15 years with my Triumph Bonneville T-100

I would argue that other than those aforementioned guitars, nothing has had the same profound effect on my life as that old motorcycle. It’s changed the direction of my life in such a way that I can’t even imagine where I’d be if I hadn’t gone against my father’s wishes and brought it home at the end of my junior year of college.

Together, that motorcycle and I have created memories that will last a lifetime. The end of a year is a natural time to look back, so I ended mine on a high note by revisiting a few of the favorite trips and memories made together over those 15 years.

Bar Harbor, Maine in 2005

Rummaging through my parents’ basement, I found what I was looking for stuffed in a back corner on a bottom shelf of an old metal storage rack. A musty set of ancient throwover saddlebags that hadn’t seen use since the early 1980s when my Dad strapped them over his ‘78 Yamaha XS750 and headed down to Mexico.

25 years in a damp basement left them with a certain “not-pleasant” smell. But I was traveling on a budget. Having just bought a brand new Triumph Bonneville three months earlier, I didn’t have much left in the “discretionary fund” for such luxuries as new luggage. So I soaked the bags for a few nights in a chemical concoction of items I found under the kitchen sink. While the final result wasn’t great, it was good enough for a 22-year-old college student heading out on his first motorcycle trip.

The destination was Bar Harbor, Maine, a 600-mile trek from my parents’ house in Breinigsville, Pennsylvania. A high school friend, Emily Dufton, had taken a job writing for the local newspaper and she and her boyfriend at the time had rented a house for the summer and invited me up for a long weekend.

What would have made for a lovely two-day ride, I decided to do in one, against my dad’s recommendation. Pssh, two days to go 600 miles? Come on, surely I knew better. I’d be on the road by 7 a.m. and be there in time for a late dinner with friends.

Dad was right.

By 8 p.m., I was still on the road as the sun disappeared from the western sky and the Maine air began to give up its summer warmth. By 10 p.m. I was stopping at every other rest stop to hold my hands to the Bonnie’s engine to try and regain warmth. My gear consisted of an old leather jacket, some Levi’s, and a thin pair of summer riding gloves. Not ideal for a Maine evening where the temps had dropped to the low 40s.

When I finally arrived shortly after 1 a.m., I was cursing my father for being right as I shivered my way out of my gear and into bed.

The weekend itself was full of long hikes through Acadia National Park and motorcycle romps around town, giving both Emily and her boyfriend rides on the bike. Neither had ever been on a motorcycle before and they both got a kick out of traveling on two wheels. I had my first blueberry beer from a small café that started serving them at 10 a.m. We bought lobster straight off the boat and stumbled around on Main Street until the last of the bars locked their doors for the night.

After 48 hours, I was back on the bike. Having not learned my lesson the first time, I decided to push through and make it back home in a single day. A day with a lot of rain, and not a lot of rain gear (this would turn out to be a recurring theme in my motorcycling career).

My first motorcycle adventure was, ultimately, a success because it  offered up the unique taste of freedom only a motorcycle can provide. I was a young man champing at the bit to wrap up college and see what the world had in store for me.

Sunday nights on Angeles Crest in 2007

Graduating college in 2006, I was in limbo. I knew I wanted to get out in the world, so I turned down a teaching position in the same town I had spent the previous 22 years, because I knew that wasn’t going to get me any further down the road.

The opportunity came shortly before Christmas of 2006 when I received an unexpected phone call from Steve Doherty. Steve, an old high school buddy, was taking a job transfer to head up a sales division in Los Angeles. He was packing up a moving truck and heading west and wanted to know if I wanted in. Less than three weeks later, my Triumph Bonneville was in the back of that truck as we hit the California border.

I was broke and naive to think that the $1,500 I had to my name would last me longer than a month when my share of the rent was $900. I immediately took a job as a motorcycle courier, lying on the application regarding my familiarity with navigating the streets of L.A. Keep in mind, this was before Google maps.

With my Thomas Guide in the tank bag, I spent weekdays dropping off envelopes to lawyers and court officers, and on the weekends I would head to the mountains and explore the far reaches of Los Angeles County. As I didn’t have any money, the Bonneville was my sole source of entertainment. I became extremely fond of riding out and back on Angeles Crest Highway north of the city. Even today, this is still one of my top three favorite roads in America.

One Sunday afternoon, I pulled into the Shell station in La Cañada Flintridge to top off before hitting the mountain and I met a group of sport bikers who called themselves the Night Riders. Their nickname stemmed from the fact they’d ride Angeles Crest at night.

They’d sit at the Shell station late in the day and wait to watch the cops roll off the mountain. From there they knew they had a few hours of daylight to chase on a very spirited ride up the mountain, before stopping at Newcomb’s Ranch for burgers and iced tea and then a slightly less spirited ride off the mountain and home for the night.

I was a bit out of place on the Bonnie, wearing my two-piece Rev’it! suit on a fairly relaxed, classically styled bike among a group of track-prepped sport bikes, but I never let that stop me. On those mountain roads I became very familiar with the footpeg feelers and the limits of what the Triumph would let me get away with. Those Sunday night rides became a regular occurrence, an affordable outing with fellow motorcyclists.

Don’t ever let “not having the right bike” stand in the way of having a good time.

Across America on The Lincoln Highway in 2008

By my second year in Los Angeles, I had landed a teaching position at Dorsey High School. If you’ve ever seen “Dangerous Minds,” you’ll have a general idea of the sort of atmosphere of this particular career move. But alas, I was no Michelle Pfeiffer.

When the economy fell apart in 2008, so did that job. After wrapping up with a few months of summer school, I decided to take my newfound freedom and hit the highway. Whereas my Bonnie had subbed as my sport bike for weekend rides in the mountains, it was about to shift its role to a long-distance touring machine. 

Using maps I found from the Los Angeles public library and a variety of online sources, I pieced together the route for the original Lincoln Highway. Dedicated in 1913, it was America’s first coast-to-coast byway and survived well past Eisenhower’s first push for a Federal Highway system.

Today, the condition of the original route varies from state to state. In some areas, you’ll find select portions of the road extremely well preserved while in others you’ll have to ride your motorcycle through an old cemetery to find a dirt road hidden on the far side.

I headed out with a tent, sleeping bag, camera, a few changes of clothes, and a detailed route created over weeks of planning and research.

I had no agenda but the open road. I set up my tent and slept when I was tired, woke up early and had nothing to do all day but ride. I explored ghost towns and cities, rode my Bonneville on the Salt Flats for which it was named, watched the sunrise over the Great Lakes, surprised my parents at the beach, visited old friends, and ran out of money in Boulder, Colorado. From there, the Bonnie and I tackled our first Iron Butt ride, racking up nearly 1,100 miles in 23 hours before sleeping on a park bench outside of Truckee, California.

To this day, it is still the most free I’ve ever felt.

I ended up back in California, with barely enough money to cover the next month’s rent but I had one hell of a story to tell. A story that would have never happened (at least not in the same way) without that Triumph.

I eventually found another teaching job and fed my starving piggy bank. That being said, I was on the road for nearly a month and tackled almost 8,000 miles and I don’t think I spent even $2,000 on that trip, including a few repairs.

If you do it right, there is a lot of adventure to be had on a motorcycle with very little financial input.

Tennessee to Virginia with the Kowalsky brothers in 2011

After an influential trip to visit friends in Nashville, I decided to leave the West Coast for the Dirty South.

In July of 2010, I packed up the Bonneville and rode from Los Angeles to visit some family in Monroe, Louisiana. My Dad rode down on his Suzuki V-Strom and after a night of crawfish, corn on the cob, and cold beer, we headed off together in the sweltering morning humidity for a trip back home to Pennsylvania.

After a week-long jaunt from California to Pennsylvania, I left the bike with dad as collateral and headed back to L.A. with the family Suburban to pick up the rest of my stuff. Sure, I could have just rented a moving truck, but where is the fun in that? 

I settled in Nashville and took the first job I could find, barbacking at a late-night pizza shop called Mafiaozas in the 12 South neighborhood. It was there I met two of my best friends, Mikey and Johnny Kowalsky.

After a few months, my Dad was kind enough to ride the Bonneville down to me in exchange for returning his Suburban. I felt like Mitchell Goosen in “Airborne” when his Rollerblades showed up from California.

The Bonnie was my daily rider and it wasn’t long before I convinced Mikey and Johnny to search out bikes of their own, a pair of Honda Nighthawks in varying states of disrepair. After a few weeks of cleaning carburetors, replacing clutches, rebuilding forks, and buying new tires, the bikes were ready to roll.

To celebrate, we planned a road trip to Front Royal, Virginia, to meet up with my Dad and Uncle Bob, and then head south, exploring the entire stretch of the Blue Ridge Parkway, culminating with a trip to Highway 129, the Tail of the Dragon. A first for all of us.

While I had logged over 50,000 relatively solo miles on the Bonnie up until this point, this was my first time indulging in a long-distance group ride. Something that can go easily awry with the wrong cast of characters.

Instead, it ended up being my favorite long-distance group ride to date. We were on the road for nine days straight together and we didn’t have one bad memory. To this day, when I call up Mikey or Johnny, we still laugh at inside jokes from this trip. Up until that point, the guys maybe had 1,000 miles of riding experience between them. By the time we rolled back into Nashville, our trip meters clicked over 1,500 miles.

Our little trio would end up having quite a few weekend rides over the years, but nothing that even came close to the excitement and adventure of that first one. 

Skyline Drive with Dad in 2018

I left Nashville in 2013 to take a chance working in Customer Service for a relatively small online retailer called RevZilla. I had originally applied for a position as managing editor of a soon-to-be created blog, but I lost out to some scoundrel named Lance Oliver.

But I didn’t let this deter me. I spent my days answering customers’ questions about motorcycle gear and nights writing everything from early gear reviews to coverage of local motorcycle shows. Eventually, RevZilla decided to expand their content team and that’s when Lemmy got pulled from the merchandising department and I got pulled from Customer Service to work under Mr. Oliver.

Together, we started chipping away at the seemingly impossible task of competing with household names like Cycle World, Motorcyclist, and Rider magazine and established web sites like Motorcycle-USA.com. Progress was slow to come, but inch by inch, we made headway in the industry. As bike reviews started becoming more of a reality, I found myself with less time to spend with the Bonneville, as I now had an expanding stable of motorcycles to ride. Never mind that my own garage had a few more bikes in there by this point.

While testing a Yamaha XSR900, I decided to plan a trip with my Dad. Unfortunately, we never made it past the first day as Pops had a pretty rough crash late in the afternoon. A few broken bones and a totaled motorcycle later, dad was left on the mend, with no motorcycle and a lack of certainty as to whether he wanted to return to two wheels.

The Bonnie at that point was wearing knobby tires, a low-slung handlebar, and a seat off of a Thruxton model. I installed a new set of Michelin Activ tires, a more relaxed handlebar, and put the old King and Queen touring seat back on. Gave it a good tune up and dropped it off at my folks’ garage.

My thought was that if Dad had something familiar to ride, he might find his way back to motorcycling. Almost a year to the day of the original accident, we were packing up for a trip to Virginia.

Skyline Drive has made an appearance in a lot of my articles over the years. From sport-touring trips with my Triumph Tiger 800 XC to the BMW R 1200 RS bike review, this road is a favorite of mine. And that’s because it was a favorite of my Dad’s.

There are old black-and-white photos of him and my Mom down there, long before I was even a twinkle in his eye. It’s the location of the first trip we’d ever taken together as well as many subsequent trips since then. So it was a fitting and familiar destination for the two of us to take off to as he returned to motorcycling for the first time in over a year.

I was on a Kawasaki Z900 and he was on the Bonneville and the trip went off without a hitch. Other than the fact he was prepared with the appropriate rain gear and I was not.

During a recent episode of our Highside/Lowside podcast, I made reference to the fact that Lance Oliver picked on me when I submitted the article about that trip, chastising me working as a gear expert and video host for RevZilla and yet setting off on a wet and chilly weekend ride in perforated leather without any rain protection. My dad called me after the episode aired to correct me.

“Lance might have picked on you for that, but I was the first,” Dad yelled over the phone. “I can’t believe you didn’t give me the credit for being the first one to call you an idiot for not being prepared for the rain!”

Well, Dad, there ya go. My public apology for getting it wrong. You knew I was an idiot long before Lance picked up on it.

The Bonnie today, on the eve of 2021

The Bonnie is still living at my Dad’s house. He takes it out from time to time, rides it to work and back, and we’ll ride together on the weekends. It brings me joy to see how far that bike has come and how it’s influenced so much of my life, my career, and my relationship with my Dad.

My goal for this year was to plan out a big commemorative road trip with the bike. To steal it back from my Dad for a few weeks and finally push the odometer over the 80,000-mile mark. That didn’t happen. But luckily for me, the Bonnie isn’t going anywhere.

And, luckily for all of us, 2021 is a brand new year.