STRETCHING THE KATANA'S LEGS

When our weekend plans were cancelled last minute (to go check out a quaint hotel in the Freestate), I redirected our trip to another biker-friendly hotel namely Fouriesburg Country Inn.

What is it like to take a road trip on the new Suzuki Katana? Well, as it happened, I found out sooner rather than later.

This only happened on the Thursday but as luck would have it, they had a room available. Having not needed to carry luggage on the Katana yet, and with my wife Gabi still fairly new to riding and zero chance of me strapping luggage to the back of her BMW K1200S (which is far better suited for this purpose than the Katana), we promptly dusted off all my various luggage options I collected over the years and made our way into the garage to see what would or could work on the Katana. I actually forgot how many different bags, racks, and panniers I had.

Luckily, we were only staying for one night, so everything we needed easily fitted into one of my Aprilia bags, which I just managed to squeeze on to the Kat’s pillion seat. Now as you should know by now, the Katana is not actually built for touring and/or carrying luggage because the pillion perch (rear seat) is fairly minimalistic, with no real tying points. We kinda managed by using my trusty old bungee cords, and also found some nifty fold-out straps under the seat where we could hook the bungees, in addition to the rear footpeg mounts and the newly fitted tail tidy/number plate bracket, which as reported before came courtesy of Tornado Developments, custom-made for the Kat.