I miss the earth so much I miss my wife,
It's lonely out in space,
On such a timeless flight,And I think it's gonna’ be a long, long time,
'Till touch down brings me round again to find,
I'm not the man they think I am at home,
Oh no, no, no, I'm a rocket man,
Rocket man, burning out his fuse up here alone.– Bernie Taupin
The life of a motorcycle journalist seems glamorous from the outside. A couple of Fridays back, I was flown to the Canary Islands to ride and report on the 2020 Triumph Rocket 3. When I got off the plane there was a person holding a sign that read ‘Triumph’; she drove me and a few other guys to a Ritz-Carlton hotel hanging off a cliff above the Atlantic. Xi Jenping – the Xi Jenping, as in the President of China – was one of the other guests.
The place was crawling with armed bodyguards, some dressed like tourists. A hotel employee said, “When Putin was here a few days ago, you would hardly have noticed.” Yeah. It was that kind of hotel.
The man at the front desk told me, “We’ve upgraded you from a room to a villa,” which translates from Spanish as, “President Xi needs the hotel, which is easier to secure, so we’ve moved the few shoulder-season guests into villas.”
Whatever. All I wanted was a bed, after traveling about 24 hours from Kansas City. In the good old days, OEMs flew us across the ocean in business class, but post-Great Recession, it’s steerage all the way. But there was nothing I could do to make my body sleep before midnight, local time, which meant I’d been awake about 36 straight hours.
Great, right? But if I’m rattling around alone, I’d prefer a ‘pension’ and a €150 per diem.
The ‘room’, of course, was ridiculous; the size of my house in Kansas City. People have spent months in space, in stations the size of the bathroom. There were seven large heated swimming pools in the complex. I had one almost all to myself right outside one of my two balconies. It would have been an amazing, beautiful, incredibly sexy place to be with a lover. But lying in there, desperately needing sleep that wouldn’t come, it was ineffably lonely and wretchedly excessive. If OEMs really understood motorcycle journalists, they’d put us up in far more modest places and quietly hand us a per diem. They’d save money and we’d make money.
Out of sympathy for the North Americans’ travel schedules Triumph at least had the good grace to fly us in with one clear day to acclimate. In the morning, I searched in the wrong direction for breakfast, and found a sprawling buffet serving mostly English families with small and vaguely terrifying children who – presented with a everything from Iberian hams and pickled herring, fresh fruit and every imaginable baked good, and eggs cooked nine ways from Sunday – asked harried servers, “Do you have Wheatabix?”
Don’t get me wrong; I love Wheatabix. But I’m always struck by the characteristic English way of speaking any foreign language, which is simply to speak English, but louder and with the careful enunciation of every syllable. DO YOU HAVE WHEAT-A-BIX?
No, Christo did not wrap the cliffs. That intensive, terraced farming of bananas.
After breakfast, I put on trunks under sweatpants, grabbed my swimming goggles, and descended a rough staircase hundreds of feet down a cliff, to a private cove. A few guests lounged on beach chairs, catching the sun when it poked through clouds.
I wondered about one couple speaking Russian. He reminded me of Jared Kushner; simultaneously slender and pasty, with that same callowness. She was a unique piece of eye candy with a rocking body almost completely covered in bold tattoos that resembled Haida artwork; an elaborately stylized pair of wings spread across her back in red and black, but I instinctively knew she was no angel.
Maybe he was a minor functionary from Putin’s clique, who decided to stay on for a couple of days’ vacation. Or, he could just as easily have been an accountant for some mobster, whose presence here so close to the Russian President’s stay was just a coincidence. All over Europe these days it seems that Russians are the new Americans.
I stripped down to my trunks and walked into the water. It felt cold enough for a moment that I questioned my motives, but I took the plunge and swam a quick few strokes to build up some heat. As cold-blooded as I am, even I got pretty comfortable, and began a long, slow exploration of the huge boulder reef that protected the cove.
A colony of sea urchins made me take care not to actually brush the rocks. I drifted into a school of tiny, iridescent fish while, below me, larger fish slipped into crevices as I approached.
Rudeness works, I guess. The guy in the background complained about the amount of Bailey’s he got, and the waiter returned with a very generous pour. (This tuna burger was delicious, BTW.)
I did that again, and when I got back out on the beach I realized that ominous looking storm clouds were now massing. I climbed the stairs, and walked up a significant hill to my villa for a luxurious shower. I called that a workout, and found a smaller and officially ‘no children’ restaurant for lunch. At the table across from me a grumpy German complained that the barman had provide him and his wife with skimpy pours of Bailey’s. Rudeness works; the waiter returned with more. I sat there and began writing my review of the Rocket 3 before I’d even laid eyes on it – putting the bike in context, and covering some of the new specs.
I saw it Sunday evening. The gaggle of rival motorcycle journalists predictably stalled out at the complimentary bar set up outside the conference room; I slipped past to spend a little time alone with the machine. A fellow Canadian, the hard-working Costa Mouzouris, also came in.
Costa gets some alone time with the new machine, before the press conference.
Then Triumph ushered in all the English-language journalists. A marketing guy delivered a preamble of multiply redundant superlatives, and assured us that there was no need to take notes because the entire Powerpoint presentation we were about to see was already on a protected website for us.
It wasn’t. Triumph had a few accessories laid out for us to look at, but none of the stuff I would really have liked to see – no pistons, valves, or crankshafts. After a dinner of hors d’oeuvres, or tapas if I’m being generous, I got one last glass of wine and carried it back to the Villa, where I added a few nuances to the review in progress.
I occupied about 15% of the bed for a long, long night in which sleep simply would not come. I gave up, and just lay there determined to rest my body whether my brain cooperated or not. It wasn’t the best way to prepare for a street launch.
Group 2 leaves the hotel for the start of the Canary Islands TT.
After an early breakfast I suited up, hiding a set of Bohn body armor under the jacket and jeans my client had sent me to wear for the photos. I was happy to learn I’d been assigned the mid-control ‘R’ version, and not enthused by Triumph’s suggestion we all swap bikes back and forth. I’ve never liked a motorcycle with forward controls and doubted I was about to start.
Triumph brings in ringers to lead street rides. They’re racers, mostly of the ‘real roads’ type. I was pleasantly surprised at the relatively sane pace set by my group’s leader, and told him so at the coffee stop. Unfortunately someone else complained that he was going too slow, so the rest of the day was the usual open roads madness, further complicated by the fact that the mountainous national park we rode across is a mecca for cyclists and hikers. I overheard one guy in another group say that he actually bumped an oncoming car’s wing mirror with his elbow. “That is not something I’d admit,” another one muttered.
At one point, a woman looked the wrong way for oncoming traffic and stepped directly into my path. Luckily, my spider sense tingled a moment before she moved, so I was already off the gas and pulling the brake lever as I aimed behind her, at the part of the gap that was growing as she crossed the road. I made eye contact with guy accompanying her, and willed him to stand his ground. I guess I gave them something to talk about, and they gave me something to talk about.
Lilya, from Alicante, seemed disappointed when I told her I was only borrowing this bike for the day.
The highlight of my day came at a dead stop, when a beautiful Spanish girl visiting from Alicante told me that she loved motorcycles and could she please just sit on it for a picture? It was the bike, not me, that caught her fancy of course but it was nice to at least feel seen.
Tenerife is so mountainous that in spite of its small size the weather’s often totally different on the other side. At the highest point on our ride we passed a huge observatory and then descended into clouds and cold mist.
In a first, for me, Triumph actually arranged to close a section of a public road for tracking photos. That took care of oncoming-traffic fears, but it was still the usual cluster-fuck of waiting your turn, interspersed with sketchy u-turns. Still photos were shot afterwards in the usual way, sharing the roads with traffic, and a lot more sketchy u-turns. As usual, I breathed a little sigh of relief when we got back to the hotel.
Triumph’s irrepressible Lance Jones seems happy to wait while dozens of journalists ride up and down a section of closed roads, for tracking photos and video.
I might be among the slowest of motorcycle journalists on the road, but I always like to be one of the first with an informed review on the web. So, I skipped the fancy post-ride dinner. I ordered a club sandwich from room service, opened the bottle of red in the minibar, and knocked out my ride impression.
I really, really wanted to sleep – because and in spite of the 0345 alarm I set in order to catch an 0415 airport shuttle on the way to a four-flight 26-hour travel day.
As usual, the fuckups began right at check-in, where the first agent told me that Triumph hadn’t paid for my luggage, and that I’d not only have to pay €60 if I wanted to bring my luggage home, I’d also have pick it up and recheck it in Madrid – something none of the other journalists were told, even though we were all flying on the same airline. I decided to abandon it in Madrid if making that swap threatened the rest of my flight schedule. I’d just play dumb when I finally got to Atlanta and beg Delta to find my bag and forward it.
Instead I ran about a mile through Barajas airport, dragging a 40-pound gear bag, checked it in with KLM and found myself with time to grab a coffee and check my phone messages. Or not. Catastrophic failure of iPhone 6, which on top of everything else would make coordinating a ride from the airport, or booking an Uber, that much harder.
The reality of these assignments is, if I’m not getting on or off a plane, or actually riding (a few hours ever few days if I’m lucky) my laptop’s open in front of me. It’s not as if I’m really experiencing some place new, just a new airport.
The history of the American motorcycle industry in general, and the specialist journalists who provide content about it, can be neatly divided into two eras: before and after the Great Recession. I think all motorcycle journalists have asked, “Why do I do this?” a little more frequently in the latter era.
It’s still usually a rhetorical question. Even in the post-2009 reality of cheap-and-shitty travel bookings, most OEM-sponsored junkets are kind of fun and all of us secretly love being on that list of people who might be flown off to some exotic (or at least, warm) locale to ride a new bike before anyone outside the factory has even seen it.
This time, I really questioned my ‘career’ choices. In the days leading up to the trip I thought that a change of scenery would do me some good. But it didn’t, and by the time I got home, at midnight on Tuesday, I’d spent 26 hours in airplanes and airports and had not copped more than a few minutes of REM-at-best sleep since Sunday morning in the Canaries. I was well into the kind of sleep deprivation usually reserved for CIA black sites.
Why do I do it? Maybe the best answer now is, I can’t stop; I can’t replace it with anything that pays any better. Professional journalism’s days are numbered anyway. I’ll ride this job out as long as I can, but even at my age, I imagine the decision to hang it up will be made for me.
Of course it still seemed glamorous to my friends here. “What was it like?” they all wanted to know over the next few days. Only some of them cared about the latest Rocket 3, and since my review was posted before I even got home, they already knew. Most were curious about the trip, and the place itself. I had no real answer except, “The ocean was nice.”
As far as the trip went, the highlight for me was the swim. Ironically, it was the only time I’d really felt in my element for days but I was, quite literally, out of my element. Now, back home, I’m again at sea. Again, I’m swimming but here, I can’t see the shore, and can’t see the bottom.