KLR-650 first month & american gumball

Yesterday I finally got the title for my motorcycle and realized that I’d owned it for exactly one month!


So far, I haven’t done anything very adventureous – still getting used to riding again. I had a couple things that were making me nervous about it:

1. The bike gets warm (>1/2 way on the heat gauge, but still significantly below the red) tooling around, usually on my commute home in the evening.

2. There is a sputtering or almost backfiring when I am coasting down hills, which is several times each direction.

Turns out that both are normal! Hooray!

I was thinking about other things I want out of life and ended up coming across the American Gumball Rally website. In highschool, Beals and I used to watch “documentaries” about people on the Gumball 3000 and Mischief runs, their expensive cars, and their (pretty crazy) disregard for speed limits. I pitched Beals on doing the Nevada America Gumball Run in 2017, and we immediately got into whether his Focus or my Focus got to wear a racing stripe and do the honors, when Beals dropped a bomb on me:

too bad you don’t have your f250 still, that would be an epic ride

It turns out my parents do still have the ‘91 Ford F250 to which Beals was referring. There’s one catch: the truck is in Prosser, WA, and I’m in San Francisco, CA, and Beals is in Portland, OR. Okay, so, we’ll take on a road trip:


Correction: two catches. The second is that the truck transmission and alternator are dodgy. And per catch (A), we have 14+ hours through Oregon and Nevada. We’ll just have to bring some way to get ourselves out of trouble if it breaks down somewhere. Something that could fit in a pickup. Something like


So yeah – that’s the plan:

1. Drive the bike to Prosser.
2. Load the bike on the truck.
3. Drive to Las Vegas with the truck and the bike.
4. Do the rally.
5. Drive the truck back to Prosser.
6. Ride the bike back to San Francisco.

Boom – problem solving.