Riding the Suzuki V-Strom 650 a few months ago, followed by a 1200-mile, 5-day tour of Yorkshire on my Street Triple R, further reinforced my belief that my perfect two-up touring/commuting motorcycle might well be found in the modern-day Adventure Tourer. I felt sure that I wanted to have the upright seating position for all-day comfort,…

I’ve spent the past nine months or so test riding, researching and carefully evaluating any number of motorcycles for consideration as my two-up tourer and winter commuter. A year with a Triumph Street Triple R has shown it to be a bike with tremendous strengths, such that I if I were to sell it I would…

Triumph’s Bonneville: Sunday cruiser or hipster throwback? Most articles I’ve read about the British firm’s modern remake of their once-famous roadster suggests that I should be comparing it to Moto Guzzi’s V7, Harley Davidson’s 883 Sportster and Kawasaki’s W800 – all classic naked designs evoking an era of mechanical simplicity and wind-in-your-hair motoring. The marketing…

In my ongoing quest to choose a new two-up tourer and all-year commuter, I’ve ridden BMW’s two big boxer-engined bikes, as well as Triumph’s flagship triple. I’ve experimented with middleweight adventure bikes in the Tiger and found them lacking. All the faired middleweight sport-touring bikes like the Bandit seem to have been whittled down to a…

I’ve never known quite what to make of big, fully faired, bells & whistles touring bikes. A few months ago Rosa and I took BMW’s outgoing air-cooled boxer twin R1200RT out for a couple of hours, and we rather enjoyed it. Sure, it was big and heavy, but it was surprisingly light on its feet…

What is an adventure bike? Definitions abound, from two-wheeled SUVs to giant dirt bikes; from tall, upright sports bikes to the inevitable evolution of the sports tourer. Regardless, the industry, and indeed the biking public as a whole, seem to have latched onto the image of the tough, rugged, do-everything motorcycle, even if most bikes end up doing exactly…

It seems that everyone in the news is getting excited about the enhanced flavour of BMW’s water-cooled R1200GS Adventure, but I’m too short to be interested in something that’s even taller than the standard GS. Plus, I hate spoked wheels, and don’t have any intention of taking a 250kg motorcycle off-road. And I’ve never actually…

I finally got myself organised and booked test rides on BMW’s R1200RT and R1200GS. I’ve ridden BMW boxers before – an R1150R when I was shopping for the Bandit and my uncle’s R1150RT in Canada last year, so there really shouldn’t have been many surprises. Neither 1150 had blown me away at the time, but…