good, some bad. Bad, you ask? Very bad. It was speed-limited to 112 mph. Nothing wrong with that on its own, if they gave you full power all the way there. But no — it starts choking you back around 105, and if you're going uphill, more like 90. Try that passing a semi and the string of cars stuck behind it.
My buddies, meanwhile, were having a ball running up to 112 and waving me on to pass, knowing full well there was nothing left in the tank. Made me laugh. Not really.
The rest of the rally went the way it usually does — sweepers through Death Valley a little faster than the law allows, no unscheduled events (crashes), a good time. After the goodbyes, everyone scattered home, some a hundred and twenty miles, some two thousand. My ride back was somewhere in the middle, about five hundred.
Not long after I got home, I got a call from Russell Day Long: they'd had a cancellation, and the slot was mine if I could make it. I took it.
That same morning I had a routine doctor's visit. On my way out with a clean bill of health, she asked if there was anything else on my mind. I said no — but that I'd bumped my head a few days earlier and now had some little blisters there. She took one look and said she thought it was shingles. She was right. She put me on Acyclovir, told me to rest and stay off work.
Me: I'm heading to Shasta City tomorrow.
Her: No.
Me: It'll be a relaxing trip. Probably help me heal.
She gave me an exasperated look. She knew my mind was made up.
I left the next morning and only made it to Tulare before stopping for a room. Funny thing — I thought I was getting close. In reality I was still four hundred miles out. I went to bed early, woke up earlier, and pushed the speed limit the rest of the way to Shasta City. I was parked in front of the shop ten minutes before they opened.
It's an all-day job to build a custom motorcycle seat, and very few companies do it as well as RDL. The ride home was much easier on my backside — though the shingles were still plenty irritating under my helmet. I had a month to heal before a VROC rally in Maggie Valley, NC.
A month later, and shingles last a long time — annoying even when you catch them early. Still, I'd planned the trip and I was taking it. When I'm on a motorcycle I don't know what a straight line between two points is, so on my way to North Carolina I found myself cutting through New Mexico, then Texas, spending the night in Texarkana.
There was a little restaurant near the motel serving a great-tasting Cobb salad — with the faintest hint, in the background of every bite, that something wasn't quite right. Not enough to stop eating. So I didn't.
The next morning I was in real trouble — a case of the squirts that wouldn't quit. I packed up, loaded the bike, and waited until the last possible minute to turn in my key. One more precautionary trip to the bathroom, then I swung my leg over the seat — which caused an involuntary reaction of its own. I still had the key. Back up to the room I went.
After the necessary cleanup, I checked out and pointed the bike toward Georgia. I made it eighty-eight miles before the E. coli took me down completely. I don't usually stay anywhere nice, but I had no choice, and an early check-in got me an expensive room. It took two full days before I felt like eating again.
I rode another five hundred miles into Talladega, AL, and spent the night at a Super 8 wallpapered floor to ceiling in NASCAR Cup cars — turns out that's the home of Talladega Raceway. A bowl of complimentary Raisin Bran the next morning, and I was back on the road to see my friend Mark and his wife.
They'd been in a terrible accident — a kid texting and driving had hit them. His wife suffered a quadruple break in her pelvis; Mark had twelve breaks in his, plus countless other fractures. They'd spent a couple of years between the hospital and a rehab facility. My visit landed on the day his wife was released — Mark still had a couple more weeks before they'd even let him transfer to rehab. Between the wreck and the hospital, he'd flatlined five times.
We'd been riding buddies for years, plenty of spirited miles through the twisties together. Sitting with him in that hospital bed, he told me he'd never ride a motorcycle again.
Maybe three years later, visiting him at his home in North Carolina, he walked me out to his shop and showed me an old Kawasaki Nomad someone had given him, or sold cheap. He was rebuilding it. A year after that, he was riding it down his gravel driveway. I've ridden with him these last two years, and he hasn't lost a step.
Funny thing — he doesn't remember ever telling me he'd never ride again.
Another funny thing: I'm glad he doesn't.
I could tell he was getting tired in that hospital bed, so I said goodbye and left with the image of a broken but healing man. Before leaving town, I stopped by to see his wife too — also badly hurt, but mending well.
From there I started toward Maggie Valley for the SEVROC Rally. Not long after crossing into North Carolina from Georgia, an old one-ton farm truck pulled onto the road ahead of me, into my lane. I needed to change lanes rather than crawl to a stop behind him, checked over my shoulder — clear — but before I could move over, my front forks felt like they'd completely collapsed. The bike erupted in the craziest clunking, scraping, grinding noise I'd ever heard. I killed the throttle and fought to keep it straight until it finally stopped.
I went to put my feet down and something told me to lift them higher — it felt like giant springs underneath both boots. Try to stand on one leg and the bike would tip toward the other side, and vice versa. Looking down carefully, I found a roll of hogwire fencing wound up under the bike, my feet planted right on top of it. There was no way to get the bike off of it without dropping it.
Then I remembered — this model had walking speed, forward and reverse. Using the paddle shifters, I turned the bars one way and walked the bike forward, then the other way and walked it back, over and over, until I was clear of the wire. I put it on the side stand and took a few pictures of my predicament. Sure enough, it had scratched up my brand-new Gold Wing. Ugh.
I threw the fencing off the shoulder, got back on, and rode the rest of the way to Maggie Valley, checking her out as I went — she ran fine. About five miles from the motel, Mother Nature decided the bike needed a wash, so I rode the last stretch through a downpour. The motel let me park under their covered drive-through and gave me a room where I could see the bike from the window.
The next morning I found major scratches all over the new paint. I waited until I got home to Arizona to file the claim.
Total damage: $9,800. Wow.
I've always been a good driver — some say lucky — and I'd never had to file an insurance claim before this. I was with Geico at the time, and they sent an adjuster out to look at the bike. He offered $3,800 for repairs. I'd already looked it over myself and knew it would run at least $5,000, so I told him I was taking it to the dealer for a second opinion. The dealer charged me $100 to look — and came back with an estimate of $9,800. Big difference.
Geico agreed to pay it, but I let them knock $4,000 off the bill, since I could make a perfect repair on the expensive part myself rather than have them replace it. They agreed, and cut me a check for $5,500.
This was when I learned there's no such thing as customer loyalty anymore. When my renewal came in, the premium had doubled. I called and asked why, after I'd just saved them four grand. They told me I was just a number.