Cascading With the R1100s
Cascading with the R1100S
LEANINGS
PETER EGAN
IN THE WORLD OF WRONG DECISIONS, I've discovered that choosing to fly rather than ride to your destination is al most always a mistake-unless you have, say, the Pacific Ocean in your path. But sometimes you just gotta fly.
And that was the case recently, when Barb and I joined some old Northern California friends on a ride through the Cascades near Sunriver, Oregon.
We’ve been getting together with this crew nearly every summer for about 25 years now and riding somewhere together—northern Mexico, the Ozarks, Colorado, British Columbia, etc. The wallpaper slideshow on my computer screen is filled with photos of euphoriclooking (not to say glassy-eyed) people in riding gear sitting at tables in a wide variety of hotel restaurants that have mountain roads lurking just outside.
It’s a fairly fast-riding group, although health problems (gout, mostly, and centerstand-related back injuries) have recently forced one or two to follow along in cars. Luckily, these cars nearly always have their trunks filled with cases of wine, as several of these guys are in the Napa Valley wine business. Barb and I look forward to this annual opportunity to sample wines that actually cost more, per gallon, than unleaded premium or bottled water.
This year, our destination was the Northwest, as several riders had recently bought condos or cabins at Sunriver, a vacation development surrounded by snowcapped peaks, mountain lakes, tall timber and surreal landscapes with lava flows and extinct (?) volcanoes. Our friends Ren and Marilyn Harris invited us to stay at their cabin and take day rides into the mountains.
We’d originally planned to ride our Buell Ulysses out there but soon realized we didn’t have the extra week of travel time to make it from Wisconsin and back.
Ren to the rescue: “Why don’t you fly out, and I can bring our ‘guest’ RUOOS up to the cabin on the trailer with my R1200GS.”
No arm-twisting required. The RI 100S remains one of my favorite sport-touring bikes, and I’d ridden this one before, on a visit to California. It’s a black, lowmileage beauty that belonged to Ren and Marilyn’s late son, Ren Jr., who died of cancer when he was still quite young. It sat, polished and alone, in front of their house during the memorial dinner we all attended some years ago.
But before we could ride, we had to get to Oregon and back. It turned out this involved a couple of United Express flights on which the bathrooms had not been recently cleaned, so the cabin smelled just like the little house behind my great Aunt Margaret’s big farmhouse. Minus the quicklime. Also, I had a broken seatback.
Other than that—and the lack of peanuts—it was quite opulent.
Sometimes, though, the modern airport experience can actually be erased (without traditional shock therapy) by the ride on the other end.
Ren and Marilyn led us on a spectacular 200-mile loop. And Ren is not one to get stuck cheerfully behind a 35-mph motorhome and a line of timid drivers. Yes, we did some passing.
After one particularly exhilarating zoom past a couple of dawdlers, followed by a nice blast through a fast uphill curve, Barb leaned forward and shouted, “What model BMW is this?” “An RUOOS!” I shouted back. “It’s just like that first yellow testbike we rode through Colorado back in 1999.” There was a moment of silence, and then Barb said, “I like it!” This was followed by a happy squeeze on those parts of my waist where extra calories are stored for emergency use.
I liked it, too. I’ve been riding mostly dual-sport, standard and adventure-touring bikes for the past couple of years on the theory that they are easier on my back and wrists—which, of course, they are. But I’d almost forgotten how nice it is to tuck behind the fairing of a modem sportbike and lay it into a big sweeper with a little body weight over the front wheel and your legs tucked up and out of the way. It’s one of the four or five classic physical sensations in motorcycling.
Did I say modem sportbike? Okay, the RUOOS is actually going on 13 years old. But—like that other favorite of mine from the Nineties, the slightly more stifflegged Ducati 900SS—you don’t suffer much from the heartbreak of archaic technology. It has taut-yet-fluid suspension, great brakes and a smooth engine with lots of satisfying torque. And both the RUOOS and the 900SS are almost illogically inexpensive on the used bike market now.
As we came down out of the mountains and into the city of Bend, I found myself wondering if I didn’t need one of these bikes. Yes, my wrists and butt were a bit numb at the end of a long day in the saddle, but one needn’t always ride for a full day to have fun...
Oh, Lord. The mental gears were turning again.
You’d think I would have learned by now never to borrow a good motorcycle, because I always end the ride by asking myself, “Why don’t I have one of these?” It’s a disease, but a harmless one, I guess. Except for the missing money in our IRA.
That evening, Ren and Marilyn had everyone over to their cabin and opened a few bottles of the eye-wateringly excellent cabernet from their own vineyard (Paradigm), and I accidentally magnetically wandered, glass-in-hand, out to the garage to look at the black RI 100S.
A lovely bike to ride, and quite an impressive piece of motorcycle sculpture, I think.
Barb and I’d had some good times on these bikes. We rode that yellow test bike from Colorado to Wisconsin and back to California across Texas and the Southwest. Took a silver one through the Alps for a week, and Ren’s black beauty through Northern California a few years ago. And now this trip. All with the same group of people. But three of them are no longer with us.
This black one was special, of course. We’d ridden with Ren Jr. when he first got the bike, and it was a nice reminder of those times and the thing that had brought and held us together all these years, which was riding.
Sometimes it’s hard to separate the symbolism and personal meaning of a bike from your attraction to it.
I guess that’s because you can’t, and shouldn’t even try. E3
