(I will have to find some photos and scan them for this page, they are all pre-digital-era. Meanwhile, I found this on the 'net, which is not the right color and has some owner mods like the rubber gaiters on the forks.)

My friend Rick had bought an R65 in 1979. He said it was the kind of bike he had been looking for. I was surprised to see how much it seemed to have in common with the VW Beetle I owned. An air cooled boxer motor. Simple maintenance. The R65 had much cleaner lines.

By 1981, I had gotten more interested in motorcycling. I was 23, and making pretty good money as a computer programmer. I had sold the Bug off and bought a new car. I was more interested in bikes, though I really hadn't done any research about them. So, I decided to visit the dealer that Rick had bought his bike from.

West Valley Cycle Sales occupied a small, freestanding building on Saticoy St., a busy four lane road in LA's San Fernando Valley. The showroom was a small area with a few bikes on display. The woman at the counter running the store showed me the single current model R65 she had in stock. I asked a bunch of dumb questions — I was kind of excited to think I might own this bike.

It took a little while, but I did buy the bike. While I had enjoyed borrowing Rick's other bikes once in a while, when I came to pick up the R65, I was very eager to go riding. A lot of riding. I picked it up on a Tuesday afternoon. Laurie, the shop owner, was there. Her mother, Ruth, got me to fill out the paperwork. Her father Jay gave me some information about riding and maintaining the bike. I still recall him telling me that the shiny chrome pipes would turn blue, it was normal. There was a 600 mile service that needed to be done, and there were some restrictions on RPMs up until then.

I immediately took off and started riding it around all of the little mountain roads in the Santa Monica mountains, roads I had learned while driving over the hill to UCLA and Hollywood or Downtown and then commuting into Santa Monica. On Thursday I called Laurie and asked her if she could do the service soon, I was going to pass 600 miles pretty quickly. I brought it in on Saturday with closer to 700 miles on it.

Through the shop, I went on their monthly Sunday rides. Then I learned about the NorCal club's '49er Rally. I remember riding home the first time: the rally was being held in Mariposa in those days, and the group from the shop rode through Yosemite and over Tioga Pass to US-395, which we took south. It was hot out there. 395 is not a particularly interesting road, mostly straight, with big views to the Sierra Nevada on the right and the White Mountains on the left. In those days, the road was concrete. We came into a section with big black lines all over the road. I had never paid any attention to them before, but they got my attention then — the bike felt like it was starting to slide, which is not a good feeling at 75mph! Woke me right up.

I commuted on the R65, and went for rides and campouts with the TRW Motorcycle Club, even though I didn't work at TRW. I remember going to a campout with them in the Sierra, I think in Sequoia National Park. One of the guys led a ride through some very nice roads. He was going pretty quickly, and starting to leave a lot of the others behind. When he got to a junction and had to wait, I was pretty much right behind him. He told me that he hadn't expected that I would be second, on the little BMW. I guess that was my whole experience with the R65, I just didn't know I wasn't supposed to be able to do those things with it.

Through the shop I met another guy with an R65. Randy's R65 was the real blue color you see above. We got to be good friends and still are. I was going to school at night at CSUN and it turned out he was going there, too, but during the day.

I joined the BMW MOA. There was an article about the well known, annoying buzz in the R65 around 4000 RPM and how to cure it. I was amazed — I had never been bothered by it, or even really noticed it. In the magazine I discovered there were a lot of accessories available for the R65. A German firm named Pichler made a full coverage fairing for it that looked very stylish, but it was very expensive, and then it had to be painted.

One thing that I did think was a problem with the R65 was the seat. It got pretty uncomfortable after just a few hours of riding. Rather than buy a fairing, I rode up to Atascadero and had a custom seat made for it, a Mayer Day Long. It wasn't the most stylish thing, but it sure felt good.

I did eventually buy a plexiglass windscreen for the bike. It came and I spent a couple hours getting it mounted on the bike, just so. I had pretty much decided it was right and turned around from the bike to my workbench in the garage, and I knocked a bottle over. I jumped back to avoid the liquid and fell into the bike — knocking it off the centerstand and over onto its right side. Heather came out and asked what had happened. I couldn't believe it, the brand new screen was broken vertically, about a third of the way over. I was very pissed.

One day I ran into Randy at the shop. He had had the tiny fairing that BMW sold on his bike, but I noticed he had taken it off. He told me that it didn't do anything and he was thinking of selling it. He was probably right, it was really more of a decoration than anything functional. He said I could try it out and see what I thought of it. So, we rode over to his mom's place.

She lived on a residential side street in Encino. As we were coming slowly down the street, a car, facing out, pulled out of a driveway directly into Randy's way. The woman driving it suddenly realized that Randy was there and stopped abruptly. Randy rode around her and then I did the same. I guess she didn't expect two motorcycles, and she drove right into me.

Her bumper rode up over the crash bar on the right side and trapped the bike. It never fell over. Before she stopped, she managed to tap my ankle. I was wearing good boots, but it still chipped the bone there. Randy drove me over to the nearby emergency room, where they x-rayed my foot and then set a cast. Randy had called Heather, who was home, in bed, sick. She was not very happy to hear about it and less happy to have to get out of bed, get dressed and come get me. She arrived just as the nurse was putting on the cast.

It was a temporary kind of cast, made from gauze bandage impregnated with plaster. The nurse soaked it and then wrapped my foot, my ankle and part way up my calf. She used hot water to activate the bandage, and it turns out that the reaction of wetting plaster is exothermic. My poor leg got steamed inside that cast.

Unfortunately, the woman's car, which had seemed not to do any real damage to the bike (thanks to my leg protecting it!), had after all twisted the frame. A bike, even a BMW, with 56,000 miles on it, just doesn't have much value left and the woman's insurance company totalled it.