Adventures Large and Small

Hello, and welcome to the July/August issue. I hope that summer is treating you well and that a motorcycle trip is in your near future.

This issue we have two travel stories aboard classic iron, one a trip completed in a day, and one that took just a little bit longer.

I get pitched a lot of zany ideas, and to be honest, more often than not, I encourage people to do the thing. Writer John L. Stein called me one day a couple of months ago and mentioned he’d dug out a 1964 Yamaha YDS2 and was in the process of getting it roadworthy.

John has written a lot of highly entertaining stories for us over the years, including Surf Riders (September/October 2021), in which he and some friends strapped surf boards to their bikes and took off on a motorcycling/surfing/camping trip.

When John called, he was in the midst of planning another adventure. Once he got the YDS2 running, he planned to get it out on a good day ride, but where to go? What began with the idea of going in search of the perfect cup of joe (and the cafe that would serve it) turned into something bigger. Was his little Yamaha the perfect cafe racer? After being off the road for some 25 years, would it make the journey without much trouble? You can read John’s story, In Search of the Ace Cafe.

Another great travel story featured in this issue is by writer Greg Williams. Greg had heard a tale that some years back, a group of friends had ridden a good chunk of the TransAmerica Trail, a famously not-easy and mostly unpaved route that runs across the United States. It’s a well-known route, and one many people have on their bucket list to ride someday, but the zinger here is that this group of friends decided to tackle the trip on a trio of 1960s Honda Dreams rather than modern dual-sports. Undaunted, brothers Pat and Kenny Jones and friend Dwayne McLemore set off on the trail from Olive Branch, Mississippi, with the goal of finishing in San Francisco, California, and thankfully they took a lot of pictures along the way. Read the story Dreams on the Trail, on Page 54.