More Pre-Trip Prep: Dual Sport Versus ADV

Summer is fleeting. It’s easy to miss the moment. I’m trying to do better; I aim to carpe the living shit out of the diem. An epic camping trip is on my horizon!

“Motocamping” is nothing special, just carry your stuff on a motorcycle instead of in your car. I planned for that with my Honda PC800 (“Marshmallow Fluff”). I even packed my stuff. It wasn’t going to be “an adventure” but it would be fun. It didn’t happen.

Knocked down by fate, I came back off the mat swinging. Ha! Fate ya’ whily bitch! You didn’t see that coming did ya’!

I’m about to do the motocamping thing but I decided to do a real “adventure”. Rather than pavement and parks, I’ll be going from remote to remote, campsite to (hopefully) campsite. This will (I think) be almost entirely on dirt. I’m going to do it solo and I’m going to do it soon.

There’s about a thousand ways this can go wrong. Logistics alone have driven me batty! But it’s coming together. I can almost taste it!

Allow me to ruminate. Motorcycles are specialized critters. Sportbikes, tourers, and cruisers aren’t particularly happy on dirt. Here’s a photo from Sturgis. Check it out. It’s an assload of very cool motorcycles! Almost none of them are well suited to off road. Yes, they can be pressed into service for light trails, but in general they aren’t.

I’ve been to Sturgis. My first motorcycle was a cruiser. I love my cruiser. But I’m not really a “motorcycle rally” guy. I don’t hang out in crowds, I don’t ride in groups, and I get bored with chrome and t-shirt kiosks.

I’ve crossed America several times on my cruiser. Then I started to crave different adventures. A little over ten years ago Ewan McGregor & Charlie Boorman had me hooked. I watched the show and loved it.

Link is here. I warn you, it’ll fill you with wanderlust!

Deep in every man’s heart is the desire to ride a motorcycle around the world, or sail the seas, or climb Everest. Don’t deny it. Accept it. Embrace it. Do what you can within your limits. If you can’t summit Everest, walk up a hill. Better than than sitting on a couch complaining about the cost of an Everest expedition!

Oh heck, what am I saying, if you want to sit on a couch bitching, go right ahead. It is 2024 after all.

As for me, the whole “ride forever, including on dirt” dream had me lusting after a type of motorcycle called the “ADV Bike” or “adventure bike”. This is more a marketing term than a mechanical optimization.

The thing is this, a bike that can cross continents will spend a lot of time on highways. It absolutely needs to be highway compatible. Conversely, it need only handle as much dirt as the Earth’s limited wilderness can provide. An ADV will definitely do better on dirt than a chromed out Harley bagger or a massive Honda Goldwing land yacht, but it’s not really great at dirt.

As for the story I loved so well, Ewan and Charlie had their fare share of Siberian mud. They also did plenty of miles on American/Canadian superslab and that’s the stuff that didn’t get as much screen time.

Here’s Charlie Boorman on what I believe to be a BMW 1150 GS. I (like many people) lusted for years after a bike like that.

The thing is, once you move beyond “daydream” to “novice doing the thing” your perspective changes. Charlie’s awesome BMW 1150 GS used to look great. Now it looks like a boat anchor! It’s top heavy. It’s complicated. It’s HUGE! It’s a sprained ankle with monthly payments!

Picture that bike at the bottom of a ditch. Suppose the beast was buried in mud; hard to grip and pull and with water slowly penetrating irreplaceable circuit boards. Imagine conditions of rain and snow and hail. Because I have a weird imagination add wolves. Yes! The wolves are circling and you need to deadlift the friggin’ bike out of a bad spot; this isn’t politics or social media, it’s reality, if something is too damn heavy for you to lift, it’s too heavy for you to lift. You can’t talk your way out of physics.

What’s Charlie going to do? Is he going to lift a 600 pound motorcycle with 200 pounds of gear… while wolves gnaw on his arm? The real answer is that almost nobody rides a big ADV solo and on trails. They stay in packs for safety and help lift each other’s bikes.

I ride solo. If Charlie generously gave me to keys to his monster ADV I might wind up stuck wherever the bike gets stuck.

ADV motorcycles are awesome in theory but they don’t get used like you think. Off road, they’re too much of a good thing. Too much weight. Too many fiddly gadgets to break.

Oh, and I should mention that the current version of Charlie’s cool ADV motorcycle is the BMW R 1250 GS. A machine like that will set you back at least $25 grand! If you spend 25 grand on a shiny piece of machined German excellence will you be inclined to ride it into a swamp?

If you’re really going to do rough terrain, especially if you’re solo like me (and perhaps if you’re getting a bit grey in the beard, as I am), you need a lighter bike. The term for this is “dual sport”. That means the bike is very much at home in dirt but it has enough lights and stuff to make it street legal. Dual sports can ride on pavement. They’re not great at it, but they can do it. They’re the mirror image of the ADV which isn’t great on the trail but can do it.

Itchy Boots posts all about her solo trips. I’m watching season seven, in which she goes all over Africa. Africa, at least from her videos, appears to be made entirely of mud. Plus there are other obstacles. When she gets to a river locals often put the thing in a rickety canoe for the crossing. A hefty BMW would never get across those rivers.

Itchy Boots (Noraly) uses a Honda CRF 300. She goes places that’ll make your hair curl. That’s where the “dual sport” shines. Her spunky little “dual sport” somehow endures while Africa’s geography tries to murder it.

A brand new CRF 300 only costs about $6 grand. You can buy one and then buy three more, just to add up to the cost of an ADV motorcycle.

Personally, I bought the cheapest simplest wheeled mule I could find. It’s an archaic, obsolete, underpowered, yet charming and unkillable Yamaha TW200. Here’s a photo from a few years ago (link):

It’s probably the least cool “dual sport” in current manufacture. It’s slow. It’s carbureted. It has virtually no electronics. It’s basically unchanged since 1987.

On the other hand, I know I can pick that bike up because I have. Often. I’ve submerged it in a pond. I’ve rammed it into trees. I’ve run it hot. I’ve run it in snow. The bike just keeps churning away. It’s a machine with zero fucks to give.

I call it “Honey Badger”.

Oh yeah, I paid $4500 out the door for that plucky little spud. Suppose I completely destroy my entire motorcycle by riding it into a lava pit or something. It’ll set me back only a little more than a new set of tires for my Dodge.

There’s only one problem, it sucks on the road. It tops out at 55 MPH and is very buzzy. When I’m forced to endure pavement, I tend to keep it at 50mph or under. If I tried my plodding little mule on the Interstate, I’d wind up splattered across the grill of a Kenworth. That’s its kryptonite!

I have to trailer my dual sport to the trailhead. An ADV can get to the trailhead on it’s own. That’s where ADVs shine.

When an ADV gets to the end of the trail, it rolls back onto pavement and goes home. That’s kind of cool too.

When my dual sport gets to the end of the trail but my truck is still parked hundreds of miles away… um then what?

Hm….

Ring ring ring!

“Hello? UHaul? I’d like a one way reservation for your smallest truck. Yes, I’ll hold.”

ADVs totally rule in terms of logistics. Getting my dual sport (and me) home is going to be a bitch.

More later.