1000 Miles of Bad Road

(With Adventure bikes still riding a wave of popularity, we thought it would be enjoyable to look back at a feature story that included the Honda Transalp, one of the first, and the BMW GS, which many would say is the grandfather of the ADV genre. The story appeared in the February 1989 issue of Cycle World.)

At least the road was on the map. But that still didn't help much. The problem with maps is that they simply tell you that a road exists, where it starts and where it goes, and that's all. Fine, if you're trying to get from point A to point B in a hurry, but maps don't tell you anything that really matters about a road. Especially if you view roads, as motorcyclists often do, as a means of recreation, rather than an unfortunate waste of time that stands between you and your destination.

The map that Senior Editor Ron Griewe and I were looking at didn’t tell us anything we really needed to know about the road we were heading toward. It didn’t say how many turns per mile it offered, it didn’t tell us about the chuckhole factor or the mean gravel coverage. It didn’t even offer a green dashed line, by which Mr. McNally usually demonstrates his opinion of a scenic road. The name of the road, at least if we were to believe the map, was simply “Poor Road.”

It was anything but poor. It had ups and downs, rights and lefts punctuated with rocks and potholes, and it stretched out like an endless rollercoaster through some of the most beautiful hills in Northern California. The road might well have been considered bad by the A-to-B mentality of most of the world, but it was exactly what we were looking for.

Ron and l were on a three-day search for bad roads just like that one. It was all in the name of duty, mind you, all for the sake of the magazine. We were in the process of evaluating Honda's new Transalp and we had discovered that the bike required an entirely different testing procedure than anything we had run across before. The Transalp is either the most specialized motorcycle ever built, or the most generalized one, depending on your point of view. It's specialized in theory, because it stakes a very narrow claim between street bike and dual-purpose bike, expanding a niche originally created by the BMW R80 and R100GS. In function, though, the Transalp, like the BMW GS, excels at a wider variety of uses than any other type of motorcycle built. As sportbikes, these two can stay with just about any machine made. As cruisers, they're the most relaxed and spread-out motorcycles you can buy. And then there's the specialty of the house: bad roads. Like the ones that Ron and I were looking for. We had a Transalp, an R100GS, a road map and a mission on the California coast.

So we looked and we rode. Some roads that we came across were only marginally bad. Others were so bad they were verging on greatness. Several days of rain had turned some into slimy sloppy nightmares. The two bikes didn’t mind. They just sloshed through it all with no problems or complaints.

The area we chose to explore was dotted with ranches and abandoned gold mines. That created a little bit of a problem for our purposes. Whenever we thought we had made a major discovery, a perfectly awful road, it would dead-end with a gate somewhere. And invariably, the ranch owners near such dead ends would view the two riders on the odd motorcycles with more than a little suspicion. Some were friendly. One woman chose our arrival as an opportune time to come out, check her mail and start a conversation. As we got off the bikes, she introduced herself. Her name was Carolyn. “I’m Ron and this is Ron.” I said. She wasn’t impressed.

“My husband’s name is Ron and my best friend’s name is Ronnie,” she reported with a top-that kind of smile.

Another ranch we stopped near had an owner who wasn’t as hospitable. He came out in his pickup and asked what we were up to, patting a handgun in the seat beside him. “I didn‘t know if you guys were Hells Angels or what.” We decided his name wasn’t Ron.

Wherever we stopped, though, and whoever we were talking to, eventually the conversation would turn to the motorcycles. You have to admit, the two machines were an odd couple, despite their common purpose. Just explaining that purpose was hard enough, especially to someone with only a peripheral involvement with motorcycling. “Dirt bikes, huh,” they would always say—not really a question, but we would still feel we had to answer.

“Well, no, not really.”

“Enduro bikes, then, you know, for dirt and street.”

"No. They're… well they're new." That seemed to help. What were we supposed to say? "No these are bad road bikes?" Most of these people had just progressed to the point where they didn't call all motorcycles Hondas. It might be a little early to spring anything like the Transalp and the Beemer on them.

When the trip was all over, we didn't really discover anything we didn't already know or at least suspect. We just had a whole lot of fun. And our mission was accomplished: We had traveled some of the worst roads on earth and loved every inch of them. We did discover that the BMW and the Honda are very different executions of a similar idea. The Transalp, despite having styling elements taken straight off a Hurricane, was the most off-road oriented of the two while the safari-styled GS excelled more on the street. OK, that's fair. We wouldn't want them to be identical.

And as for maps? Well. I suppose they have their uses. Just don't pay much attention to them if you’re going for a ride on something like a BMW GS or a Transalp. And don’t believe them when they tell you a road is “poor.” You might miss the very best of the worst roads of your life.