I may not be out there riding this summer, but here’s the next best thing:
On July 3, my friend Bob Weeks rode in from British Columbia on an adventure bike he built out of a 2000 Harley-Davidson Sportster.
The donor bike he started with.
Bob rode quite a lot of gravel across Canada getting here. I hadn’t seen him since 2019 when I visited him and Janey at their place in Tete Jaune Cache while on my way up to Tuktoyaktuk and Deadhorse.
Bob got here in the afternoon on the 3rd and was back on the road the morning of the 6th. Pam and I enjoyed every minute of his visit. He’s a great raconteur, has been to a lot of interesting places in his life; ridden South America and Australia and just about everywhere in North America.
From our place, he camped next in western Connecticut, then the Pennsylvania side of the Delaware Water Gap, a favorite of mine, then on down the Blue Ridge Parkway through Virginia, the backroads of North Carolina, rode the tail of the dragon at Deals Gap. He’s in Alabama today, headed for the Barber Vintage Motorsports Museum.
It makes my summer that he stopped by. Definitely revived my spirits. My 90-day blood labs aren’t looking so good. Won’t bore you with that. Will let you know what’s what in October when I find out whether it’s a trend or a blip.
All the pretty horses…
I asked Bob to take the piglet out for a ride, given that he knows DR650s a lot better than I do. The bike was stock the last time he saw it in British Columbia. I went through it from stem to stern when I got back, bolted on lots of new equipment. He thought it rode well.
Pam and I were on Lake Winnipesaukee in New Hampshire when Bob texted to say he had crossed from Ontario into New York and was headed for Rhode Island. We had made a quick trip north to see James Taylor at an outdoor venue on the lake.
We camped there overnight in Jenna and Jonny’s van, left the venue the next morning when the place was deserted. There had been quite a traffic jam inching its way out of there late the night before. The place seats something like 9,000.
Oh, and get this: that sign on our next door neighbor’s Westfalia…?
It got an uptight somebody’s tighty whities into a twist. He informed the staff he wanted to be moved to a less controversial camping spot.
Saturday rolls around and traveling-man Bob is saddling up.
I rode with him down to Exeter to get him pointed west on route 165 off route 3. We got rained on pretty heavy. To get out of it we pulled into an open-air post-and-beam building, owned by my friends Amy and Dana of Ocean State Harley-Davidson. That gave Bob a chance to go over his maps and fix in mind the backroads he wanted to ride across Connecticut.
Paper maps! The only way to go. Like Bob, I typically look at them once in the morning, get the general idea, see where you are at day’s end. Be open to the road. Some of the best places I know I found accidentally.
With Bob on his way, I took the van north again on Sunday, met Jonny at the ski retreat he and Jenna are building in Vermont. I didn’t feel as if I had 163 July motorcycle miles in me, hence the van. Really didn’t feel up to going at all, but we had planned it for a month, Jonny had arranged time off from work. I had said I would be there, so I went.
It was the final push on habitability, a red pine floor in the little apartment over the garage, about 500 square feet.
The pneumatic nailer drives 2-inch staples through the tongue, then we face-nailed the floor with cut nails, for the Vermont look.
Virgo in the night sky, viewed through my iPhone.
We applied an oil finish: tung oil cut 50/50 with citrus solvent.
Let the oil soak in for an hour, wipe up any excess with a rag, it dries to a matte finish.
We also trimmed out the skylight openings. I had cut a sheet of maple plywood to size at John Ross’s shop in North Kingstown, hooked up the airless Graco and sprayed the panels white.
Jonny made the final precision cuts, built the boxes on the floor of the garage; we popped them into the rough openings, done.
The site engineer came by. There might need to be some earth work done before the well driller can do his thing.
Speaking of water, my wash-water ditch was dry. It was ungodly hot. We definitely got too much sun exposure cutting the floor boards to length outside.
That said, the place is coming along nicely. The kids will likely hire the house foundation done next year. And with the apartment finished at last, they’ll never again have to camp in a construction site on the property. They can treat the house as a turnkey project.
I wish I had snapped more pics while Bob was around—we were too busy visiting!
This you might remember: a few days of our 2019 travels in British Columbia and the Yukon.
And for you motorheads, here are 18 pages of Bob’s one-off Sporty build on Adventure Rider. Lots of cool shop photos.
Out for now.
Tony DePaul, July 11, 2024, Cranston, Rhode Island, USA
