
Air Tahiti July Special - 3 Free Nghts in Tahiti, from US$1150pp
New Zealand Guided and Self Guided Motorcycle Tours - GoTourNZ.com
Check out these great air fare deals shown on TripAdvisor. London to Auckland from as low as £892. Get your mouse clicking and get down here. :-)
http://flights.tripadvisor.co.uk/en_GB/mobile/cal?travelers=1&airport0=LHR&airport1=AKL&fare=892&fareCurrency=GBP&date0=20140201
Keep the rubber side down..
All the best,
John
http://flights.tripadvisor.co.uk/en_GB/mobile/cal?travelers=1&airport0=LHR&airport1=AKL&date0=20121101
Congratulations to Cindy Ponce and Natalie Canfield.
Cyndy and Natalie each attended our seminars on touring new Zealand with GoTourNZ at the Bloomsburg rally, and won a free 10 day guided tour with us.
If you were there and didn't win this time, you'll have another two chances at Missouri..
See you there. :-)
Safe riding,
John.
GoTourNZ.com - Adventure New Zealand Motorcycle Tours
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Read below for incredible bargain fares:
Log on to Air New Zealand's US website at www.airnewzealand.com (make sure you choose the US site in the drop down country selector) and on the home page you'll see specials showing from US$799 return.
With a friend I just chose flights that would connect with our November Best of The Best Tour (commencing Oct 30). Departure city was Seattle, and we chose Nelson as the NZ destination. A return fare of U$1012 including taxes was returned. I think you'll agree that's a bargain in anyone's terms.
Get your skates on. We have places available on all our Nov and Dec tours.
Good luck!
John Fitzwater
We've just finished delivering our final seminar and the 2009 BMWMoA Rally at the Appalachian Fairgrounds in Gray, Tennessee. Claudia's name was the 2nd drawn out of the box (the first name wasn't present).
Claudia and husband Richard are over the moon at their win, and are now making plans to join us soon. Congratulations guys!
Thanks to all those people who visited us at our booth, attended our seminars, and to our many friends who just dropped in to say Hi. .
Special thanks to Jill Martin, Gray and Alison Buckley, Roy Blakney, Peter Williams, Brian Rathjen and Shira Kamil (my shout next dinner guys!)
And of course to the BMWMoA Rally organisers and volunteers who made the event possible.
Thanks all. A great event.
Safe riding
John
Congratulations to Al and Barbara Horton.
Al and Barb have won a free 10 day guided tour of New Zealand with us. Their names were drawn from those who attended our Go Tour New Zealand seminar at the BMWMoA Rally in Johnson City, Tennessee.
Another lucky couple will have a chance to win at our 2nd seminar tomorrow (Saturday 18 July, 2009) at 10am.
This is turning out to be one of the biggest MoA rallies ever. A great event and a credit to all involved in organising it.
Safe riding all,
John
GoTourNZ.com
Al Kinney, a friend and client who toured with us a few years back just sent us this classic piece from Hunter Thompson.
Thanks Al.... Now, I'm going out for a ride.... :-)
Cheers,
John
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You've probably all seen this before, but it's been too long since I have, so I send it along to brighten your day…
Al Kinney
Song of the Sausage Creature
by Hunter S. Thompson
There are some things nobody needs in this world, and a bright-red, hunch-back, warp-speed 900cc cafe racer is one of them - but I want one anyway, and on some days I actually believe I need one. That is why they are dangerous.
Everybody has fast motorcycles these days. Some people go 150 miles an hour on two-lane blacktop roads, but not often. There are too many oncoming trucks and too many radar cops and too many stupid animals in the way. You have to be a little crazy to ride these super-torque high-speed crotch rockets anywhere except a racetrack - and even there, they will scare the whimpering **** out of you... There is, after all, not a pig's eye worth of difference between going head-on into a Peterbilt or sideways into the bleachers. On some days you get what you want, and on others, you get what you need.
When Cycle World called me to ask if I would road-test the new Harley Road King, I got uppity and said I'd rather have a Ducati superbike. It seemed like a chic decision at the time, and my friends on the superbike circuit got very excited. "Hot damn," they said. "We will take it to the track and blow the bastards away."
"Balls," I said. "Never mind the track. The track is for punks. We are Road People. We are Cafe Racers."
The Cafe Racer is a different breed, and we have our own situations. Pure speed in sixth gear on a 5000-foot straightaway is one thing, but pure speed in third gear on a gravel-strewn downhill ess-turn is quite another.
But we like it. A thoroughbred Cafe Racer will ride all night through a fog storm in freeway traffic to put himself into what somebody told him was the ugliest and tightest decreasing-radius turn since Genghis Khan invented the corkscrew.
. I still feel a shudder in my spine every time I see a picture of a Vincent Black Shadow, or when I walk into a public restroom and hear crippled men whispering about the terrifying Kawasaki Triple... I have visions of compound femur-fractures and large black men in white hospital suits holding me down on a gurney while a nurse called "Bess" sews the flaps of my scalp together with a stitching drill.
The motorcycle business was the last straw. It had to be the work of my enemies, or people who wanted to hurt me. It was the vilest kind of bait, and they knew I would go for it.
Of course. You want to cripple the bastard? Send him a 130-mph cafe-racer. And include some license plates, he'll think it's a streetbike. He's queer for anything fast.
Which is true. I have been a connoisseur of fast motorcycles all my life. I bought a brand-new 650 BSA Lightning when it was billed as "the fastest motorcycle ever tested by Hot Rod magazine." I have ridden a 500-pound Vincent through traffic on the Ventura Freeway with burning oil on my legs and run the Kawa 750 Triple through Beverly Hills at night with a head full of acid... I have ridden with Sonny Barger and smoked weed in biker bars with Jack Nicholson, Grace Slick, Ron Zigler and my infamous old friend, Ken Kesey, a legendary Cafe Racer.
Some people will tell you that slow is good - and it may be, on some days - but I am here to tell you that fast is better. I've always believed this, in spite of the trouble it's caused me. Being shot out of a cannon will always be better than being squeezed out of a tube. That is why God made fast motorcycles, Bubba....
Which we had - no doubt about that. The Ducati people in New Jersey had opted, for some reasons of their own, to send me the 900ss-sp for testing - rather than their 916 crazy-fast, state-of-the-art superbike track-racer. It was far too fast, they said - and prohibitively expensive - to farm out for testing to a gang of half-mad Colorado cowboys who think they're world-class Cafe Racers.
The Ducati 900 is a finely engineered machine. My neighbors called it beautiful and admired its racing lines. The nasty little bugger looked like it was going 90 miles an hour when it was standing still in my garage.
I was hunched over the tank like a person diving into a pool that got emptied yesterday. Whacko! Bashed on the concrete bottom, flesh ripped off, a Sausage Creature with no teeth, ****ed-up for the rest of its life.
We all love Torque, and some of us have taken it straight over the high side from time to time - and there is always Pain in that... But there is also Fun, the deadly element, and Fun is what you get when you screw this monster on. BOOM! Instant take-off, no screeching or squawking around like a fool with your teeth clamping down on our tongue and your mind completely empty of everything but fear.
No. This bugger digs right in and shoots you straight down the pipe, for good or ill.
On my first take-off, I hit second gear and went through the speed limit on a two-lane blacktop highway full of ranch traffic. By the time I went up to third, I was going 75 and the tach was barely above 4000 rpm....
And that's when it got its second wind. From 4000 to 6000 in third will take you from 75 mph to 95 in two seconds - and after that, Bubba, you still have fourth, fifth, and sixth. Ho, ho.
I never got to sixth gear, and I didn't get deep into fifth. This is a shameful admission for a full-bore Cafe Racer, but let me tell you something, old sport: This motorcycle is simply too goddamn fast to ride at speed in any kind of normal road traffic unless you're ready to go straight down the centerline with your nuts on fire and a silent scream in your throat.
When aimed in the right direction at high speed, though, it has unnatural capabilities. This I unwittingly discovered as I made my approach to a sharp turn across some railroad tracks, saw that I was going way too fast and that my only chance was to veer right and screw it on totally, in a desperate attempt to leapfrog the curve by going airborne.
It was a bold and reckless move, but it was necessary. And it worked: I felt like Evel Knievel as I soared across the tracks with the rain in my eyes and my jaws clamped together in fear. I tried to spit down on the tracks as I passed them, but my mouth was too dry... I landed hard on the edge of the road and lost my grip for a moment as the Ducati began fishtailing crazily into oncoming traffic. For two or three seconds I came face to face with the Sausage Creature....
But somehow the brute straightened out. I passed a schoolbus on the right and got the bike under control long enough to gear down and pull off into an abandoned gravel driveway where I stopped and turned off the engine. My hands had seized up like claws and the rest of my body was numb. I felt nauseous and I cried for my mama, but nobody heard, then I went into a trance for 30 or 40 seconds until I was finally able to light a cigarette and calm down enough to ride home. I was too hysterical to shift gears, so I went the whole way in first at 40 miles an hour.
Whoops! What am I saying? Tall stories, ho, ho... We are motorcycle people; we walk tall and we laugh at whatever's funny. We **** on the chests of the Weird....
But when we ride very fast motorcycles, we ride with immaculate sanity. We might abuse a substance here and there, but only when it's right. The final measure of any rider's skill is the inverse ratio of his preferred Traveling Speed to the number of bad scars on his body. It is that simple: If you ride fast and crash, you are a bad rider. And if you are a bad rider, you should not ride motorcycles.
The emergence of the superbike has heightened this equation drastically. Motorcycle technology has made such a great leap forward. Take the Ducati. You want optimum cruising speed on this bugger? Try 90mph in fifth at 5500 rpm - and just then, you see a bull moose in the middle of the road. WHACKO. Meet the Sausage Creature.
Or maybe not: The Ducati 900 is so finely engineered and balanced and torqued that you *can* do 90 mph in fifth through a 35-mph zone and get away with it. The bike is not just fast - it is *extremely* quick and responsive, and it *will* do amazing things... It is like riding a Vincent Black Shadow, which would outrun an F-86 jet fighter on the take-off runway, but at the end, the F-86 would go airborne and the Vincent would not, and there was no point in trying to turn it. WHAMO! The Sausage Creature strikes again.
There is a fundamental difference, however, between the old Vincents and the new breed of superbikes. If you rode the Black Shadow at top speed for any length of time, you would almost certainly die. That is why there are not many life members of the Vincent Black Shadow Society. The Vincent was like a bullet that went straight; the Ducati is like the magic bullet in Dallas that went sideways and hit JFK and the Governor of Texas at the same time.
It was impossible. But so was my terrifying sideways leap across the railroad tracks on the 900sp. The bike did it easily with the grace of a fleeing tomcat. The landing was so easy I remember thinking, goddamnit, if I had screwed it on a little more I could have gone a lot farther.
Maybe this is the new Cafe Racer macho. My bike is so much faster than yours that I dare you to ride it, you lame little turd. Do you have the balls to ride this BOTTOMLESS PIT OF TORQUE?
That is the attitude of the new-age superbike freak, and I am one of them. On some days they are about the most fun you can have with your clothes on. The Vincent just killed you a lot faster than a superbike will. A fool couldn't ride the Vincent Black Shadow more than once, but a fool can ride a Ducati 900 many times, and it will always be a bloodcurdling kind of fun. That is the Curse of Speed which has plagued me all my life. I am a slave to it. On my tombstone they will carve, "IT NEVER GOT FAST ENOUGH FOR ME."
Cheers,
John
The guys at our sister company Thunderbike Powersports (www.thunderbike.co.nz) recommended I take a out a Moto Morini Corsaro 1200 demonstrator last week. I love big lusty Italian V twins so it was an easy sell. With Graeme from Thunderbike on Tbike's KTM Superduke demo, and friend Shane on his O6 Triumph Sprint 1050 with set off for a quick fang through the Moutere Hills, to the West of Nelson. We're enjoying a fantastic spell of weather this November, and the weather was perfect.
The Corsaro was a delightful surprise - booming exhaust note, smooth, relentless "fat" power everywhere, great handling, fab brakes, compliant yet firm suspension, great riding position. It was perfect for the twisting hilly backroads surrounding Nelson.
In short, I want one - and I have ridden most offerings from other manufacturers in this naked sports bike genre.
If you get a chance to ride one a Corsaro, grab it with both hands. If you're contemplating buying a naked big bore scratcher, make sure you test ride one of these before parting with your cash.
Siezure later,
John.
The Burt Munro Memorial weekend continues with a feast of racing for the motorcycle enthusiasts, a day of racing at Wyndham, with Super Motard, BEARS , pre '62 , pre '72 and girder fork equipped motorcycles.
The competition was fierce and the large crowd enthused by the array of spectacular machinery- not to be missed!
Make sure you book for next November now - space is limited.
Cheers from Wyndham, Southland
Ian
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The Burt Munro ( World's Fastest Indian Tour) has been a huge success here in Invercargill, home of Burt Munro and New Zealand's Southern most city.
It has been an amazing weekend so far, with circuit racing , street racing beach racing and speedway also.
We have had a really nostalgic few days, visitng Burts burial place and also the museum. We have seen a great display from the filmset, including the car and the Burts "shed"- also the replica bikes for the movie as well as the real record holding bike as well.
We have managed even to talk with some of the actors from the movie. Invercargill has been a great host town for this gala weekend that has been an overwhelming success and there are bikers everywhere.
Be sure not to miss this event next November as it is just going to get better and better.
Cheers, from Invercargill.
Ian
Nov 6, 2007: Wanaka to Queenstown
We woke to an absolute cracker of a day - the sky was almost cloudless.
For those that were into it, we went for a good physical workout with a run up Mt Iron on the outskirts of Wanaka. This peak overlooks Wanaka township and offers spectacular 360 deg views of Wanaka, the Cardrona Valley, and the Alps.
After a hearty breakfast at the Lodge we rode to the Warbirds museum at the airport for a view of the machines of yesteryear. Then it was on the bikes for the great ride up the Cardrona Valley and over the Crown Range to Queenstown. The views are simply breathtaking - this is a "must do" road for any motorcyclist.