Pre-Sturgis Ride

[F6Dave]

Great post. I kind of miss my old Valkyrie sometimes also.

I was just out there a couple of weeks ago. There were not that many people around at all.

June is a great time to visit the Black Hills. Some places feel like ghost towns.

[SpencerPJ]

Great looking bike, sounds like a great trip. I am still working on endurance to make a motorcycle trip. I'm only in my upper 50s but max ride lengths have been 3 hrs tops. I do feel a lot better with my F6B and Ultimate seat, maybe one day. soon.

[F6Dave]

Great looking bike, sounds like a great trip. I am still working on endurance to make a motorcycle trip. I'm only in my upper 50s but max ride lengths have been 3 hrs tops. I do feel a lot better with my F6B and Ultimate seat, maybe one day. soon.

You have one of the best touring bikes ever made, so go for it!

While on a trip I often think of how nice it would have been to own one of these bikes in my early days of touring. At the risk of sounding like an old geezer telling a kid how tough it was 'back in the day', I'll say that long distance touring has never been better.

When I decided to try touring on my brand new 1976 Kawasaki KZ-900, 55 MPH was the law of the land. That added hours to a 400 or 500 mile day. I logged two 900 mile days in 1978, and they seemed to last forever. Today's high speed limits, especially out here in the west, have made it far easier to cover long distances.

Motorcycle gear has come a long way too. I added a Vetter-clone fairing and some hard bags to my KZ-900, so the basic bike worked well. If you wanted audio Vetter made a 'Cycle Sound' accessory that let you mount a car radio and speakers in the fairing. That worked OK. If you wanted to communicate with other riders you'd mount an automotive CB radio on the handlebars, then get creative with the microphone, speaker, and antenna installation. A state-of-the-art nav system was a tank bag with a map pouch. It took a few years before I bought a proper leather riding jacket, so I made due with a nylon windbreaker over a flannel shirt on cool days. For really cold days I knew riders who made heated vests with several yards of 24 gauge speaker wire.

Most seats were hard slabs back then, so a day's ride could be painful. JC Whitney sold a 'water seat' (water beds were popular then) which consisted of foam rubber in a plastic bladder that you filled with water. It was actually pretty comfortable!

I started touring 3 years before the Goldwing Interstate hit the market. We've come a long way!