Heavy rain all week made Beaver Valley a muddy mess. The Tiger waded through it all, spinning it's wheels in the deep mud but always getting me down the track.
Sunday was a long ride up north to clear my head after another week of pandemic teaching where they pile on extra work going on two years into a pandemic and then reduce your ability to do it. The trusty Tiger was on song and we sailed and sailed, up past Horning's Mills and through Creemore before tackling the Grey Highlands. I was timing the ride because I had a meeting!
Last week I joined the Canadian Vintage Motorcycle Group and then connected with their Facebook page (that part is free - if you're into old bikes I'd urge you to join up!). By dumb luck the admin who accepted my FB group request happens to live nearby and has a lockup ten minutes from where I live. He asked if I wanted to see what he had kicking around in terms of project bikes I could buy. That CVMG membership is already paying off!
Four hours and three hundred kilometres later I rolled up to a farm just south of town and met Brian and his lovely wife Terry. We drove down to his storage containers out of sight at the back of the farm and he unlocked a hidden magical kingdom!
The bike I think I'm going to do a full ground up restoration on is a 1971 Triumph Bonneville. This year was the first oil-in-frame model. There are benefits to this model that suit me, the main one being that this bike has a taller seat than other Bonnies.
The bike in question has been partially 'choppered' with a big sissy bar and king/queen seat. It also has long front forks - someone was on their way to turning this into some kind of Easy Rider homage, but it won't stay that way. I'm not stuck on the stock-at-all-costs angle but I like motorcycling for the dynamic feel of it and a chopper isn't about that. A modernized custom that stays true to the original look but makes use of the bits and pieces that will make this classic a bit more dependable is where I'm at.
Fortunately, Brian has lots of stock spares which he'd include with it so I'll be able to strip it down and begin working out how to put it all back together again without having to start from scratch. When I pick up the bike I should also be getting some tupperware boxes full of additional parts.
Classic Bike Magazine had a great issue in June about Steve McQueen, On Any Sunday and desert racers. McQueen himself did a Bonneville desert sled back in the '60s. I like the stripped down scrambler look of that kind of bike, though I'm not going to go all knobbly tires and brown seat with it, but a simplified, high piped Bonneville for the road? That's something I could get into!
I'm going to have to wait until after Thanksgiving Weekend to get my hands on it. I 'll also have to figure out how to get it over here, but I'm looking forward to my first deep bike resto after successfully putting a number of early retirements back on the road again. This one's going to be an engine out, frame up restoration, Henry Cole style!
Brain had some beautiful old bikes - this 1950s BSA bitsa was a wonderful looking mashup. The only thing that made me hesitate was the 350cc engine trying to move my bear-sized self around.
Back to stock? The '71 was the first of the oil in frame Bonnevilles and an odd duck with a tall seat height, but it was also a handsome thing!
Here are some other resources and reference images as I bring this old thing back from the edge.
A well looked after old bike that comes with lots of spares. It would also let me tackle the Ontario Amateur Trials Association's season of events and get my head around trials riding.
This is the accessible option in GasGas's competition range of trials bikes. It's a lightweight, 2-stroke competition machine that isn't quite as mad as their 300cc beasts.
OWN A DREAM CLASSIC!!!
about $25,000
This is a tricky one! Old bikes are vanishingly rare in Ontario so I'd have to go overseas for this pre-war Triumph Tiger 100. It's £12,000 ($21k CAD) and I'd need to get it shipped over this way which would probably add some more thousands on there in terms of shipping and duties.
OWN AN EASIER(?) CLASSIC!
$?
It's not for sale so this isn't exactly an easier classic, but it's local and it's a lovely 1961 BSA. I'd have to convince the owner to sell it and I'm not sure what it'd need for the road, but it looks fantastic!
BIZZARRE WINTER PROJECT
$2000 (but I'd offer $1500)
750 GSZ 750 F with 42k kms on it. Not asking much and it's ridiculous, but I like it for that - it's a full 90's colour commitment! I'd actually like an 80s Katana but they're hard to find. It'd be my first Suzuki! I like the organic shapes, but it's a heavy old bus for the power output.
¥198,545 (that's about $2300CAD, maybe $3k with shipping/customs)
You need a 2016 or newer SV650. The new ones are $7500. A lightly used (5200kms) 2018 with some nice extras is $6300.
With a $10k CAD budget I could create a modern special as an homage to the classic Katana. A bit more on top would get it a period accurate paint job. It wouldn't have that big air cooled work of art on it though.
2004 HONDA CBR600 F4i TRACK BIKE
$2500 (I'd offer $2200)
It's been dropped and has some scratches, but I'd want it to track ride so I don't care about the aesthetics. It'd get stripped down and ridden only on track. It's only 167 kilos to begin with and I'd take even more off. This one's only got 32k on it. It'd get lightened up and mechanically sorted and then do what CBR600s do best - take corners at speed.
I still need a vehicle that could move this stuff to where I need it, but that's another story.
We pulled into Creemore just past noon with rain forming on my visor. My lovely wife (who is very good at finding a seat in a restaurant) got us just that on a covered patio at the Old Mill House Pub and we enjoyed our first meal out since the pandemic started while watching the rain fall.
The thunder cell past over just as we finished lunch so we had a nice walk around Creemore checking out the Creemore Bakery & Cafe coffee shop and the local, independent bookstore, Curiosity House Books. Of course, we stayed just along enough that the next cell was moving in, and it was a humdinger! We could have sat it out but the afternoon was getting long and we had a doctor's appointment to get to back home so we got ourselves ready and jumped on the bike just as the rain came again.
This wasn't a summer shower like the last one, it was torrential. By the time we turned on to County Road 9 to follow the Mad River up the Niagara Escarpment and hopefully through the storm, the road was a river itself and visibility was down to just a few car lengths.
This was my first time tackling this kind of weather on the Concours and I was doing it two up and on a schedule. I don't know if Kawasaki Heavy Industries makes nuclear submarines (they do, of course), but the Concours handled this biblical end of time storm like one. With the windshield raised I was able to duck out of the deluge and track through the tsunami coming down the road toward us.
County Road 9 twists and turns as it follows the Mad River up the side of the escarpment and the volume of rain was already causing flash flooding. As we approached Dunedin a construction site on the left side of the road had washed out leaving half a foot of muddy water running across the road. I angled the bike to hit it at 90° and we crossed effortlessly leaving a wake of muddy water. Further up the river had burst its banks and had flooded the roads around us.
Stopping seemed more dangerous than the alternatives so I just pressed on. As we climbed out of the valley the rain, which had been thumping down in quarter sized drops so heavy I thought they might be hail eased and stopped as quickly as it came. As we crested the summit the sun broke out highlighting the green valley behind us that was still under a diabolical sky. We pulled up to the intersection with Grey Road 124 which would lead us down toward Horning's Mills, Shelbourne and then home, except the sky south of us wasn't just dark and sinister, it was green, like a fresh bruise.
"I don't think I want to ride into that," I said to Alanna.
"Noooo..." Alanna said, eying the apocalypse south of us.
"How about we jog west to Dundalk instead?" I said, nodding to the turnoff just south of us.
A deke onto County Road 9 and we were passing through county side washed clean by the passing storms. We caught another followup cell past Dundalk but it was nothing compared to the submersion we'd experienced coming out of Creemore. What's the best way to ride through a tornado? Don't, ride away from it!
It was one of those moments when you bond with a new bike. You ride it well and it performs like the fantastic piece of engineering that it is. As we thundered home (making the appointment with 10 whole minutes to spare), I found myself appreciating the Neptune Blue Kawasaki in a new light. This bike offers a level of versatility, even in the most obtuse situations, that opens up riding opportunities that I might otherwise not have considered.
I came across Overland Journal in Indigo that other day and the combination of reasonable price ($12CAD) and very high quality (it compared favourably with magazine-book combos asking $25+) had me picking it up. It isn't motorcycle specific but does include off road and adventure bikes along with pretty much any vehicle you might go off the beaten path with.
I usually do that kind of off-roading with completely inappropriate vehicles. In the early noughties my wife and I beat a rented Toyota Camry to within an inch of its life on the the logging roads in the interior of Vancouver Island. Another time we were in a rented Citroen mini-van in Iceland watching arctic foxes run across the empty landscape. In both cases we got deep into the wilderness in rental two-wheel drive vehicles, but then we got a Jeep Wrangler as a rental car last year and it started giving me ideas.
I put myself through university working as a service manager for Quaker State's Q-Lube and whenever a Jeep came in you needed an umbrella when you walked under it for all the fluids leaking down on you. That negative experience put me off the brand for years but last year we got a Wrangler as an insurance rental after and accident and it changed my perception.
It was a 2019 Jeep Wrangler four dour with about 20k kilometres on the clock and it was tight! Everything worked and felt quality and it did something that no car has done for me in the past decade; it felt like an event driving it.
Since bikes set in I've fallen out of love with cars (trucks, whatever), but the Jeep made driving feel special again. Performance cars seem kind of pointless when I have two bikes in the garage that are faster than anything but apex million-dollar plus super-cars, but the Jeep came at it from another angle. The big tires made it a challenge to manage on pavement and the big V6 in this one was a stark contrast to the sub-two-litre mileage focused appliances I've been driving, but maybe that's what made it feel special.
There was a point where we could have taken the other car (a Mazda2) down to Toronto but took the Jeep instead and it made the whole experience less like a long, difficult winter drive and more like an adventure. Being higher up off the road meant I wasn't looking through other people's road spray all the time and if I wasn't heavy on the gas the thing was getting mid-high-twenties miles-per-gallon.
Another time we were out in it and my brother-in-law (a former Jeep owner) and our sons went out for a ride and I shifted it into 4wd and drove right over the snow mound in the Canadian Tire parking lot, much to everyone's amazement. This was a ten-foot plus high mound of snow and the Jeep went right over it - with road tires on! Deeply impressed with the vehicle's capabilities and character is where I was when we handed it back.
I also used it to take a thousand plus pound of ewaste to recycling from work and the heavy duty suspension and utility of the thing made this an easy job when the little hatchback would have been blowing shocks and wallowing under the weight. Having a vehicle that takes on larger utility tasks makes sense when you have a lot of them to do. It also makes sense if you want to go deep into the wilderness while being self-sufficient.
I'm getting to the age now where things seem strangely expensive. My first car cost me $400 and took me a hundred thousand kilometres. A Honda Civic hatchback I had in the early noughties took me over a quarter of a million kilometres for less than seven grand. The only new car I've ever purchased (that Mazda2 that has been flawless for over 120k over ten years of ownership) cost me $17k new, all in. My wife's Buick cost an eye-watering forty-grand back in 2016 new and I'm not interested in double car payments so won't be looking until we finally pay that one off (which seems like it's taking forever with our strange new world of 7-9 year finance schemes). When that debt finally gets cleared I'll be looking at a Jeep Wrangler, but not just any old Wrangler, I want the one from the future.
From an 'overlander' point of view a dependable long distance vehicle capable of going off the beaten path means my wife and I can do what we've always done, but more so. In the pre-covid times we drove from Ontario to the West Coast in 2018:
In 2019 we took the same tiny Buick to the East Coast of Canada, but the vehicle we drove limited our ability to go off the beaten path (or even off pavement). What a Jeep would do is enable us to do the things we defer to (in rental cars) in something designed for that kind of nonsense.
This has me encouraging my lovely wife to join us at SMART Adventures this year to learn some off road driving in a side-by-side while we dirt bike. Which brings the overlanding vehicle back to bikes again. You can go deep in a Jeep but you can get places on a dirt bike that you can't in any other way. Jeep's new 4xe hybrid Wrangler would be a fantastic platform for all manner of biking shenanigans from a tread lightly/minimal emissions angle. Overland Journal had an editorial about not abusing the remote places they feature. A good place to start with that would be to minimize the amount of emissions you're putting out while enjoying nature.
If a Wrangler'll carry a full on dirt bike, it'll handle a Freeride (or 2 without batteries in 'em).
Whether it's taking a dirt bike to a trail or a trials bike to an event, the Jeep 4xe would be capable of doing it efficiently and effectively. With some canny rear mounted racks it wouldn't even require a trailer.
The next-level green expedition option would be to pick up a KTM Freeride and put it on the Wrangler 4xe and then work out how to charge the bike from the hybrid Jeep's electrical system.
Overland Journal has a lot of advertisers who specialize in making vehicles long distance ready, including many that specialize in prepping Jeeps for the long haul. A Wrangler 4xe would make an efficient, green platform from which to launch wilderness riding on KTM's Freeride that barely leaves a trace.
The Jeep Wrangler 4xe is the most powerful Wrangler yet, has astonishing mileage and would also offer some interesting electrical generation options when off the beaten track.
The electric bike and the hybrid Wrangler would cost less than a base model BMW mid-sized SUV, so it isn't even crazy expensive (well it is, but that's just because I'm old - everything's expensive!). This zero emissions expeditions thing is something KTM and Jeep should join forces on. Two legendary off-road brands working together to produce an environmentally responsible off-roading experience? Betcha it wouldn't take too much to have the Jeep's hybrid system juice up the Freeride while off piste either.
I'm glad I stumbled across Overland Journal. I'm enjoying it so much I think I'm going to pick up a subscription. Then it's time to start thinking about the Jeep/KTM green/dream team combination.
