56 / CYCLE WORLD
“Would you like to ride my Norton Commando?”
Mark asked.
“Funny you should ask,” I replied. “No.”
Actually, I would have loved to ride his flawless Com-
mando up there, but I’d suffered a stroke while kickstart-
ing my own ’74 Commando three years earlier, and I was
afraid the VA Hospital would throw me out on the street if
I showed up with another Norton-induced stroke. They’d
spent half the cost of an F-16 on my miracle clot-busting
drugs. Also, the last time Mark rode his Commando to the
Quail, the alternator exploded on the way home.
“How about our BMW testbike, a 2019 R 1250 RT?” he
offered. “You could do an update on that travel story you
wrote 38 years ago, called ‘Shooting the Coast,’ where you
took a Harley FLH from L.A. to Seattle and back.”
Update, indeed. That 1981 FLH Heritage model had
been the last of the 80-cube Shovelheads, right before the
Evolution engine arrived. A wonderfully charismatic bike,
but its throbbing vibration had cracked the crash bar welds
and shaken the floorboards apart. It also burned a bit of
“Would you like to ride my
Norton Commando?” Mark asked.
“Funny you should ask,” I replied. “No.”
oil. Now we’d be traveling on the latest and largest iteration
of the water-cooled Boxer Twin. With GPS, ABS, traction
control, and half a dozen electronic suspension settings, not
to mention saddlebags with no conchos or fringe. And we’d
really be shooting only about half the coast.
Sounded interesting, though. I’d gotten nothing but
good reports on the new RT’s comfort, handling and killer
engine, and it would be ideal for taking Barb and our
luggage on that mixture of freeways, forested lanes, and
cliff-hugging roads.
So we packed our riding gear into my battered orange
KTM roller bag—always easy to spot on the baggage car-
rousel—and off we went in a big jet airplane, where we
enjoyed a sumptuous lunch of two biscuits and a small
water with several ice cubes. A cab delivered us to the CW
office in Irvine, California, to pick up the BMW, then we
rode to a nearby hotel to gird ourselves for a chilly early
morning departure: 49 degrees at 5:30 a.m. Mark pulled
into the parking lot on a 2011 Harley XR1200X borrowed
from his wife Jen, and we rode off into the gathering