Why I Chose an Adventure Bike Instead of Another Sports Tourer
After almost forty years of riding road bikes, I thought my next motorcycle would be a Yamaha FJR1300. Then one conversation made me reconsider not only the bike I wanted, but the kind of travelling I wanted to do.
The bike I thought I wanted I had spent decades on sports tourers. When it came time to replace the last one, I walked into the shop expecting to leave with a Yamaha FJR1300. There comes a point in every rider’s life when the question changes. In your twenties, it’s usually, “What’s the fastest bike I can afford?” A decade or two later it might become, “What’s comfortable enough to ride all day?” For me, after almost forty years of riding motorcycles, the question became something entirely different: “What sort of adventures do I actually want to have?” It’s a simple question, but answering it completely changed the direction of my riding life. Six months ago, if you had asked me what motorcycle I was going to buy next, I wouldn’t have hesitated. I was going to buy a Yamaha FJR1300. The decision seemed almost inevitable. I had owned sports bikes, spent time on racetracks and ridden machines capable of astonishing performance. Those experiences were fantastic, but they belonged to a different stage of my life. These days, I am far less interested in outright speed than I am in spending an entire day in the saddle without feeling as though I have gone twelve rounds with a heavyweight boxer. The FJR seemed to offer exactly what I wanted. It had a well-earned reputation for reliability, effortless long-distance touring, excellent weather protection and enough performance to make overtaking almost effortless. If you asked a thousand experienced riders to recommend a serious touring motorcycle, I suspect the FJR1300 would feature on most lists. As far as I was concerned, the search was over. Or at least I thought it was. Forty years of changing priorities Motorcycles have marked different chapters of my life. Like many riders, I started small. At eighteen, my first taste of freedom came on a Honda CB250. It wasn’t glamorous, but to an eighteen-year-old it represented something much bigger than transport. It was independence. It meant I could point the front wheel in almost any direction and simply go. From there came larger motorcycles, faster motorcycles and, inevitably, more powerful motorcycles. I owned a Yamaha FJ1200, Ducati 600SS, a Kawasaki ZX-9R, Kawasaki ZZR600, Yamaha FZR1000, Yamaha RZ250 and the RZ500, a Harley-Davidson, and a few others along the way, and eventually an Aprilia RSV4 Factory, which was the last motorcycle I owned around seven years ago. The…