THE UNNECESS ARY EXPRESS

ASTORIA, OREGON, 12 : 54 P.M.194.7 Miles ,03 : 07 Elapsed Time

It was as warm as it would be for another 20 hours, and I was cold. Not freezing. That would come at night, when the sky filled with snow. When we couldn’t stop shaking. But right then, the day was a wonder. The low clouds broke to show blue sky, the spits of rain abating. And then I nearly dumped us both into the Columbia River.

It was Smith’s turn to tangle with the fuel transfer pump, this tiny, 12-volt thing we’d strapped to the sidecar’s fender. He was in the tub, facing backward, body in the breeze, wrestling with long plastic fuel lines full of gas. A line torn or caught in an axle and pressurized fuel would go everywhere. After which it would be almost impossible to refuel our 2016 Ural Patrol Gear Up on the fly.

And that was the whole point. We’d set off from Seattle that morning with the idiot intent of riding nonstop to Los Angeles. No getting off the bike, rider swaps at speed, and no stopping for anything but traffic.

The Ural is basically a copy of a 1930s BMW, drug into the 21st century. The frame is broomstick tube steel, but the bike has fuel injection and LED lamps. As on an old BMW, the engine drives the rear wheel via shaft; a lever on the finaldrive housing engages the sidecar wheel for more drive in low traction. It’s the kind of machine that makes every dash across town feel like something you survived.

But that’s the fun of it. Urals are a testament to simplicity. Features like electronic stability control and twin-clutch transmissions are slowly sapping the required skill from riding new motorcycles, but no bike will ever do everything for you—that’s not why most people ride. Motorcycles are fun, unnecessary things.

And so this trip was that idea, twisted extreme: We wanted to set an irrelevant endurance record as inefficiently as possible. A tribute to purposeless purpose. So we picked a Ural, and we picked Seattle, home of Ural’s American distributor, and greater Los Angeles, home of . For a route, we settled on US-101, a mostly coastal highway that