With Drew heading home on the “quicker picker upper” I headed back to the camp. I was looking forward to the post ride happy hour, dinner, bench racing around the campfire and most especially the arrival of my wife, The Lovely Chace who was riding over on her GS.
Due to my extracurricular activities with the Sprinter Chace was on-site when I returned. We had a wonderful evening. Wade Jarvis and the Colebrook Fire Department served up a fantastic dinner, we enjoyed adult beverages and we burned shit.
Photo by Rob Schobert
My plan from the get-go was to ride big bike hard with my buddies on Saturday and tone it down for a day in the woods with Chace. She’s a hell of a touring rider with over 100,000 miles blasting around North America on the big BMW but big bike hard isn’t her cup of tea. I was looking forward to having her join us for the evening’s festivities and for a ride Sunday; with the Honda in the box we had the option of working a bit on the intermediate route or going romantic and scenic on the Explorer route with the big bikes. A consideration to keep in mind was the Trail Boss promised Sunday would be a step up from Saturday so we decided to go for romance.
The Explorer route turned out to be a really wonderful ride. We’ve become hooked on our Sena’s and we enjoy chatting on these rides and we found plenty to discuss. The ride started with great paved twisties with farms and incredible views. We noted on what a great ride it was and that this is a part of New England we don’t get to that often.
We did find some nice dirt on the way, with the dirt leading to some mud. With Chace on the 1200 GS with street tires and luggage I decided this could quickly end up as us being in the wrong place at the wrong time so we turned around. When we did so we encountered another couple; he was on a 1200GS and she was riding the new 310GS fitted with knobbie tires. They were not going to be turning around.
It can be quite a challenge finding the “right” adventure bike that’s not a heavy monster. The smaller the bike the less comfortable it will be for long days and it will have less capacity for luggage, fuel and gear for an extended dual sport tour. On paper a bike like the new BMW 310GS looks like it could fit the bill until one gets to the suspension along with the understanding that BMW didn’t intend for this model to be a dirty girl, its place is more as a light weight urban adventure bike (BMW’s own description). The little Honda is wonderful in the woods but if your normal ride is a GS after a half day of on an off road riding it becomes a little on the painful side and you can forget about loading it up for a big tour, although I did recently spend some time on the Mid Atlantic Back Road Discovery Route with a guy who was doing on a Yamaha 250 so it can be done, although this rider was traveling with friends on big bikes who carried the cooking gear. If we ever find the perfect dual sport we’ll let you know. It will have KLR durability with KTM performance and light weight, while being capable of riding to Colorado and back. It will be called the unicorn. It might even be electric.
Re-route in place we continued on, having a wonderful ride. We saw the GS couple again along with some other happy riders.
One thing I keep in mind when doing these rides is not to become a slave to the GPS. I think it’s easy to start the day following a provided route and end in some sort of self defeating feedback loop about “finishing” the ride. I always look at GPX files as a suggested route, especially on pavement or in areas where there are plenty of choices. My exception to this are rides like the Back Road Discovery routes out west were a wrong turn can lead to serious consequences. Today we had no such concerns and decided before we left that lunch at the Bistro Box was in order.
For those of you that have never been, the Bistro Box is a fantastic roadside eatery in Great Barrington. Located on 7 south of town it’s always worth the visit and the wait.
We enjoyed our burgers and started back to camp. Given how close to home we were at one point we split off with Chace heading east while I returned to camp to get the gear after one of the best rides in a very long time.
Weekends like this don’t come all the time and they don’t happen without a lot of effort from a small but dedicated group of people. The other vital yet always underappreciated ingredient is the attitude of the people in this group. I’ve been to events were the folks in charge are aloof, too busy or miserable for one reason or another and it sets the tone for the weekend. In this case this group had done so much pre-event work (just look at those ,GPX files!) that when combined with their experience at hosting events it was impossible to find anyone that wasn’t smiling; even the folks busting their butts for our fun looked like they were enjoying themselves. It was that kind of weekend.
Solid Gold. Vince would be proud as would all the BTR members who came before of the ride and good times provided. Thank you.
I’d like to close this out with a huge tip of the keyboard to the following:
Dave Boiano: Trail Boss and BaseCamp professor.
Dave Seften (IT & Online Registration Guru, Pre-Rider and Mentor Extraordinaire to the Trail Boss.)
Chris Tooker and Chris Ballerini who laid out Sunday’s Intermediate Route.
Wade Jarvis, food (Colebrook Fire Department) and Pre-Rider.
Girl Scouts for Sunday Breakfast
Rich Mazzei, Check in
AkaRob Schobert, all around doer of what needed doing
Norbrook Farms Brewery
The members and officers of the Berkshire Trail Riders
And finally all the riders that came out to play. The crew above set it up and you all showed up to make it epic and to once again prove that if they build it, we will come.
Thanks to all for a Real Good Time.
#Fini
