“We either make ourselves miserable or make ourselves strong. The amount of work is the same.”

— Carlos Castaneda

Sept. 4 | Day 5: So we weren’t traveling by motorcycle, but naturally I couldn’t stop thinking about leaving Terra Nova behind and wondering (in random moments) how to prevent it from happening again.

Besides the obvious remedies of sensible packing and taking time to properly load the bike, I started fixating on other motorcycles, ones more suitable for long-distance, two-up travel. Perhaps that was part of the answer.

I started with Harley-Davidson, of course, since we were seeing so many of them on the highway. Harley touring bikes are big, heavy, and comfortable.

They’re also stable on the road. I remember riding through terrifyingly heavy wind on our way back from Mount Rushmore in 2010¹ — “It was like someone was trying to kick the bike out from beneath me,” commiserated a fellow rider at a fuel stop² — and seeing Harley tourers ride through that wind unaffected. It was their weight, low center of gravity, and long wheelbase that helped.

Big, heavy, and comfortable. And expensive, as we found during impromptu visits to Harley dealers³ starting in Hays, Kansas, and continuing during our sweep back and forth across the country.

As noted during our 2015 visit to Premont H-D in Quebec, I like Harley shops — the bikes, the tools, the garage signs on the walls. So we started looking at Harley touring bikes.

Expensive. I liked the Road Glide with the fixed fairing⁴ but couldn’t countenance the double headlights⁵. The Street Glide was next, and I liked it, though the fairing is on the forks. The Road King wasn’t bad, either.

But they are expensive, starting at $19,000 and soaring northward. So buying new is no-go, though there were some interesting used bikes, priced to inflict mild dysrhythmia instead of full-on cardiac arrest.

So we paused at Harley places in Golden, Colorado Springs, Durango, and a few more, where I casually inspected bikes and nonsensically started collecting H-D poker chips, a Harley thing⁶.

Since returning home, I’ve looked at other bikes, sport-tourers like the BMW R1200RT, a really nice touring bike with final drive reliability issues, just like my Endurance. Alas, I found Triumph no longer makes the Trophy motorcycle.

Yamaha’s FJR 1300 and Kawasaki Concours are other, less pricey, possibilities.

I’m not sure if I’ll actually get another motorcycle. But I am thinking about it. And looking at bikes while Terra Nova languished at home took some of the sting out of driving a car while we should have been on a motorcycle.

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1 — It really was frightening, more so than the Sierra wind blasting across U.S. 395 as I rode Endurance home to Reno from San Diego. I had to pull over and wait out that one.

2 — We met two riders from Pittsburgh at a South Dakota gas station and naturally we talked about the wind. It was somehow comforting to know they were as unsettled as I was.

3 — No matter how you regard Harley, it has an unmatched widespread dealer network. Most of them are located just off interstates, which (while perhaps putting them in a locale class with McDonald’s) makes them easy to find while you’re on the road. In comparison, there’s like one BMW motorcycle dealer in all of Montana, last I looked.

4 — In which the wind-cutting fairing is attached to the frame instead of the front forks. It lessens the effect of wind on steering, since a fork-mounted fairing wants to take the front wheel with it.

5 — It gives the bike a deal-killing space-shippy appearance, at least for me.

6 — Look, I don’t know why. At one to two bucks apiece, they were probably the least-expensive souvenirs of the mission. And there’s a nice tactile pleasure in clicking them together in your hand. Lots of Harley riders collect them, apparently.

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