Well, I’ve been a little MIA lately. Mostly because work is busy and I usually end up helping my wife work on her chocolate business in the evening. In case you want some absolutely amazing chocolate you can check it out here.

Rest assured I’ve been riding every chance I get. Mostly, Sunday mornings are my ride time. I wake up early and hit the hills usually by 7am. I tend to end up hanging out at Alices on Skyline and HWY 84. There, I met some really cool old guys that ride very old BMW’s, Triumphs, and one Brit that must be 75 years old that rides a Honda VFR! I hope to post more about them soon too as they are full of wisdom and I absolutely love talking to them.

Back to the ride! Last weekend I had an amazing first long distance trip on the Beemer. I rode with some old friends and met some new friends. It was a real good group and we had a lot of fun. Brian is on an SV-650 and Aric commands a BMW F800. We met up with Harry who has a really nice Honda Shadow 750. All of them really amazing machines and great riders.

The Route:
Some of the roads I’ve never been on and some I haven’t driven in years. In all, it was about 300 miles with a stop off for lunch. Here is the basic route as I recall it:

Aric and I started out in Sunnyvale and rode up to SF to meet up with two of the guys. Then it was over Golden Gate and into Marin up Mt. Tamalpias. From there we headed north to Point Reyes National Sea Shore. We didn’t stop and kept going all the way around Tomales Bay on HWY 1. We continued along HWY 1 and took Bodega HWY to Bohemian HWY where we cut East on HWY 116 to Guerneville. We stopped for lunch in Forestville and that’s where the group disbanded and went our seperate ways. Two of us continued to Santa Rosa and headed through some wine country along HWY 12. Then it was homeward bound from that point.

I have some new gear and everything worked great. I’ll post more about that later. I was most concerned about how comfortable I was going to be on the new ride. The longest ride I’d done so far was 120 miles in one sitting, so I was curious about how long I could stand being in the saddle before I was done.

Turns out the limit was 9 hours. But overall, this trip was a piece of cake on the S. I made some discoveries about Bronson that I will have to address at some point. Most importantly, the seat. After a few hours in the stock seat, I noticed some numbness and pain coming from my tailbone. From what I’ve been reading on the forums, the seat is gonna have to be replaced with something else.

My left wrist was really bugging me too. I’m imagining I just need to get used to longer rides and this will work itself out. Everything else worked like a dream. The bike ran great and was extremely comfy on the highway. The Throttlemeister Cruise Control worked fantastic and made the long freeway strips a little more relaxing.

I’ve got no pictures to post because we didn’t stop for anything other than lunch. I’m hoping to snap some shots in the future though because it’s kind of boring just reading about a ride without seeing the roads. You’ll just have to imagine what those beautiful roads looked like. Typical amazing California twisties.

So I think I’ll take some more long distance rides before I commit to any ergo purchases, although I can see that I will most likely want to get a set of Rapid Dog Barbacks which will put the grips up and back to make for a straighter back and less stretched arms. Otherwise, there really isn’t anything to complain about for long distance riding on the S.

Next post will be a review of a cool tank bag, riding pants and hopefully the installation of a power socket wiring…

This entry was posted on Friday, August 21st, 2009 at 11:34 pm and is filed under BMW. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.