Which bike you use for your travels is a very individual decision. When we had reached the point of knowing that we were going to be able to travel full time we began an extensive evaluation of motor bikes. This was all done by reading evaluations and doing comparisons of statistical data on the machines under consideration. Once we had reached a point where we felt we had a clear cut winner we did something that proved to be the wisest part of our selection process. We attended a 3 day riding course at which the manufacturer provided the bike we had selected for our use.

After three days of riding the bike on all types of roads with an emphasis on dirt and gravel rather than paved roads we found that our winner was in fact, for us, the wrong bike! While the course was an expensive commitment it was not as expensive as the purchase of the bikes would have been. The course also allowed us to ride another bike that we had completely eliminated from our selection process because, in our evaluation, it suffered from the too syndrome - too heavy, too tall a seat height, too big, just too much bike. Guess what? We fell in love with it and that’s what we purchased. Go figure.

One reason we chose BMW is that BMW offers a three year warranty on their motorbikes in the USA and they will honor the warranty in Europe as long as the bike is registered in the USA. We know this to be true because we have tested the warranty four times - once in Spain, once in France (Corsica) and twice in Germany. This is good customer service and truly a result of globalization. BMW provides only one year for their motorbike warranty except in the USA and Europe, where starting in 2002 it is two years. Many people get very upset when they hear that our USA model BMW’s that will be three years old in June 2003 are having problems repaired as part of the warranty. Another reason we purchased BMW’s is because BMW has a world wide network of dealers selling and servicing BMW motorbikes. This solves a lot of problems when spare parts are needed for scheduled maintenance or when something fails.

So the planning issue comes to the front here as well. Had we not included this course as part of our evaluation we would have made a purchase that would have adversely impacted our entire dream. Sometimes you must spend some money in order to learn what really will work for you. See The Bikes section for more info on them.

NOTE: During the summer of 2004 we spent a lot of time riding in the European Alps. A great experience and something every motor biker should do. One of the things this allowed us to do was ride our bikes on some less than ideally surfaced unimproved roads with lots of dirt and rocks of varying sizes.

We found that the BMW R1150GS’s that we have are just too big and heavy to ride safely on roads like this when the roads are very steep and the turns are very tight. We had ridden many unimproved roads two years ago when in the Scandinavian countries but those roads were in very good condition.

When we add all of the problems we have had with these bikes to their inability to cope with the weight they can carry (as well as they weight they themselves have) as of October, 2004, we decided that we were going to sell them and get different bikes.

And we did. See The Bikes page to see what we did.

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