My 2019 year in riding was a particularly memorable one, highlighted by a cross-country trip while testing the Kawasaki Versys 1000 SE LT+ and test-riding the Triumph Street Triple RS in Spain. It was also memorable for changes: selling my Versys and resurrecting my mother’s old motorcycle. 2020, as it goes without saying, is a year that will be memorable in far less pleasant ways. And I say that as one of the lucky ones, who did not lose a loved one, a job or a home.
Even if I’d known the worst pandemic in more than a century was coming (along with needless deaths of Black men and women and protests in the streets and wildfires in Australia and California and enough hurricanes to use up the entire damn English alphabet and a big chunk of the Greek alphabet, plus a hundred other calamities), I still wouldn’t have been able to predict much of what happened in 2020. The year was simply too capricious in its inequity, destroying some and amazingly enriching others, spinning off all manner of surprises and unexpected side-effects, grinding us into a teeth-on-edge animosity one minute and unleashing selfless acts of kindness another.
Even in the much smaller scope of this blog, those contradictions and inequities persisted. Lots of people in the motorcycle industry lost their jobs as factories and some dealerships shut down, and some of those people never were called back to work. And yet others had banner years, thanks to those unexpected side-effects. Dirt bike sales surged as families realized that one thing they could do during a pandemic was go outdoors and ride together. Some parts of the motorcycle industry had their best year in a long time.
In the even smaller scope of this post, my year in riding offers little of interest to write about. (I know, poor strategy. The few readers who made it this far just clicked away to check Facebook or TikTok. But honest.) That’s why I so appreciate the 2019 I had, and not just those motorcycle trips but also a couple of very memorable non-motorcycle trips with my wife, to New Orleans in January and to Puerto Rico in July, to celebrate our 25th wedding anniversary.
The new addition: a 2014 Honda VFR800 Interceptor Deluxe.
The biggest development in my year of riding in 2020 came just days before the economy (and travel) started shutting down due to the pandemic, just a few months less than 10 years since I last bought a motorcycle (an unprecedented drought) and almost a year after I sold my Versys. In the first days of March, I bought a used 2014 Honda VFR800 Interceptor Deluxe from a dealer in suburban Cincinnati, specifically for the purpose of all the travel I planned to do this year, and then I couldn’t travel anywhere.
A weekend of motorcycle racing at Road America in front of empty stands was an eerie sight, especially as many of the streets of U.S. cities were in turmoil that weekend with protests over the death of George Floyd.
Then it became a question of waiting to see, finally, when and where I could ride this new-to-me motorcycle. As it turned out, opportunities were few. My first trip was to Road America to witness the first professional motorcycle racing to resume after the interruption of the pandemic, as MotoAmerica raced in front of empty stands, no fans allowed. It was a strange and nearly eerie weekend. In October I took a shorter trip to the Indianapolis Motor Speedway for another round of MotoAmerica racing. But unlike past years, there were no trips to RevZilla HQ in Philly for work, no plotting a new route to Maine to visit my sister, and no vacation rides.
Gratuitous photo from my scenic ride home this morning on my @TriumphAmerica Daytona. Still looks pretty good for a 14-year-old #motorcycle, no? pic.twitter.com/fEBzDJ18co
— Lance Oliver (@lancekoliver) August 24, 2020
Instead, my riding in 2020 was far more utilitarian, mostly consisting of the 200-mile round trip to check in on my elderly mother or the 200-mile round trip to spend time with my wife as she split her days between our home and her apartment in her new workplace. I mapped out every possible route between those destinations and home and managed to get in a fair amount of enjoyable riding that also had the virtue of being useful transportation.
In that I differ from most U.S. motorcyclists, for whom riding is a purely recreational activity. For me, it’s mainly transportation, but I inject a lot of recreation into it by choosing creative routing. I almost never go out and ride around for fun, with no destination, but when I go out for a ride, I almost always accomplish something and I always have fun.
Sum total for the year was just 11,586 miles of riding, solely on my own four bikes. That includes 5,722 on my Interceptor and 3,137 on my old Speed Triple, now with more than 117,000 on the clock. That’s the fewest miles I’ve ridden in years, and the fewest different motorcycles, too. A typical recent year would see me riding up to half a dozen press bikes, but not 2020. Stuck at home, I only rode what I owned.
We’re all hoping 2021 will bring us back toward something that’s more “normal.” This year was not destined to be a good year of riding, but as I long ago decided, riding makes any year better.
