A Gear Arsenal, a budget, and a Bat Cave

If you live somewhere with seasonally changing weather, one big secret about being able to ride more often is the need for what amounts to a large arsenal of different types and sizes of riding gear, all kept wherever it’s easiest to get to and use. For example, and I’m embarrassed to admit this, for my northern Minnesota year-round local riding I employ two different Aerostich R-3 ‘light’ Tactical one-piece suits. 

On close inspection, these suits look identical, but they’re actually two completely different sizes – one is slightly larger and has been fit-altered to be comfortable over a sweater and down puffy, and the other is a size smaller and provides a standard (and closer) fit for the rest of the year. Each R-3 is now about ten years old. The bigger one gets worn daily during about five months of wintery riding and the other one is used the other seven. The luxury of having two identical-appearing Aerostich suits is like cheating and until now they were my secret to more year-around saddle time.

The madness doesn’t stop there. For my out-of-town traveling during the ‘riding season’ I’ll wear either a Darien jacket or a Transit leather jacket over a pair of AD-1 light pants. Both of these ensembles have now seen years of wear. For me, a two-piece jacket + pants work best for all-day and day-after-day road trips, and the one-piece suits are faster and easier for commuting and running errands around town. Many long-time riders have come to this same conclusion: A diverse collection of gear is a necessity for dealing with variable weather and different riding applications.  For most riders making such large investments takes a while, and like all longer-term expenses, is harder to justify. This means it’s important to choose gear that really lasts, is long-term serviceable and repairable, and will not reflect only the moto-fashion-of-the-moment.  

From day one my riding gear has always been more equipment than fashion, devil take the hindmost. Soon after I started riding as a 16-year-old high school kid I’d purchased an actual ‘motorcycle jacket’, a pair of ‘motorcycle gloves’, a helmet, and a pair of nice-quality boots (specifically a black Belstaff Trialsmaster waxed cotton jacket, a pair of red HI Point MX gloves, an international orange Bell TX500 helmet and a pair of reddish-brown lace-up Red Wing Irish Setter hunting boots). With all this gear I considered myself an extremely well-equipped young rider. 

Fifty-four years later and I have three different helmets: An old ‘open face’ Shoei which is a lot like that first Bell TX 500, a much-less-old Nolan ‘modular’ for daily commuting and general riding, and an even nicer newish Xlite (Nolan) modular for traveling. I also now own two different types of riding boots, half a dozen pairs of riding gloves, two different types of balaclavas, two different electrically heated mid-layers, a bunch of scarves and neck-bandanas, multiple base and mid-layers, and the aforementioned set of Aerostich R-3 light one piece suits and two Aerostich jackets (Darien light and Transit) and two pair of AD-1 pants. It’s all become well-used and well-worn.

I’ve accumulated this inventory, sorted out the keepers, gotten rid of the little-used items, and have pretty much narrowed my quiver of gear down to what works for me and what doesn’t. 

It took years. 

Today I have a bit less gear than I did as recently as ten years ago, but once in a while, I’ll still decide I need to try something I’ve never experienced before. This coming fall* it’s going to be some Neos over boots. We’ve carried them for years and they’ve never sold too well, but I have an idea about how I want to use them.

Several years ago, I’d started riding/commuting through the winters on a bicycle with studded tires. A few years after that I moved a little farther from work and upgraded to an E-bicycle (though keeping and still using the non-electric one sometimes) and have not yet solved the problem about what to wear on my feet during really sloppy weather. When it’s cold and dry enough I’ll wear a pair of simple ankle-high fleece boots which look like winter versions of a high-top basketball shoe. I’ve worn these for many years before I started winter bicycle commuting and they are great. And for super-cold days I also have a pair of very old felt-lined mukluks which are lightweight and these also work great for bicycling. But when temps are around and just below freezing, the streets here are mostly wet and slushy, and my E-bikes front tire picks up this slop and flings it at my feet and lower legs, and I have nothing for this. These conditions seem to exist around here for about 50% of the winter, which is where the Neos come in. My new plan for E-biking through that sloppy cold weather will be to use my Chaco sandals (with wool sox, as I normally do on cold days) inside the Neos waterproof over boots, hoping this will prove ideal. If it does work (?) then after I get to work (or any other destination) I’ll quickly be in comfy dry sandals.**

Gearing oneself up to comfortably ride nearly every day and nearly everywhere for nearly everything is far tougher than gearing up primarily for sport and leisure. Taken together, all the necessary gear is so expensive to acquire and so time-consuming to use, that few riders have the combination of determination and means to attempt it. Which partly explains why motorcycles in advanced and wealthy countries are widely understood by the general public, law enforcement, and judicial communities as self-indulgent toys. Which is unfortunate for all of us.

In theory, we could change that, but it would be a lot of hard work. Riding all the time to nearly everywhere can be done. It just takes planning, patience, a fairly generous gear-purchasing budget spread across more than a few years, and some sort of set-aside ‘bat cave’ location in one’s dwelling to keep this stuff organized and at-the-ready. 

It’s always been worth it, at least for me.

Mr. Subjective, October 2020  (Published April 2024)

*Those Neos over boots have now worked great for four years. As I’d projected back in 2020, when this blog post was written, when motorcycling I mostly wear them on rainy slushy days to protect my very old-school (Gokey brand) leather ankle-high laced ‘around-town’ riding boots. Those boots have been around long enough to have literally required re-soling twice. I also wear the Neo’s during really bad wet weather over the lightweight shoes I wear whenever I’m pedaling (E or regular bike). [Please Note: For reasons beyond our control, the Neos Overshoes are not currently available, but we expect them to be again in the future.]

**The Neos did end up solving this problem.