My year in riding, 2018

Riding and reviewing the Ducati SuperSport S in northern California was one of the highlights of my year of riding in 2018. Photo by Brian J. Nelson.

Two years ago, I spent some of the long December evenings looking back at my year in riding. I think it should be something I do every year, to remind me to appreciate (and relive) the experiences I get to have, thanks to motorcycling, which is my job, my hobby, my passion and, at the most basic level, my transportation. By any measurement, I have to say that 2018 was a good year.

Many years, the first few months are an exercise in frustration as I wait for the weather to improve and I’m ready to ride anywhere, any time, for any excuse. In 2018, however, some of my best riding was front-loaded into the first quarter.

Riding the Yamaha Star Eluder. Photo by Drew Ruiz.

The bagger, the Scrambler and off to the races

Less than two weeks into the new year, I flew to San Diego for the press intro for the new Yamaha Eluder, an expensive new bagger with an unusual combination of lots of high tech electronics and a very traditional, air-cooled V-twin engine with the lowest redline (4,750 rpm) on any motorcycle I’ve ever ridden. Normally, a trip to San Diego in January is a great thing, and this one wasn’t bad. But I was too trusting of the weather forecasters who said the rain would have moved out by the time of our ride. I wasn’t wearing waterproof gloves as we crossed the hills inland of San Diego in light rain as the thermometer on the Eluder’s very complete Infotainment system said it was 46 degrees! Fortunately, by the time we dropped down into the Anzo-Borrego Desert, we had sunshine and temperatures in the 60s.

When RevZilla got an invite from Ducati to ride the new Scrambler 1100 Special in Portugal, Spurgeon was supposed to go. But when he banged up his knee at the Royal Enfield Himalayan intro, I dusted off my passport and got on a plane to Lisbon. And I was glad I did.

Riding the Ducati Scrambler 1100 Special in the hills along the coast of Portugal was my most unique experience of the year. Ducati photo.

Ducati generously scheduled us with plenty of free time to adjust to the time difference (more an issue for the California-based writers than for me), so I arrived in Lisbon at 5 a.m. local time, took a nap and had a full day for sightseeing in a beautiful city I’d never seen before. I walked all over the old city’s streets and hills and the next day we had a great ride down the coast on the newest, biggest Scrambler.

Back home, I made a trip to Road Atlanta for the MotoAmerica round in April and in June I went to Road America for what turned out to be the most exciting race of the MotoAmerica Motul Superbike season and the turning point in the championship. I really enjoyed the ambiance of the Road America round, too, as it was my first-ever visit to that track.

Despite a trip to Portugal and some exciting racing, however, I was reminded once again that it’s not just about the motorcycles, but about the people we share them with. I say that because, in many ways, the highlight of my year was a day spent riding the Big Sur section of the Pacific Coast Highway south of Monterey with my wife, Ivonne, on the Ducati Supersport S. I borrowed the bike from Ducati for a week in California, covering the Sonoma Raceway round of MotoAmerica and reviewing the bike. Ivonne flew out for a short visit and we spent one day seeing the sights in Monterey and one day taking a leisurely ride down the PCH, her first visit to that iconic motorcycle road. We gawked at the waterfalls and stopped at the overlooks, ate lunch at Nepenthe and otherwise did all the touristy things.

Ivonne and I spent one afternoon leisurely sightseeing on the Pacific Coast Highway on the Ducati Supersport S. She loved the bike, was thrilled with the scenery, and enjoyed the restaurants and aquarium in Monterey.

Tourist traffic was fairly heavy so it was by no means the ideal motorcycle ride, from a purely technical perspective. But having the chance to share the experience with her made it my most memorable day of riding all year.

Somewhere in the swamps of Jersey. On the Honda CRF250L Rally.

Fortunately, I’m not nearly so jaded yet that it takes a new Ducati or a dramatic backdrop for me to enjoy a day on a motorcycle. One day I recall fondly from 2018 was a Saturday spent riding the Honda CRF250L Rally that we had as a long-term loaner at RevZilla this summer. With a free day, I aimlessly wandered new-to-me backroads through southern New Jersey after breakfast at a small-town diner, then rode back into Philly to see Spurgeon’s new house. The Rally’s suspension is soft and boingy and a mildly tuned 250 cc bike only provides so much power, but the joyful rarity of having unstructured hours to explore roads new to me on a motorcycle new to me was a treat. Riding around the streets of Philadelphia, I was reminded just how good these quarter-liter dual-sports work as urban transportation, which inspired me to write about that topic.

I relearned how a lightweight dual-sport can be a great motorcycle for the city. Photo by Spurgeon Dunbar.

So 2018 was a year of memorable rides, and in this case they happened to be front-loaded into the first three quarters of the year. Sadly, the rides I’ll remember most in the last quarter of the year were short, daily trips across the city to The James Cancer Center, where my father had surgery (and where the short-sighted parking policies meant I could have arrived by car, bicycle, bus or by foot and visited him for free, but because I arrived on a motorcycle, I ended up paying close to $20 per day for parking).

Hospital was quickly followed by a rehab center, then hospice care, and by early November, so fast, he was gone.

My father never shared my passion for riding, but inadvertently he started me on this course by buying a brand new Honda 50 for $245 in 1967, solely because it was the cheapest transportation available. The common refrain of the people who came up to me at his memorial was that “he was a good man.” He believed in doing the right thing, taking care of responsibilities and then enjoying life, in that order. Even though he did not share motorcycling with me, he was happy to see me pursuing what made me happy and never once tried to dissuade me from riding.

The stats behind the memories

In addition to riding in Portugal, I did one other thing in 2018 that was a first for me. I kept a mileage log of all my riding.

I’ve often wished I had kept a list of all the motorcycles I’ve ridden over the years, but now it’s an impossible task to recreate it. (I do know it’s 18 brands.) I have even less of an accurate idea of how many lifetime miles I’ve ridden. Inspired by the examples of others on some forums I check, I decided this year I would keep a running total of the miles I’ve ridden. The final stats are not all that impressive. Lots of people ride more miles and more often. I work at home and rarely go for a purely recreational ride. When I ride, it’s nearly always because I have somewhere I need to be.

The end result of all that was 14,197 miles of riding in 2018 on 10 different motorcycles, ranging from 8,223 miles on my Kawasaki Versys to just 15 miles across Philadelphia on the CSC SG250 San Gabriel we had at RevZilla as a test bike this fall. The other interesting stat is that my three personal motorcycles now have an average of 71,326 miles on them (despite the garage queen Daytona barely contributing). I’ve had the same three since I bought the Versys in May of 2010 and this is the longest I’ve ever gone without buying or selling a motorcycle. I really thought this would be the year I’d replace the Versys, but I never found a deal so good I couldn’t resist.

Maybe an overdue change in the lineup will be a highlight of my riding in 2019.