The Minimal Motorcyclist

By Andrew Pain

We've all wondered about these things. What to pack? How much is too much? How do those people travel for months and years, and haven't won the lottery?

Andrew Pain is an experienced adventure and overland motorcyclist. He's traveled North and South America on a 250cc motorcycle, and knows what it means to budget the time, the money, and the energy for long overland trips. He's appeared at events such as Overland Expo and Horizons Unlimited to give talks on traveling, budgeting, and packing.

In The Minimal Motorcyclist, Andrew explains his ideas on traveling small, needing less money and gear before leaving and once on the road, and how to maximize the parts of the trip you will always look back on with pleasure. He careful constructs what you really need to travel, and how to sort those things from the amazing variety of gear available for the motorcyclist. And he explains the importance of the trip itself - the need to move from planning the big trip to leaving on it.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Andrew Pain
• Release date: May 19, 2015
• ISBN: 9781310259203

Andrew Pain

After working as a Paramedic and riding a motorcycle around part of the world, Andrew Pain is now turning to another of his passions, and writing.

Book preview

About the Author

Introduction to The Minimal Motorcyclist

I remember clearly when I decided I was going to try and write a book about travel on small motorcycles. I was in Alaska, and had just bought a new hammock tent - a Hennessy Expedition. For a hammock, it was large and heavy, but earlier I had been bit by the Adventure Tent bug and bough a Reverz Tenere tent - large enough for my motorcycle to actually park inside. I had more than enough room to walk around inside it, and it seemed like it would be the perfect tent to spend a year or more on the road with. It was, I suppose, so long as I didn't have to pack it up. The internet had been abuzz about it, and I decided it would be perfect, since I was going to be living in it. By the time I got to Alaska I was tired of it, the bulk and weight, and looking for something smaller. So, a hammock.

Before I'd left home, several months earlier, I'd been looking for books on traveling on small motorcycles. My bike, a thirty year old 250cc Yamaha, didn't seem to be anyone's first choice. In fact, the general idea was that, if you wanted to take any sort of long, overland motorcycle trip you needed one of the big adventure motorcycles, which were starting to take over the market. There wasn't much information out there for small bikes, and much of what was there was skewed towards larger machines. I remember finding one book on lightweight touring, only to find it was about traveling on a Harley Davidson Road Glide - a full dress motorcycle that weighted about 4 times what my 250 did.

So, there was I in my hammock, rocking back and forth and waiting for sleep, and wishing I'd been able to find more information on traveling with a small displacement motorcycle. It was, I'd learned, much different than traveling with a large one. Then I decided I was going to write one myself. I'd never written a book before, but I had gone to college for English and this seemed like something I could do.

The rest of the trip I occasionally took notes or wrote small blocks of text for what would eventually become Going Small - a guide to lightweight motorcycle travel. As with many things, reviews were mixed. A lot of that was just because I was new and still learning what I was doing, but also because people wanted more. While I had been on the road, something had shifted among some motorcycle travelers. The people looking to buy one of the 'Big Duellies" for their long trip was dropping and more and more attention was being paid to the little bikes - under 400ccs. I got to go places like Horizons Unlimited Events and Overland Expo to give talks on packing, small bikes, and travel in general, and people wanted to hear what I had to say (something which still surprises me from time to time). Going Small sold well, well enough that some MSF courses added it to their suggested reading lists. There were complaints, though, so I decided I would write a second book, trying to cover the topic more in depth. This was Going Small 2.0, and I included with it 10 things you should know before buying an Adventure Motorcycle - an ebook based on a series of blog posts I'd written. This sold well too, though I still felt like it was missing something, somehow incomplete. Like I'd missed an important point and wasn't even sure what the point had been.

I started working on another motorcycle/travel book, this one on budgeting. I hate budgeting, but it's an important part of travel. While I was working on it, I had a thought - instead of all these little books, why not just write one big one and revise it every couple of years. I thought of Chris Scott's Adventure Motorcycling Handbook - it was more than just a book on motorcycles or even adventure travel, it was a bible covering everything you might want to know about long term travel on a motorcycle. I couldn't write that (it was, after all, already written), but I thought I might be able to write something similar for small motorcycles, or (if nothing else) minimalist motorcycle travel. I stopped working on the budgeting book, and decided to think about it for a while.

The joy in traveling on a small motorcycle isn't really in the motorcycle - that is just a tool for travel. It's a great tool, but (and there are some people who may gasp at this) it's always been a means to a end for me. I enjoy traveling, and small motorcycles - with their low cost and high fuel economy - allowed me to travel. Before that, they were transport. I didn't own a car, since I wanted a motorcycle for travel and couldn't afford two vehicles. There were some cold mornings, colder nights, and hair raising moments as I learned to ride. But every time I had a few days in a row off work, I would hit the road. I'd ride in a certain direction, or follow a state or US highway, for a day, camp, and repeat the next day. Or return home, if I had too. The roads were lightly traveled and the towns all seemed calmer than the city I lived and worked in. Some days I only rode a hundred miles, some days it was closer to 500. Still, every time I came home I felt better than when I left.

I was remembering those days, my early days of motorcycle traveling, and realized that was the feeling I was trying to capture, the idea I was trying to convey. I had been on a small motorcycle then (a similar SR250 to the one I travel with now), and that forced me off the interstates and onto smaller roads - and it forced me to slow down. Those early trips had never been about the destination, I rarely had a destination when I started and stopped when and where I felt like stopping. And it wasn't about the road, some of the roads were twisting and fun, some were long, straight, and quite dull. It was about moving, being on the road, seeing something I hadn't seen before, even if it was just a cornfield (There are a lot of cornfields in the Midwest).

I'd moved up to a larger motorcycle, so the interstates became a travel option and my two and three day trips started to cover a lot more territory. I discovered Iron Butt rides and stretched my saddle time even further. But something, along the way, was lost.

When I started to plan my America's ride, I learned my 250 had serious engine issues, and it wouldn't pay to repair it. I had another, perfectly good motorcycle - my XS1100 - which I had been using to travel around the USA for years. But I didn't want to take it. Okay, it was much heavier and more complicated to work on but the real problem I had with riding it on a trip like the Americas was I never got off. Hundreds of miles would roll under the wheels and I would never stop to look at anything along the way. It was a motorcycle built to ride to a destination without detour or delay. The GPS would give me a nice line to follow, and apart from road hazards I rarely even had to take notice of my surroundings. It was, upon reflection, a terrible way to travel.

The 250, by comparison, made me stop. It only got 150 miles to a tank, usually, and I generally only wanted to ride half that far before stopping to stretch. In practice, I stopped even more often - to look at things or visit with people. It was not a bike to cover miles on, at least not all at once. One revelation was, however, that I still managed quite a few miles in a day if I felt the need. Sometimes I did, but most of the time I found it was better to connect with the places I passed through, rather than just pass through them, and that takes time. On the small bike I took the time, on the large bike I didn't. It was, really, that simple.

After I had worked all this out, I realized a lot of the ideas behind Going Small had less to do with the motorcycle and more to do with a style of travel - a willingness to stop more often and see things, talk to people. So, while much of this book will focus on small motorcycles and simple, inexpensive gear, I hope a