Ain't No Pillion

Athletes have a full physical before every sports season. Why should high-performance motorcycles that are about to go on a major trip be any different? Starting out on a trip with motorcycles in excellent operating condition just made sense to us, so we send our motorcycles up to Max BMW to have the professionals give [...]

We’ve always planned to take the bikes in for a pre-trip service at a BMW dealer before we go. We enjoy doing our own maintenance and feel we’re pretty competent with most things, but we also believe an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. We wanted to have the professionals do our [...]

More trip-planning minutiae – the bikes are off getting a pre-trip checkup. We’d always intended to have a BMW dealer look them over before leaving for the trip, but the timetable was moved up because we went to change the oil in Masukomi’s bike and had problems removing the drain plug – the prior owner [...]

We’ve been unable to deal with some of the big logistics of our trip due to some delays in getting some paperwork through. Now it looks like we may have the paperwork resolved on Friday (fingers crossed!) and we can start doing the big things, like buying plane tickets, arranging cargo for the bikes, etc. [...]

We’re nearing the final stages of gearing up for our big trip (hopefully leaving at the beginning of December!) and so we’re picking up the last bits of kit that we’ll need for the trip. We’ve got pretty much all of our motorcycle gear (although we still need to figure out winter-weight gloves) and I [...]