TRAVEL BUG
If there was a road sign signalling the occasion, I missed it. Which was surprising and not both at the same time. Surprising because crossing the Victorian border into New South Wales was something I’d been looking forward to since the border officially closed on 8 July last year for the first time in 100 years. But equalling unsurprising too, because the road I’m riding was one I’d been dreaming of during nearly every one of Melbourne’s 120 days of strict, stage-four lockdown, and it’s delightfully distracting.
The bike I’m aboard is BMW’s F 900 XR, which is also significant in that it was the last motorcycle I rode before the pandemic got a foothold in this country and changed our lives for what now feels like forever. It was about this time last year that I was bombing around on it at the world launch in a country which, unbeknownst to me, would be using its ice-skating rinks as morgues just one month later as it scrambled to deal with the tragic consequences of the coronavirus.
At the time there were lots of unanswered questions relating to the specification the all-new bike would be offered to Australian buyers in and for how much. And while a
