Page 1 Page 2 Page 3 Page 4 Page 5 Page 6 Page 7 Page 8 Page 9 Page 10 Page 11 Page 12 Page 13 Page 14 Page 15 Page 16 Page 17 Page 18 Page 19 Page 20 Page 21 Page 22 Page 23 Page 24 Page 25 Page 26 Page 27 Page 28 Page 29 Page 30 Page 31 Page 32 Page 33 Page 34 Page 35 Page 36 Page 37 Page 38 Page 39 Page 40 Page 41 Page 42 Page 43 Page 44 Page 45 Page 46 Page 47 Page 48 Page 49 Page 50 Page 51 Page 52 Page 53 Page 54 Page 55 Page 56 Page 57 Page 58 Page 59 Page 60 Page 61 Page 62 Page 63 Page 64 Page 65 Page 66 Page 67 Page 68 Page 69 Page 70 Page 71 Page 72 Page 73 Page 74 Page 75 Page 76 Page 77 Page 78 Page 79 Page 80 Page 81 Page 82 Page 83 Page 84 IRON BUTT MAGAZINE | Winter 2014 TrueLies CatchingTheLong-DistanceBug We want to hear from you. Why are you a long distance rider? Send an essay to editor@ ironbutt.com about why you are involved in long distance riding. Please try not to exceed words. If selected, we will run your story in the True Lies column. Robert Torter It started with martinis in . In December, I was invited to a luncheon hosted by Ernst & Young, which was auditing a large mining company. The Chief Executive Officer, Max, had declined earlier invitations, but much to the dismay of the auditors, accepted this one. Max was a most unusual char- acter. I had never met Max before and we were seated at one end of the table by ourselves. We began drinking martinis and at the end of the function, my new best friend, Max, stood up, somewhat unsteady on his feet, and announced that he and I were going to ride our motorcy- cles to Seattle,Washington.That was the beginning of my long-distance riding addiction. We rode to Seattle one year, Anchorage, Alaska the next, and Lab- rador, Canada as our final ride together. Max, who was close to then, retired from motorcycling adventures, so my long-distance riding was temporarily put on pause. Along came my second intoxicating influence — my wife Sylvie. We had moved from South Florida, where riding can be dangerous to your health, to Montana where riding is insanely good. We owned a neglected BMW RGS Paris Dakar and decided to take a mile beautiful loop through Yellowstone, Wyoming, Arco, Idaho, Sun Valley, Idaho, and along the Salmon River to Wisdom, Bozeman and Big Sky, Mon- tana. Sylvie had never ridden miles and despite one mechanical problem after another, we had a fabulous time. My third and final intoxicator was making the mistake of reading Against the Wind by Ron Ayres. It was the final blow. Out went the GS/PD and in came a new BMW RGSA. We left South Florida and rode to Las Vegas, Nevada primarily on two lane roads — in Janu- ary! We didn’t have any heated gear or riding pants, but at least we wore top of the line Lucchese cowboy boots. Despite freezing half to death, we made it to Las Vegas and, once again, had a fabu- lous time. In fact, we left the GSA in Las Vegas and returned for several rides during the winter. We really caught the bug. Like our good friend and respected Iron Butt rider, Rob Nye, Sylvie and I do not collect certificates for the sake of col- lecting them. But we love rallying since it fills our new addiction.We have ridden rallies, ranging from -hour events to the -day Iron Butt Rally. The IBRs were fun rides and we finished twice, despite spending an average of five hours a night in hotels. For instance, I believe we were the only ones to bag the Men- docino lighthouse bonus in the rally. Did it make sense? Hell no, but we simply had to see it. We proved that it is possible to have fun in a highly competi- tive event like the IBR and still enjoy the ride. Since we are no longer competing, we decided to give something back to the sport that has given us so much plea- sure by hosting our own long- distance event — the Big Sky Rally. Next year will be our third and multi-IBR podium finisher, Jeff Earls, is the chief architect of the rally. It will be a -hour event and the theme is “Workin’ on the Rail- road.” Although we don’t com- pete any longer, we still have the Long-Distance Bug. This summer we rode our Harley- Davidson CVO Breakout for almost , miles. It’s funny how our long-distance riding has come full circle from a bare bones RGS to the space capsule KGT and now back to an unfaired HD Breakout.We still use the KGT. But on the naked Breakout, it seems we ride fewer miles and get the same pleasure we would get by riding twice as many miles on the KGT. We’ve also ridden in South America and South Africa with Ayres Adven- tures. It was in South Africa that Mike Kneebone gave us our nickname — the V Twins. We wore silver riding gear and it seems that whenever I leaned left, Sylvie leaned right, giving us the appear- ance from behind of a V Twin motor. How do I explain the addiction? For me it is a combination of two things. First, riding is a beautiful thing to do. It has many similarities to our other addi- tion, which is downhill skiing. Both activities can be described as having ele- ments of yin and yang. Both have appar-