Moving Up To The "Best" Long Distance Touring Bike

The passion for motorcycling intensified daily with the purchase of the Honda ST1100 in 2000 as Deb and I continued to make regular day trips and overnight trips every chance we got. It wasn't long before we had explored most of the scenic backroads within a day or two of the Seattle area, started regular subscriptions to a few motorcycle magazines produced primarily for the "touring" or "sport-touring" motorcyclist and were attending the area motorcycle shows. Going out for coffee on a weekend morning meant motorcycling at least 35 miles in some direction or another to explore new roads and find new coffee shops -- and usually ended up with more than 100 miles added to the ST.

I can't say enough good things about the ST1100 (now produced as an ST1300) and I got very involved in learning all I could about the large, cohesive, worldwide community of ST1100 riders (the same bike is called the Pan American in Europe). I even began a collection of electronic photos of all the modifications created for the ST1100 (known in the community as "farkles.") One of the first web sites I created was to display these various photos complete with owner/email links to the owners of the ST's in the photos. Eventually I got in touch with the creator of the largest ST-focused web site (residing in Finland) and arranged for my "farkle" photos to become part of his massive web site (http://www.st1100.org/) .

Now the ST has frequently been the motorcycle of choice of long distance riders, including a subset of more than 35,000 riders that refer to themselves as "ironbutts" where the easiest level of acceptance into the group is by traveling 1000 miles in 24 hours...and every summer there is an intense competition to win a the ultimate USA recognition by traveling 11,000 miles in 11 days (see http://www.ironbutt.com/) . However, in the very stratified world of motorcycles and motorcycle riders -- it is not among the few motorcycle models that are considered premier for "luxury" long distance riding particularly when wanting to ride "two-up" (with a passenger). Therefore, it wasn't long before Deb and I were looking at the luxury long distance rides that at the time included only two: Honda Goldwing 1500 and BMW LT1200. And when Honda smartly produced an all-new Honda Goldwing 1800 in 2001 that performed like a higher powered ST1100 and Deb considered the rear seating on the new Goldwing superior to the BMW -- we began thinking about how our plan to ride across the USA would be more comfortable on a new "Wing." In our own rationalization, we also plotted that if we were going to take this cross-country motorcycle tour when I retired in 2003, we should get the new Wing in 2002 so that we could be

totally familiar with it. And that's what we did.

In March 2002 we traded our ST1100 in for a new, 2002 Honda Goldwing GL1800A (the A being for the $1000 optional ABS brakes). And when 2002 colors changed the regular deep blue to a blue that looked purple in the sunlight, we changed our interest in blue and purchased the color we thought would best add to the safety on the road -- the very visible yellow.

[Our 2002 Honda Goldwing GL1800A]