Chronicles
Snow Job: Riding in Winter
Unless you are lucky enough to live somewhere that escapes winter's icy grip, there is a special set of hazards everyone else has to deal with to keep rolling year-round: the cold, the dark, the precipitation, and changes in traction. And winter conditions are a potential hazard on high mountain passes all year. Put them all together, and make way for...
70,000-mile maintenance
For three years we have been riding our KTMs on a long and winding road around the world. When we got to Colombia, our gauges had ticked over a distance of some 70,000 miles, roughly equivalent to two and half trips around the globe along the equator. Our trusty companions have not always had an easy life: We tortured them in the hot sands of the Sahara...
Protection Racket
There are two kinds of riders, it’s said: Those who are going down and those who have been down. Falling off a motorcycle is something that almost all of us will experience at one time or another. RoadRUNNER readers, being well above average in intelligence, experience and perspicacity, therefore understand the importance of getting good impact...
MotoVentures Training
Old hands will tell you that their experiences on dirt roads or tracks helped to make them better street riders. Many successful professional road racers got their start in the lowly dirt, learning to handle the vagaries of less than perfect traction and control their motorcycles in unusual attitudes and situations. But where, when you’re ready...
Rebel Without a Clue
It's the B-movie western we've all seen a hundred times. Outlaws ride into town, get drunk in the saloon and clash with the locals. The ineffectual, alcoholic sheriff won't intervene; his daughter, meanwhile, falls for the gang leader. The locals form a lynch mob, and the sheriff, shamed into action, tries to intervene. There's an escape, a chase,...
Riding to Work
Motorcycling along my secret back road route to work on a spring morning, I'm completely focused on the ride. With no thought of the challenges waiting at my job, I'm enjoying the fresh scents of budding flowers and some colorful scenery on a two-lane byway curving through an attractive suburban area....
BMW Mendoza
Motorcycling on one's own is perhaps never wise, but often it is inevitable. There was a time when I intentionally scouted routes alone, but I have since learned how much more enjoyable it is to share the experience, good or bad, with others....
New York's Scooter Scene
New York, New York. So nice they had to name it twice. The Big Apple. Gotham, the city that never sleeps, is an unlikely place to find two-wheeled communion, plagued as it is with manic cabbies, potholes that swallow small children, and suburban sprawl that pushes any scenic back roads well beyond the city limits. But like dandelions growing in sidewalk...
City Portrait - Knoxville
All motorcyclists covet great roads, and everyone has their favorites. But when it all boils down, certain common denominators remain. The twists, turns, sweeps, and swoops of lonely two-lanes snaking their way through the mountain ranges across the land usually comprise the cream of the collective crop. And every motorcyclist who can't resist the...
Vintage Japanese Motorcycle Club National Meet
Oak Ridge, Tennessee, is a freaky place.Your average city is a place where history happens in the course of incidents inevitably occurring over the duration of time. But Oak Ridge is a place created specifically to make history. Big history. History that mankind will remember for as long as man exists. History that changed the meaning of history itself....
