Mike's Tenere & Motorcycle Blog

 1996 Triumph Trophy 1200 (owned) This is my return to motorcycling after a 17 year hiatus raising a family in which I sold my beloved 1983 Gold Wing Standard (non-Interstate) in 1992 to buy wedding rings...or as I joke...I traded one passion for another 😀. I opted to import a US bike from Boise Idaho which turned the event into a grand adventure in celebration of my 50th B-Day that involved a bus ride to Seattle, then a flight to Boise & an overnight stay with the seller. If this bike was not to my liking I had 2nd Green 1998 Trophy 1200 lined up in California...always good to have a back-up plan😎. My blue Trophy & I had a rocky start with the bike displaying the well documented fuel starvation & erratic idle a few times due to a kinked fuel line under the tightly packed tank a few times....but I knew it was an easy fix & nursed it home.  The route home was through mostly familiar roads up the mtns west of Snake River Canyon, then west along the Columbia Riv...

  1983 Honda Goldwing GL1100 Standard (aka “Light Wing”) Review (owned) : This was the bike that defined my early 20s to early 30s passion for long distant touring replacing my ’80 Suzuki G850G that was written off in an accident in Austin Texas in 1982 part way through a North American tour that began in Vancouver, BC. followed the west coast through Baja & central Mexico, then north to Texas. I had actually bought an ’82 GL1100 at the Motorcycle Show, but when delivery rolled around a few months later they gave me the updated ’83 model (last year of the GL1100) instead that came with mag wheels vs the Comstar steel units, revised suspension w/TRACS anti-dive & fork brace, revised transmission/gearing, Honda’s 1st combined brake system & a dry weight of 599 lbs for the non-Interstate Standard model devoid of farings, top box, bags, air compressors, stereo/cb & crash bars. The liquid cooled flat four w/5 sp trany & shaft drive that began life in 1975 at 1,000 ...