Throughout 2025, I ran a series of columns in BMW Owners News detailing my life riding a 1976 R 90/6, one of BMW’s venerable “Airhead” generation of motorcycles. The R 90/6 is something of an icon, though perhaps not so much as its sportier brother, the R 90 S. The non-S version is what we would call a “standard” – if it was a Honda, it would have been a “Universal Japanese Motorcycle,” or UJM. These bikes were pretty much all you could get for street riding in the early to mid 1970s, and they were expected to do anything and everything the rider asked of them.
What I asked of the R 90/6 was to put me back in touch with why I loved riding motorcycles so much in my late teens through late 20s. Somewhere along my journey as a motorcyclist, I’d lost track of why I loved riding and in the 2020s, found it to be something of a chore—something I felt I had to do instead of something I did because I loved doing it. I wanted to recapture the feeling of loving to ride again, and for whatever reason, I decided that riding a vintage bike would be the trick.
I bought the bike from my friend Jon, who lived near Phoenix, Arizona, at the time. He’d owned the bike for several years, but as his interests shifted from camping from him motorcycle to camping with his girlfriend out of his vintage Land Rover, the bike got sidelined and ended up sitting in his storage space for a couple of years. He asked me to buy the bike and of course I did—in May 2023. I didn’t know at the time it would be a year and a half before I could ride the bike safely, and you’ll find out along with me in this series of blog posts why that happened and more.
To ensure I rode only this vintage motorcycle, I put my 2015 R 1200 GS into long-term storage, transferred the plate to this bike and took it off my insurance. I also owned a 2019 Indian FTR1200S, but had already decided to sell it, as my knees could no longer handle the aggressive riding position.
The basic format of what’s going on here is me sharing my diary entries with the world and supplementing those with my columns in the magazine and other materials as we go along. Every time I rode the bike, I wrote an entry in my notebook about miles ridden, fuel consumed, places gone, meals eaten and the like. I’m going to publish those diary entries here, one year to the day after I made them. Some names and specific details may be altered to avoid embarrassing myself or others, but overall what you’ll see here is nearly word-for-word what I wrote as I rode the bike. When warranted, I’ll update the entry with a One Year Later comment to hopefully offer some insight as I gain distance from the ups and downs of what it was like to rely on a 50-year-old motorcycle on a daily basis.
I hope you enjoy the process, both from the tree view and from the forest view.
