Tag: adventure

I Hate the Word “Content”

There was a brief moment where I thought maybe the next chapter in my life might be making videos of all the amazing motorcycle roads in America: how to get to them, where to stay, where to eat, and the glory of the roads themselves. Then, I made two discoveries that greatly attenuated this idea. One was Adam Sandoval: no way what I could do with my yearly vacation would compete with what he had done. The second was the fact that I hate setting up shots and editing video. I love talking, pontificating, philosophising, but it turns out I actually hate the core part of moto-vlogging. I do some small amount of video editing, but it turns out that this turns one of my favorite things into just a goddamned job.

I have a GoPro 13 Black and I capture some moments for friends and family whether it be ADV, scuba diving, or random camping shenanigans. I watch a lot of motorcycle-focused Youtubers though: Shade Tree Surgeon, Dork in the road, Ride to Food, Her Two Wheels, Off She Goes, Just G Kue, Doodle on a Motorcycle, Kidmoto22, MotoState Podcast, Whit Meza, Rever, RIDE Adventures, DanDan the Fireman, Meghan Stark, Lowbrowcustoms, Real Riders Ride, RevZilla, Klim, and others.
Jesus, just the thought of actually properly linking to each one of those channels reminds me of why I don’t produce motorcycle content.

Ugh, and there’s that word, “content”.

I have seen a number of Youtubers who ask the audience what kind of content we, the watchers, would like to consume. These words make me think of a nest of baby birds. Momma flies to the nest, and the baby birds open their mouths for momma to regurgitate whatever directly into their mouths. I went out and got this, now let me vomit this into your face. Motorcycle riding, ADV riding, scuba diving, camping, any kind of adventure travel: these are sacred things to me, the things that I wade through corporate America and 401ks to get to. When someone reduces this to “I will create the content, and you will consume the content”, it makes me sick just a little bit.

You’re on Youtube, with 300,000 subscribers, making cool videos for me to watch. You need money to do this full time. You work with companies who sponsor you. I get all that: just don’t reduce this to yet another transactional interaction. Riding across, discovering a cool restaurant in a small town, camping, seeing amazing sights: these are sacred experiences.

The ADV Thing

I added a Husqvarna Norden 901 to my garage. Why?

On an episode of of This Motorcycle Life, the host interviewed Melissa Holbrook Pierson. She’s most famous for taking a very long ride on a Ural with her disabled child, but also for writing a book called “The Man Who Stop at Nothing“, in which she claims that Iron Butt style riding is the most pure form of motorcycling. As a multiple Iron Butt finisher , I must disagree.

For a long time, a couple of extreme events have been calling to me. The first is the Hoka Hey Challenge, in which riders cover around 10,000 miles in short order, often 10 days or so. The rules include no staying in hotels and no using GPS. You have to sleep by your pony and follow a set of written directions with paper maps. The first years, people wrecked and died because the trip included gravel and a lot of extreme terrain.

The other is the James Dalton Highway, riding all the way to the Arctic Circle in Deadhorse/Prudhoe Bay. The last 400 miles of this trip is largely shitty gravel.

Beyond these trips, it should come as no surprise that significant miles of dirt and gravel on a 1000lb touring motorcycle is at best impractical. The tires don’t grip, the suspension isn’t built for that kind of rut. The appeal of a machine that can gobble some highway miles but then just take a sharp right onto a gravel road, a Backcountry Discovery Route, maybe some muddy Jeep trails, is strong.

There are views and settings that are hard to get to, and some of those are precious and likely to be much more sparsely occupied than the paved roads to a county park.

The Challenger, of course, is still in the garage. The American highway system is amazing, and that is the machine for long road trips.

I didn’t grow up on dirt bikes like a lot of people did. The guy who’s been putting patches on his black vest for years is buying the full Klim riding gear and hopefully putting some stickers on “panniers” soon.

Adventure touring is the purest form of motorcycling.