last year for the gen. i
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It is true that activity on this site is a lot lower than in years past. When I post it is almost always to ask questions about why my motorcycle isn't working quite right, and sometimes to offer camping tips. I've thought about posting some trip reports but it seems... I don't know...a little vain, since I've been far more fortunate than most in the KLR love affair? Yet I do like to read other people's reports, especially if they are about someplace I don't know. Maybe we all need to think more about why we ride. KLRs still seem to sell pretty well. I see them out and about. What do we do to attract people to this site? I've never been on Facebook or any other social media and don't plan to start now. Seeing people diving face-first into that tiny screen freaks me out. There is no life in there, no wind, no smell of fresh-cut hay, no crunch of glacier snow under your boots. My other travel hobby is river running all over the west, and groups like Utah Rafters at Yahoo have met the same fate... lost to Facebook. Yet people complain about the same thing, hard to find files about stuff you really want to learn about. Whatever happens, I'm grateful to this group because it was instrumental in changing my life. About fifteen years ago I decided I wanted to get a motorcycle and start riding to remote places. With a damaged knee, backpacking and skiing had become problematic. Partly it was because of the mileage you get on a bike, but it was also about living closer to the bone. You just can't carry as much as you can on a four wheeled vehicle so you have to trim life down to the basics. I never was into motor homes, but even a van was starting to seem a bit extravagant, not to mention having trouble on rough terrain. So I did a lot of research and decided my first motorcycle would be a KLR 650. I took a MSF course, shopped around, and bought a bike. A big part of deciding on a KLR was this group. I'm a lucky guy when it comes to KLRs. I bought a used 2003 with just three thousand miles on it in 2005. It had been dropped hard so some dings, but overall, solid. Since then I've ridden it in Arizona, New Mexico, Utah, Colorado, Idaho, Wyoming, and Montana. Mostly back roads. And I ride it to the grocery store a couple times a week, or to run other errands since the nearest town of any size is about 15 miles away. It still purrs like a chicken every time I start it up. I liked that bike so much that when some jobs in the Czech Republic came up, I decided to get a motorcycle over there. They don't sell KLRs in Europe except, apparently, in the UK. But one turned up at a dealer in Olomuc, CZ. I'm guessing some guy wanting to live the dream ran out of dream after shipping the bike over from the USA and riding a thousand miles east. It's a 2009. I'm co-owner with a Czech friend. He handles the paperwork, I get to ride it a couple of weeks a year. The thing runs great and has taken me through CZ, Slovakia, Slovenia, Austria, Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Montenegro, and Albania. This September I'm going to ride out through Hungary to Romania and have a look around Serbia on my way back. There's something about a motorcycle that is totally different from a car. In CZ, people planted hundreds of apple and pear trees along country roads. (f**kin' socialists ;>) When the fruit ripens, anyone can go out and gather up baskets full to take home to can or feed to their pigs. Mile after mile of fruit trees, on a public right-of-way. Riding down a narrow country lane with the scent of apples filling the air, dropping down into the cool moist air of stream beds and then up onto the dryer, dusty smelling meadows... can't get that from a car. The coolest motorcycle moment of my life was when I took the most remote border crossing open between Montenegro (where, by the way, the roads are so steep there was a switchback IN A TUNNEL, and it was an unpaved road in an unlit tunnel) and Albania, where they really do have concrete pillboxes everywhere. After going through the straight-out-of-Hollywood border crossing with bored, suspicious crossing guards and a red and white gate with a cement counterweight, I rode through a stream, past a pillbox, and up a rough, unbladed road. Standing on the pegs due to the rough, uphill track I kept saying out loud, with a huge grin on my face, "I'm in fucking ALBANIA!" Never been so stoked in my life, and I've had adventures in 24 countries so far. Where they still harvest hay by hand and stack it in huge, steep cones. Nobody speaks any English so everything is sign language except hello, please, and thank you. The food is simple: lamb or fish harvested an hour or two before you eat it, and delicious fresh tomatoes and fruit. Yet one morning at a campground at the end of a long, unpaved road deep into the mountains, a beautiful little girl about six years old came up to me from her cabin as I lubed my chain for the day's ride and said, in perfect English, "What are you doing?" Daddy is a "businessman" in New York. She was back in Albania on a visit to the old country. Globalism. And the KLR never gave me a moment of trouble. This is a machine that can take you to places you never dreamed of, and even after you've been there, it still seems like a dream. Point Sublime. Kotor Bay. Spis Castle. The KLRs have taken me on fantastic voyages. This year a similar opportunity came up in Australia. Yep, I am now half owner of a 2013 KLR in Oz. Haven't ridden it yet, I'm heading over to Sydney on May 2nd and will meet the bike for the first time in Canberra a couple days later. I'll saddle up and ride through The Great Dividing Range up to a job near Brisbane. Same paint as the Czech bike, which is kind of cool. So now I have one full ownership in the US and two half- ownership KLRs on other continents. My body isn't getting any stronger or more flexible but I feel pretty good at 59. I plan to ride as long as I can but I'm not a mechanical genius, I will need help from you guys when stuff doesn't work. For example, after riding in almost constant rain from Croatia through Austria on my way back to CZ, why did the 2009 bike just up and die a few miles from home in stop and go traffic? I pushed it into a convenience store/gas station that just happened to carry fuses. I found a blown fuse, replaced it, started up, blew again. Repeat. Put the bike behind the store under a tarp, found a place for the night, came back the next day (sunny now) put in a new fuse, and it was fine. Any ideas? I can't remember which fuse it was. Why does my '03 eat batteries if I am gone for a month and forget to put it on the battery tender? Anyway, I've learned a lot from this site, tires to oil, and gotten great advice on fixing stuff. I'm never going to Facebook, so to me, I'd like to keep it alive even if traffic is thin. This site led me to buy the first KLR, and look what happened! Magic. And yep, I have stopped at Fred's place in Moab a couple of times (a bit hard to find, but worth it) and he has been great about helping me out. I can get by without the site, but I'd rather not. OK, I have had a couple of whiskies while writing this. Still, more problems are solved by throttle than by brakes. Bryan Eloy, Arizona
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this group going away?
On Sat, Mar 17, 2018 at 9:35 PM, bryantburke@... [DSN_KLR650] DSN_KLR650@yahoogroups.com> wrote: It is true that activity on this site is a lot lower than in years past. When I post it is almost always to ask questions about why my motorcycle isn't working quite right, and sometimes to offer camping tips. I've thought about posting some trip reports but it seems... I don't know...a little vain, since I've been far more fortunate than most in the KLR love affair? Yet I do like to read other people's reports, especially if they are about someplace I don't know. Maybe we all need to think more about why we ride. KLRs still seem to sell pretty well. I see them out and about. What do we do to attract people to this site? I've never been on Facebook or any other social media and don't plan to start now. Seeing people diving face-first into that tiny screen freaks me out. There is no life in there, no wind, no smell of fresh-cut hay, no crunch of glacier snow under your boots. My other travel hobby is river running all over the west, and groups like Utah Rafters at Yahoo have met the same fate... lost to Facebook. Yet people complain about the same thing, hard to find files about stuff you really want to learn about. Whatever happens, I'm grateful to this group because it was instrumental in changing my life. About fifteen years ago I decided I wanted to get a motorcycle and start riding to remote places. With a damaged knee, backpacking and skiing had become problematic. Partly it was because of the mileage you get on a bike, but it was also about living closer to the bone. You just can't carry as much as you can on a four wheeled vehicle so you have to trim life down to the basics. I never was into motor homes, but even a van was starting to seem a bit extravagant, not to mention having trouble on rough terrain. So I did a lot of research and decided my first motorcycle would be a KLR 650. I took a MSF course, shopped around, and bought a bike. A big part of deciding on a KLR was this group. I'm a lucky guy when it comes to KLRs. I bought a used 2003 with just three thousand miles on it in 2005. It had been dropped hard so some dings, but overall, solid. Since then I've ridden it in Arizona, New Mexico, Utah, Colorado, Idaho, Wyoming, and Montana. Mostly back roads. And I ride it to the grocery store a couple times a week, or to run other errands since the nearest town of any size is about 15 miles away. It still purrs like a chicken every time I start it up. I liked that bike so much that when some jobs in the Czech Republic came up, I decided to get a motorcycle over there. They don't sell KLRs in Europe except, apparently, in the UK. But one turned up at a dealer in Olomuc, CZ. I'm guessing some guy wanting to live the dream ran out of dream after shipping the bike over from the USA and riding a thousand miles east. It's a 2009. I'm co-owner with a Czech friend. He handles the paperwork, I get to ride it a couple of weeks a year. The thing runs great and has taken me through CZ, Slovakia, Slovenia, Austria, Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Montenegro, and Albania. This September I'm going to ride out through Hungary to Romania and have a look around Serbia on my way back. There's something about a motorcycle that is totally different from a car. In CZ, people planted hundreds of apple and pear trees along country roads. (f**kin' socialists ;>) When the fruit ripens, anyone can go out and gather up baskets full to take home to can or feed to their pigs. Mile after mile of fruit trees, on a public right-of-way. Riding down a narrow country lane with the scent of apples filling the air, dropping down into the cool moist air of stream beds and then up onto the dryer, dusty smelling meadows... can't get that from a car. The coolest motorcycle moment of my life was when I took the most remote border crossing open between Montenegro (where, by the way, the roads are so steep there was a switchback IN A TUNNEL, and it was an unpaved road in an unlit tunnel) and Albania, where they really do have concrete pillboxes everywhere. After going through the straight-out-of-Hollywood border crossing with bored, suspicious crossing guards and a red and white gate with a cement counterweight, I rode through a stream, past a pillbox, and up a rough, unbladed road. Standing on the pegs due to the rough, uphill track I kept saying out loud, with a huge grin on my face, "I'm in fucking ALBANIA!" Never been so stoked in my life, and I've had adventures in 24 countries so far. Where they still harvest hay by hand and stack it in huge, steep cones. Nobody speaks any English so everything is sign language except hello, please, and thank you. The food is simple: lamb or fish harvested an hour or two before you eat it, and delicious fresh tomatoes and fruit. Yet one morning at a campground at the end of a long, unpaved road deep into the mountains, a beautiful little girl about six years old came up to me from her cabin as I lubed my chain for the day's ride and said, in perfect English, "What are you doing?" Daddy is a "businessman" in New York. She was back in Albania on a visit to the old country. Globalism. And the KLR never gave me a moment of trouble. This is a machine that can take you to places you never dreamed of, and even after you've been there, it still seems like a dream. Point Sublime. Kotor Bay. Spis Castle. The KLRs have taken me on fantastic voyages. This year a similar opportunity came up in Australia. Yep, I am now half owner of a 2013 KLR in Oz. Haven't ridden it yet, I'm heading over to Sydney on May 2nd and will meet the bike for the first time in Canberra a couple days later. I'll saddle up and ride through The Great Dividing Range up to a job near Brisbane. Same paint as the Czech bike, which is kind of cool. So now I have one full ownership in the US and two half- ownership KLRs on other continents. My body isn't getting any stronger or more flexible but I feel pretty good at 59. I plan to ride as long as I can but I'm not a mechanical genius, I will need help from you guys when stuff doesn't work. For example, after riding in almost constant rain from Croatia through Austria on my way back to CZ, why did the 2009 bike just up and die a few miles from home in stop and go traffic? I pushed it into a convenience store/gas station that just happened to carry fuses. I found a blown fuse, replaced it, started up, blew again. Repeat. Put the bike behind the store under a tarp, found a place for the night, came back the next day (sunny now) put in a new fuse, and it was fine. Any ideas? I can't remember which fuse it was. Why does my '03 eat batteries if I am gone for a month and forget to put it on the battery tender? Anyway, I've learned a lot from this site, tires to oil, and gotten great advice on fixing stuff. I'm never going to Facebook, so to me, I'd like to keep it alive even if traffic is thin. This site led me to buy the first KLR, and look what happened! Magic. And yep, I have stopped at Fred's place in Moab a couple of times (a bit hard to find, but worth it) and he has been great about helping me out. I can get by without the site, but I'd rather not. OK, I have had a couple of whiskies while writing this. Still, more problems are solved by throttle than by brakes. BryanEloy, Arizona
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