How to choose a touring motorcycle #2

Here’s yet another experience choosing a motorcycle for a round-the-world trip. Like most RTW trips, off-roading has to be a consideration. Here’s an excerpt from the online journals of Chris and Spice.

There is a lot to consider when thinking about modifications for a two-year round-the-world trip. Comfort, reliability, ruggedness, power, practicality, availability of parts, so on and so. The plan was to ride the TransAm Trail as a sort of off-road boot camp for both Spice and I as well as the bikes. Could they handle the constant pounding of 4,000 miles of dual-sport trails completely loaded down? That was what we set out to see…I bought a big GS just like the dream said but quickly realized it may not be the most practical thing in the world. The weight, cost and sophistication may overwhelm my feeble abilities. Next we started to check out the F650 Dakar. We both rode a few but no matter what we weren’t sold on the BMW. Around this time I flipped through a few old issues of Motorcycle Consumer News and came on a series written by the renowned world tourer Greg Frazier. He bought and built an adventure touring dual-sport bike, a Kawasaki KLR 650 ready to go for less than ten grand. Eventually we found two young KLRs with not very many miles on them in Alabama. Mine was an ’02 model with zero modifications and we found an ’01 model for Spice with a few little mods here and there. Now we had to build them. Read the full story.

Read the first installment of How to choose a touring motorcycle.