Weeks of running crumbling mountain roads, strafing endless switchbacks, and dodging stinky diesel trucks reveal all.
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| © Provided by Bonnier Corporation |
By Andrew Cherney, Motorcycle Cruiser
I’ve never been much of a Softail guy, truth be told. Or at least not in the barely distant past. The series has always felt overly styled for my tastes (more form over function), with mediocre suspension and a squirrelly chassis further sabotaged by perennially weak brakes. And if you had a lot of crap to carry, well, god help you; there weren’t many places to strap it to. My list of preferred touring bikes featured mostly Road Kings or, for the long days, an FLT or maybe even a Dyna. But now there’s no more Dyna.
So there I was last autumn, saddling up a 2018 Harley Softail Heritage Classic for a stint in the mountains of northern Spain with a bunch of Brits. The four of us, all competent riders (some more than others), had our pick of a couple of different 2018 Softails for the three-week tour. I didn’t want something as hefty as a Touring bike squeezing through narrow goat paths and old medieval villages for three weeks; it’d be like bringing a bazooka to a knife fight. But I still wanted cargo capacity, so Heritage Classic it was.
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