How can I even be thinking of riding that big old thing all the way to the bottom of the world? Don't I know that as soon as you leave the U.S. (or Canada, Austrailia or Europe) there are no roads, chicken and donkeys are everywhere and everyone looks like this.


I guess I like a challenge.

The motorcycle:

For some reason I keep buying wrecked Victory V92 bikes at salvage auctions. these are the bikes that Victory orphaned back in 2005. I fix them and ride some, sell some to buy more. Usually you can't see the mileage before you buy so when it has low mileage, you win and sell it, when it has 65,000 like this one.
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You ride it to the end of the world.

So after selling anything of value on it and setting it up the way I like. It looked like this



The preperation: Preperation? we don't need no stinkin preperation.

Tires: The best ones off the the bikes I had Rear Metzler ME880 with most of its tread and a front Michelin Commander II with more than half its left.

Custom seat.


When I bought my daily driver for $400 from a Pakistani Cabbie, it was there so I cut it to size.
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Not sure I want to think about it's former location. Got an Alaska Sheepskin But Pad to go over it.

Got myself a nice set of Ortlieb panniers. Took them on a trip to the Adirondacks with the Chai (Life, not Tea)
Riders MC on my yellow Victory Sport Cruiser and melted the right one with the exhaust . Gorilla tape to the rescue.

Tank bag and the Texsport yellow dry bag that survived my Mexico trip.
Off to Meet the Jews in LA then Mexico | Adventure Rider

Ready (or not) to go

Looks like this is going to be an "interesting" trip!

NOTE to the author - have to be logged into the other site to see the pic, so best to attach directly here or link to the actual url, not the attachment.

__________________
Grant Johnson
Seek, and ye shall find.
------------------------
Inspiring, Informing and Connecting travellers since 1997!
www.HorizonsUnlimited.com

Oh, so who the hell am I? I'm Mitch, 55 years old and needing to do this adventure sooner than later. I've got a very understanding wife, Parents that encourage this sort of thing and 2 kids going to college.


Me with my more HU acceptable ride. This is a one way trip for the bike and I'm not parting with my Wee (Strom the is).

There's a thread here about whether one gains or loses weight on these trips, I sure hopes it's lose in my case.

This trip was supposed to be a Father & Son trip with my oldest, but he got an unexpected acceptance to a very selective Bio-Chem program. I'm very proud of him and we'll do another trip when he has his degree.

This ride report is in real time so if I'm passing your way and you want to extend some hospitality, I'm ok with that

Bram from Holland rode down from Massachusetts to join me until the middle of Mexico. He's riding his father's 1988 BMW R100GS. 5 min to go.

We made it to the Horizons Unlimited meet in North Carolina and had a great weekend. the organizers, the venue and the presenters made it memorable as did all our fellow riders. Thanks

Mitch,
None of your pics are coming through ... try one of the photo hosting sites below or another like them. smugmug costs money but offers A LOT of services ... Picasa is free. (a google company) Attachments don't work. Good luck! Hope to see your pics soon!

https://www.smugmug.com

https://picasaweb.google.com/home

I'm using Dropbox. I had a Smugmug account but when I was out of commission for a while and didn't pay, they deleted all my photos. The only ones I had from several trips and I will never pay them another cent.

Theoretically any url of a photo should show up here unless there is something wrong. i see all the photos BTW. Not sure what that means. You can always go to the ADV site my RR is here.

Brooklyn to Argentina on a Salvaged Victory | Adventure Rider

I'd bet SmugMug has your pics somewhere ... I doubt they did a permanent delete, as it's so easy to store them somewhere. Maybe you can get them to dig them up, burn onto a CD and send to you? Just a thought?

You do know the same guy that owns ADV Rider ... OWNS Smug Mug, right?
His kids run SmugMug, far as I know.

I can't believe it was just yesterday that we crossed the border into Mexico.



Crossing went fine at Matamoros. Everything is in one place so no roaming around for the Banjercito.

Drove south to the town of San Fernando and changed some money there. Town seemed a bit sketchy so we got out of there quick. The plan was to take a back road from there to Linares for the first day. Unfortunately, the ride leader, yours truly, missed a turn off at the town of Mendes and we ended up going northwest instead of southwest for several hours. We ended up ion China. China, Mexico that is. Not much to do there so we headed back southwest towards the town of Montemorelos.

It was in Montemorelos that I had one of the best days of the trip so far.
I stopped at a Hotel to inquire about staying. it was a dump so I passed. Looking at my bike, I saw that the back end was very low, that's not right. Across the street was a guy named Asiel (not sure spelling) who owns a locksmith shop which had a Suzuki GSXR1000 in front, he asked me what was wrong and I told him I had raised the bike up and now it was slammed to the ground and my friend and I were looking for a hotel.

No problem he said. I'll take you to a good, inexpensive hotel and you can come back to my shop and we'll see what's up with the bike. He found us a great hotel with cold A/C and secure parking for just $12 for each of us.

Got the bike to his shop and took off the seat and I knew exactly what had happened. Prior to the trip I had put a longer clevis on the monoshock. The clevis is the part that is like a C with a bolt through it that holds the top of the shock to the fame. This raised the bike up a few inches. I figured, since the bike was raised, I could take out preload for a softer ride. The problem the shock travel remained the same so with less preload on the spring, the shock kept bottoming out and sending all the force to the clevis, bending it over 90 degrees. With the help of another biker from his club, we took off the shock, removed the bent clevis and took it to another member of the club who had a welding shop and rides a late '90s harley Police bike. He straightened the clevis and reinforced and we went back and put it together. Asiel said that's what bikers do for each other in Mexico.

He told me that some guys from his club were meeting just up the road from the hotel and going to some drag races on the outskirts of town, would I like to come. hell yeah.

Here are some of the club giving the ADV Rider salute

Now I'm going to talk about the difference between quality of life and standard of living.

It costs $3 to get into the drag strip, whether you're watching or racing. It's run what you brung. It's real drag strip with a Christmas tree, time slips and everything. There's a guy grilling carne asada for tacos, another selling (yes the racers were drinking too). The music was blasting and some couples were dancing. Everyone was having a great time and not spending a bunch of money.

The racing vehicles ranged from kids on 125cc China bikes to a guy with a new Porsche Carrera RS. Most were Chevy Camaros and Pickups with worked small blocks, Mustangs and a bunch of grocery getter type cars. All on street tires. Some did amazing burnouts (Cherokee SRT8), some could barely spin the tires (PT Cruiser) but everyone had a blast. Old school car culture alive and well and accessible to everyone. One of the club guys ran his wife's Chevy Uplander minivan and smoked the PT Cruiser , then got smoked by a Nissan Sentra.

The thing is, we in the USA can't have this sort of thing, sure we can afford nicer cars, have bigger houses and better electronics, but we don't have what these guys have. It's not just the racing. Their Motorcycle Clubs have everything from sport bikes to Harleys and everyone is family. The bikes are all at least 8 years old and brought used from the US, but they have a genuine camaraderie, and it extends to all bikers, regardless of club or type of bike.

Now for the drag racing. I didn't bring my camera so no picks and If you're not a car person, skip this.

The Porsche wet up against a 4th gen Camaro with a serious engine. It lit up the tires right off idle in the box. The Porsche won all three time with the driver raving the car to the rev limiter and hitting the launch button.

A Ricer type Hyundai Genesis Coupe raced a Ford Focus ST with Hyundai hooking up better but the Focus catching it at the top end.

A beat up old Beetle with a sweet sounding engine beat a Silverado with a worked on small block.

The 125 bikes would wheelie off the line, their rides in jeans and t shirts

A Ford Raptor beat a chipped Dodge Cummins

Nice worked late '80s VW Jetta beat a Mustang Gt

That's it, I had a great time, Bram went to sleep and missed it.

So our plan was to head for Linares, which was our first day's destination and we got there by 10am for a breakfast of bananas and peanuts.

I had been to the town of Matehuala back in 1987 when I drove my ex NYC yellow Cab to Nicaragua. I really liked the place, had great tacos in the center square so I figured it would make a good stop for the night and we would go on to this big Motorcycle Rally in Leon the next day.

out of Linares the hills started with clouds forming and indications of rain from the hurricane that was hitting the coast.



We were gaining altitude and there was a sign telling me that I should go in front so i passed Bram and headed into some fantastic West Virginia type twisties.

I was having a great time but couldn't find a pullout to get a picture of the road winding it's way through the mountains. I finally found one with a big drop off from the road (loos smaller in the pic) and when the front wheel dropped the bike leaned too far to the right and I couldn't hold it up. When Bram showed up 10 min later he thought it was quite funny.

After this the road got straight towards Matehuala and at a gas station we met these guys headed to the rally in Leon. We took this pic just before the Matehuala turnoff. They were from Reynosa, just across the border from McAllen, TX.



So we got to Matehuala and it was not as I remembered. It was crowded, under construction and there was no place to park and I decided we should get something to eat on the way out of town and continue 200km to San Luis Potosi. We found a great rotisserie chicken place and had a great meal and off we went. It was smooth sailing for the first 70 or so km then it became just sailing when the rains and wind from Hurricane Patricia came rolling in. We were running blind at 60 mph while trucks were going 30 in the right lane and idiots in cars were going 80 in the left. made passing a harrowing experience. We passed our friends from Raynosa while they were huddled under an overpass. They texted us the next day that they had gotten to Leon at midnight.

We pulled into San Luis at 8 pm and found our oasis in the wonderful Hostal Corazon de Xoconostle, managed by the fetching Euliana

If you are ever going to San Luis Potosi this is the Hostel to stay at. It's run by really cool people, its cheap and nice and they welcome motorcycle travelers. If you're not planning to come to San Luis, change your plans. You won't regret it.

The plan to go to the Rally in leon the next day was squashed by bike troubles. The universal joint at the front of Bram's driveshaft called it quits. Advers measure the dificulty of a repair by the number of s required, we started the job with this



That's 2 liters of Tequila mixed with grapefruit soda. Looks like we're gonna be here a while


A French guy had some Cuban rum, bram got some Captn Morgan, i had the above mentioned bottle and there were lots of s as me and Bram, Euliana, Alejandro, one of the owners, the French guy and a German girl talked and joke till midnight when the 2 English girls came out of their room to tell us to shut up .

Bram and the Euros went on a 5 hour ride to see some waterfalls in a rented Aveo and I'm here duing my duty to my avid readers. Heading out for a walk around the town. Happy to be stuck here.

I admire the choice of bike for your trip.
Suscribed!