Take a Trip on One of Your Old Bikes

By Landon Hall
Updated on February 11, 2023
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by John L. Stein
John's $5 Yamaha Big Bear Scrambler, loaded and ready.

Traveling on an old bike can be an adventure, or it can be as smooth as a run to your local coffee shop. Preparation is often the main difference between the two.

But have you ever stopped and thought how easy we have it today? We are rarely more than a cell phone call away from help if we find ourselves with a broken bike we can’t fix, and in the rare occurrence that there’s no signal, I’ve always had a kind stranger (and often fellow motorcyclist) stop within five minutes of roadside trouble to offer help.

How many of us take real journeys on our old bikes anymore? I’ll admit most of my 3- or 4-day weekend jaunts in the past 10 years have often been on something more modern than my 1970s twins.

The one multiple-day trip I did take a few years back on my 1973 BMW R75/5 was a hoot. A friend and I took a few days off to head to Missouri to ride some of the great roads surrounding the Lake of the Ozarks. I purposefully planned out a completely back-road route from my home in Topeka, Kansas, to our rented little cabin in Missouri.

Though only some 200 miles away, it took us 7 hours to get there with a lunch stop. In the heat of the summer, that was enough time in the saddle for us that day. The ride there was happily uneventful. The next day things got more exciting. First I was pulled over by a Missouri state trooper who was not familiar with what an antique (as in circa-1973) Kansas motorcycle tag looks like. After a friendly discussion, we were back on our way.

But a couple hours later, after some of the nicest curvy roads we’d seen yet on the trip, my buddy had disappeared from my mirrors. Turns out the charging system on his early-2000s Honda VFR had given up the ghost, and no shop within riding distance had the parts we needed to repair it. That was it. Another friend with a truck and a ramp hauled the broken VFR back to the cabin and back to Topeka the next day. The /5 never missed a beat the whole trip, and we still had a good time despite the breakdown.

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