Motorcycle Review

My wife and I meet up with Clif, the geezers and the scalawags to ride the incredible motorcycle roads in and around Cloudcroft, New Mexico. Along the way, we visit Silver Lake, the National Solar Observatory, Timberon, and much more. Join us for the funnest motorcycle trip I've taken all year.

Clif and I head to Spring Creek and the nearby towns of Mertzon, Sherwood, and Knickerbocker in West Texas to check out some ruins, explore ghost towns, and contemplate the story of Knickerbocker native Laura Bullion, one of the baddest outlaw dames in Butch Cassidy's Wild Bunch gang.

Is YouTube broken or do I just suck? In any case, this is a vlog where I go buy motorcycle parts for my ZRX1200R and complain about YouTube the whole way there. Enjoy.

Clif and I ride to an undisclosed location in West Texas to check on Matt's geocache and add a few things to it. Along the way, we enjoy an astounding West Texas sunset on a warm summer night.

It's out with the old and in with the older as I re-install the DanMoto XG-1 full system onto my Yamaha FZ-07 and modify its baffles as an experiment. The MT-07 is arguably the best-sounding motorcycle ever to roll the streets of planet earth, which makes the result of this modification all the more interesting.

Clif and I traipse around Southeastern New Mexico on our Yamaha FZ-07 and FJR1300 in search of the little-known ghost town of Bennett. We end the day in the small oil town of Jal and contemplate what the Permian Basin would be like without petroleum.

The passing last month of iconic writer and philosopher Robert Pirsig, author of 1974's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance , is currently resonating throughout both the motorcycling and academic worlds. As you may know if you've followed this blog with any frequency over the past 13 years, I have often fancied myself a bit of a thinker and lay philosopher, one who has repeatedly used motorcycling as metaphor, both in my writings and videos. With that in mind, I feel compelled to compose a bit about how the book has affected me in different ways over the years, and to explore motorcycling as metaphysical quality in a way that Pirsig would've hopefully not completely hated. I first became aware of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance in college during the '90s. My speech professor, with whom I had developed a personal acquaintance, recommended the book to me after learning I was a rider. "You should check it out," he said. "I think it would rea...