Tell Us About Your Ride: Different strokes for different blokes

WEIRS BEACH — Lakeside Avenue displays the spectrum of motorcycles, especially this week, and sometimes the range of styles can be present within the same group of riders. That’s the case with Lon Barrett and Jim Johnson, friends who live in Worcester, Massachusetts and have been riding together for several years.

Barrett, a software engineer, was at Weirs Beach on Thursday with a 2007 BMW R1200RT. He has put 10,000 miles on it over the three years that he has owned it.

“I got it because it was a good touring bike, and the dream was to ride it across the country,” Barrett said.

The Bavarian is a far cry from the first bike Barrett got – an “old Honda” that a friend gave him as a wedding gift 22 years ago. Though it wasn’t a particularly desirable motorcycle, he said, “It was still a bike, and it got me into riding.”

Barrett’s regular life got in the way of his motorcycle riding for a stretch of time, but when he got back into it, he found her preferred bikes with larger displacement.

“I tend to like big twins,” Barrett said. Why? “Torque.”

This year was Barrett’s 10th time at Laconia Motorcycle Week, and he rode up with Johnson, someone he’s ridden many miles with over the past five or six years.

Johnson’s ride started out as a 1999 Yamaha V Star, though it doesn’t bear much resemblance to its original form. Four years ago, as winter approached, Johnson took his motorcycle into his basement and got to work.

“I took a sawzall to it. I took away all the parts I didn’t want any more,” said Johnson, a mortgage loan officer. Just about every inch of the bike has been altered to fit his own vision. Johnson even took apart the wheels so he could powder coat them. The hardest part, it turned out, was putting turn indicators on the ends of his custom handlebars.

Johnson didn’t want the wiring for the blinkers to be visible, which meant that he had to feed the wires through the handlebars. Easier said than done, it turned out. Johnson resorted to sewing thread, tying one end of the thread to the wire, stuffing the rest of the thread into the handlebars, and then using a vacuum cleaner to suck the thread out the other end of the tubes. Then he pulled the wires through.

“That was an astonishing pain in the ass,” Johnson said. Looking at his bike on Lakeside Avenue on Thursday, though, dressed up in a fresh coat of matte, rust-colored paint, Johnson said the effort was worthwhile.

“This ended up exactly how I wanted it,” he said.

As different as their rides are, they both share a favorite road. As much as they enjoy the riding in New Hampshire, their top choice is found one state away.

“Route 100 in Vermont – you can take it up to the Canadian border; it’s just you and the cows,” Johnson said. “Just hundreds of miles of beautiful scenery.”