HIMALAYAN IN THE MID WEST

The 3,500-Mile Royal Enfield Summer

- PETER EGAN

If somebody had told me 10 years ago, when I was doing track days on a Ducati 996 and tearing around the backcountry on a KTM 525, that I’d end up spending almost an entire riding season seated quite happily behind the handlebars of a 24 hp, 411cc, $4,700 adventure-touring bike made in India—leaving the other bikes in my small stable almost unridden—I might have been quite puzzled. Editor Mark Hoyer certainly was, as were several of my riding buddies. So, perhaps some explanation is due.

It all started with Alaska.

About a year ago, my wife Barbara and I took an Inside Passage cruise from Vancouver to Anchorage, and we managed to quit eating and drinking long enough to get off the ship and do some exploring of the interior by foot, rental car, and railway. And, of course, I was predictably knocked out by the vastness and beauty of the Alaskan landscape. Gobsmacked, as our British friends might say, and often do. By the time we lifted off from Fairbanks on the flight back to Wisconsin, I looked out the window and announced to Barb, who was already nodding off, “I’m coming back here on a motorcycle.”

She mumbled something in her sleep that I interpreted as “Great idea!”

But what bike? I had a long flight to think about it. And a long winter ahead.

Friends who’d ridden in Alaska had described summer as “road-repair season,” and said to expect occasional stretches of mud and gravel, even on normally paved roads, and suggested that being able to pick up your own bike (while recovering from a slight concussion) was a very good thing. None of this sounded ideal for my 2009 Buell Ulysses, which is a great highway and gravel-road bike, but something of a tall and heavy handful in deep muck.