Riding The 2021 Yamaha Ténéré 700 On The Northeast BDR

[Hugh Janus]

The 2021 Yamaha Ténéré 700 in Woodstock, Vermont. ( Rob Bandler /)

“They might as well call it the ‘Can’t Get There From Here Route,’” I joked with my friend Rob, after unfurling the Butler Map of the Northeast Backcountry Discovery Route (NEBDR) he’d just handed me.

“We should probably take it as a sign that the first road out of Hancock goes southwest—the exact opposite direction we want to go,” Rob pointed out.

From there, the NEBDR ends at the Canadian border in New Hampshire, following unpaved and back roads through six states and covering some 1,300 miles—or nearly three times the distance of Google’s most direct route.

Rob, a serial bike buyer and my frequent travel companion, decided to ride his KTM 790 Adventure and, as luck would have it, a 2021 Yamaha Ténéré 700 showed up for me a couple of days before our departure. Yamaha even outfitted it with parts from its accessory catalog: aluminum panniers and racks, centerstand, heavy-duty skid plate, radiator guard, tank protector, and engine guards. It was ready to go. And I was too.

Somewhere in New Hampshire. (Rob Bandler/)

Like many of us, I’d been stuck at home, daydreaming about a motorcycle trip. During the pandemic, I became a full-time stay-at-home dad to my 2-year-old son. I struggled seeing beyond the bounds of my constricting purview as my long-term aspirations became subjugated to the immediate needs of caring for my family. Dishes. Laundry. Putting together the same 12-piece puzzle with my son again and again. Time unmarked by accomplishment made one week indistinguishable from the next. A day seemed like a week; a week seemed like a day.

While I was losing my bearings in momentless time, my son was discovering a life of remembering. He’d wake up from his nap exclaiming about the occasion, months ago, when a moth landed on the wall by his crib. Or he’d become animated when recalling a dog he once saw at a park. If memory is a vehicle for moving forward, for me, the motorcycle is its most expedient purveyor.

It was the beginning of September and the morning was cool and gray. My wife was holding my son and they waved as we rode down the driveway.

I couldn’t be away for too long, so Rob and I decided to skip the first section of the BDR and beeline to Prattsville, New York, in section 2. By the time we got there, we’d been riding in the rain for a few hours. We stopped for coffee and breakfast and put more layers on beneath our Gore-Tex gear.

To begin the BDR proper, we headed north out of town and turned on an unpaved road bordering Schoharie Reservoir. Pavement feels numb, but you can feel gravel and dirt through the tires and handlebars. It’s mud you can’t feel until it’s too late. The Ténéré's smooth throttle response made it easy to find traction and drive forward up slippery hills and we were careful not to get drawn into the washouts forming on the sides of the roads. It’d be easier if the bike wasn’t fully loaded. I added a few clicks of preload in the rear to compensate, but I could still feel the weight when the bike moved off center at low speed.

Fog in section 2. (Rob Bandler/)

It stopped raining in the afternoon, and we ended section 2 in Copake Falls on the border of Massachusetts. We got a campsite at Taconic State Park, pitched our tents, and put the bikes on their centerstands to lube the chains. We started making dinner on our camp stoves when a large family pulled into the spot across from us. They piled out of their beat-up Explorer, leaving every door open, and turning up the car stereo.

“Looks like the campground DJ is here,” I said, as I took another swig of bourbon from my flask.

Rob’s eyes narrowed over his MRE. “At least it’s not raining. There’s nothing worse than packing up a wet tent.”

Two hours later, we’d had all we could take. Rob suggested we break camp. We carried our freestanding tents through the trees to a vacant spot and re-set up by the light of our motorcycles' headlights. Beneath the darkening skies we couldn’t see the gathering clouds.

Riding past a typical stone wall in New England. (Rob Bandler/)

I awoke to rain so loud I couldn’t hear my own voice over it. I picked up my phone, texted Rob “It’s raining,” just to pester him, and checked the forecast. There was a flood watch in effect for the next three hours. The soft pine needle duff was good to bed down on, but I imagined it slowly swallowing the Ténéré's kickstand and toppling the bike into Rob’s KTM. The rain’s insistence made me alert even though my body was tired. I rummaged for my copy of Hemingway’s The Nick Adams Stories and read “Big Two-Hearted River” until I dozed off.

I woke up cold in a humid tent, not knowing if I wanted to wear more layers or fewer. The bikes were still standing and the Ténéré's panniers kept my food and gear dry inside. We boiled water for coffee on our camp stoves and started getting our gear together.

“There’s nothing worse than packing up a wet tent,” Rob reiterated into his coffee cup.

Setting up camp. (Rob Bandler/)

By late morning, we were in the Berkshires and riding October Mountain. The trail was rocky and wet. Rob was riding lead, yelling unprintable exclamations through our Sena headsets as he approached deep mud pits and rock-strewn ruts.

“There should be a different word for puddles this big,” I mused through the headset. “'Puddle' sounds like ‘piddling,’ which these things definitely are not.”

Rob cursed again. “Must be another mud pit ahead,” I thought to myself.

Later in the day, we took the unpaved backroad up Mount Greylock, Massachusetts' tallest peak, before heading for Woodford State Park to camp for the night.

A gravel road in Vermont. (Rob Bandler/)

We crossed into Vermont and got on Route 8, a rolling paved road through the woods east of Bennington. The air was cool and fragrant and the gentle light of a coastal sky here in the mountains lent a melancholy feeling of dissociation. Wild apples were ripening in the hedgerows and the smell of the first dropped fruit fermenting unseen in the ditches mingled with the turn of the leaves. Vermont was blessed with autumn’s graces and we were here for the first blush.

The clouds glowed in the pale light as we set up camp in a quiet evening before walking a few hundred meters to Adams Reservoir. The park rangers dropped off firewood at our site and we talked and thought around the campfire.

Adams Reservoir at Woodford State Park. (Rob Bandler/)

The next day took us through unpaved roads through the Vermont countryside. Miles of gravel led past tidy homesteads and Colonial homes with views of the Green Mountains. We crossed the Vermont Long Trail, which I attempted to through-hike with my college buddy, Nick, one summer. I’d quit my first writing job and left my girlfriend (now wife) back in Austin, Texas, to start hiking. My knees gave out a third of the way up the trail and we had to stop. Nick and I walked through life-altering events together before that hike, but it turned out to be the last time we’d really know each other. Catching up is the most we can hope for now.

Grafton Village Store. (Rob Bandler/)

Rob and I made our way to Grafton for hot sandwiches at the Grafton Village Store. Polite kids on bicycles enjoyed ice cream cones on the front porch and we ate beneath the leafy canopy of the store’s tree-lined patio. I imagined what it would be like to live in an old brick Federal home in a town without a stoplight or gas station. Like other towns we’d passed in Vermont, Grafton seemed almost unnaturally quaint and preserved.

“Where’s all the vinyl siding?” I wondered aloud to Rob, considering our own rural region in upstate New York, which is clad in the stuff.

That night, we’d booked a room in Woodstock, Vermont. For all its brick houses, boutique shops, and overpriced restaurants it could be Georgetown or Arlington (if it weren’t for the covered bridge downtown): a little too bourgeoisie for two guys traveling by motorcycle. After checking in, the first thing I did was wash my undies in the bathroom sink and hang them on the Ténéré's handlebar to dry in the sunny parking lot.

Covered bridge in Woodstock, Vermont. (Rob Bandler/)

Tourism, evidently, is the town’s bread and butter, and this time of year there are normally 10 tour buses a day, all of which have been canceled during the pandemic. Still, people were out and about.

Rob and I walked around downtown, past the WASP-y couples in polo shirts and tennis skirts, and peered at restaurant menus with pricey dishes like “magret of duck” and “pan-seared barramundi.” We were about to give up before wandering into the Woodstock Inn. The place looked like the poshest place in town, but it turns out its tavern had the cheapest burger in town—for a princely $18. Still, cheaper than magret of anything.

Downtown Woodstock. (Rob Bandler/)

When we awoke the next morning, it was the Saturday of Labor Day weekend. Every campground we could find was booked solid. Rob found a chain hotel on the outskirts of Barre and got us a room straightaway.

Halfway through the morning’s ride, Rob received a voice message from the hotel saying it had canceled our reservation because the number of COVID cases in our home county had risen past 400 cases per million residents. We were no longer allowed to camp or lodge in Vermont without quarantining for 14 days. But it was a beautiful day and aboard the easy-to-ride Ténéré, the world seemed a felicitous place; it would surely offer us a scenic place to pitch a tent.

Braintree Hill Meetinghouse, a congregational church built in 1845. Braintree, Vermont. (Braintree Hill Meetinghouse/)

The Ténéré is such a friendly, intuitive motorcycle to ride that it can disappear if you just want to doddle around and enjoy the scenery. I didn’t have to think about being in the right gear, or nailing a shift, or trail-braking toward apexes. The bike seemed to carry me along, through the unwinding narrative of Vermont’s rolling hills and quaint villages. But it didn’t lead to any place to put up a tent.

Like a good motorcycle, a good story can make one feel too optimistic. For Nick Adams and Hemingway’s other “worthy men” the world conforms to their needs. All they have to do is know where to look for what they want. The good fisherman can upend a log and find hundreds of grasshoppers to use as bait, the expatriate can find a bar that pours good whiskey for cheap in any outskirt town. But I’m no Nick Adams, and in 2020, Hemingway’s world seemed as delusional as his worthy man.

In place of resourcefulness and grit, we’ve got smartphones and credit cards.

(Caption)-[2021-yamaha-tenere-700-nebdr-11]: Perfect riding weather.

We crossed into New Hampshire where travel restrictions were less strict than in Vermont and found a chain hotel in Lebanon, 40 minutes down the freeway. That night we had Domino’s delivered to our dimly lit room and watched an old MotoGP documentary. In the morning, we had the typical continental breakfast: danishes cold from the fridge and weak coffee.

We started section 6 on forest roads before hitting pavement crowded with weekend tourists. Stuck behind RVs, Subarus, and fair-weather riders looking at the scenery, we couldn’t ride like we were in a hurry. Which I guess we weren’t. By the time we reached Mount Washington, there was a huge line of cars waiting to drive up, so we turned around and rode into Gorham for fuel and a snack.

Note: heavy-duty skid plate, panniers, and engine guards from Yamaha’s accessory catalog. (Rob Bandler/)

“Let’s get out of here. There are too many people,” I said.

“This is the end of the section, so we can get a headstart on tomorrow’s route,” Rob suggested. “Maybe tonight we’ll have more luck finding a place to pitch a tent.”

By the time we crossed into Maine, we’d broken the back of the holiday leisure seekers. The route went through some OHV areas, and the only people we saw were riding quads. By sunset, we were getting tired and hadn’t seen a place to pitch a tent all day.

“What are the odds we’ll come across one now?” Rob wondered.

We pulled over and I looked at the map. “There’s camping at Mount Blue State Park,” I said, pointing at a green spot on the map just north of us. As luck would have it, it had space. And no one inquired about COVID numbers in our county.

Route planning. (Rob Bandler/)

The sky was dark under the trees by the time we finished setting up our tents and stowing our gear. We ate dinner by the light of our headlamps. After a long day, we were too tired to start a campfire, too tired even to talk about the music coming from the campsite next door.

When our neighbor’s playlist hit “I’m Coming Out,” I’d had enough. I went in my tent and grabbed my earplugs from my riding jacket pocket. I read some Hemingway propped on my elbows. My shoulders were sore and I could feel the cold ground through my sleeping pad. I knew it was going to be a long, cold night so I popped a Benadryl, hoping it would knock me out enough to prevent me from waking up shivering.

It didn’t work. I woke up early, cold, and with an antihistamine hangover. We packed our bikes as quickly as we could to get our bodies warm, while a light rain began to fall. I was still groggy by the time we started to ride. My dark visor fogged up inside and was covered with droplets on the outside. Pretty soon we were off road and I felt uneasy.

“Let’s take it easy this morning, Rob,” I said. “I’m not feeling it. Let’s finish this thing well.”

Maine. (Rob Bandler/)

Ten minutes later, I hit the ground. I couldn’t see through the fog of Benadryl or my foggy visor, and I tucked the front in some sand in a slow uphill corner. I jumped up to see the Ténéré's brake lever buried in sand and gravel. Rob and I heaved the bike up, our grunting comically doubled through the headsets. The bike was undamaged except for a broken mirror. I was thankful Yamaha installed engine guards on it.

By afternoon, the sun came out, and my Benadryl fog lifted. The final push to the Canadian border took us through gravel roads lined with trees and golden leaves falling like confetti. The tires bit into the surface and I felt confident again.

Roadside visor change in Maine. (Rob Bandler/)

The route was supposed to end at New Hampshire’s Rhubarb Pond but multiple trees had fallen over the trail and we couldn’t ride to the northernmost terminus. Still, we were close enough to the border that Verizon put me on a Canadian cell tower and charged me for the privilege. And just like that, the BDR ended and we turned for home.

For all its pleasures, a motorcycle trip doesn’t change anything back home. I returned to the myopia induced by being homebound, bored, and powerless; to the utter sameness of days; to the dimming hope of tomorrow.

The end of the road just south of the border. (Rob Bandler/)

But there’s no doing quite like a motorcycle trip. It’s moving and feeling and remembering. It’s setting up camp. It’s picking up a dropped motorcycle. The vividness of impressions places a rider so distinctly in time and place that no one trip resembles another, yet each one is connected like one bright autumn to the next. My 2020 will always have the Yamaha Ténéré 700 and the NEBDR. As the pungency of all its little details germinate in memory, the trip’s connections to the past are unfurled while trips yet unknown are transposed through its lens. It’s the syllogism of two-wheeled travel, the hope for tomorrow. A hope that, until this trip, I couldn’t see my way to.

But beyond that? Well, you can’t really get there from here.

Source

[Tym]

Why is New England so damn boring. I almost fell asleep trying to read that post.