Crating the bobber

 June 5, 2023 

As mentioned yesterday, concerns about the missing front wheel spokes make me ride on regular roads instead of on the expressway to the place in Yokohama, where my crate was stored. Naga-san shows up at Ohiro's shop, offering to ride with me, which later turns out to be a very good idea.

Much as I have been griping about urban traffic, today I am pleased because the extra hour it takes also includes seeing the town, rather than seeing endless noise walls on the expressway. The 'Bratstyle'' shop specializing in cutdown SR400s and other bikes have made their name by building essentially the same bikes for 20+ years, is situated along the way, so I stop by for a re-visit. The young guys there were still in early grade school when I visited in 2006, and the ones who might have remembered, aren't in right now. So just a brief hello and we're off again.

Past the 'Style Motorcycles' shop with Harley custom bikes, past a burgundy Citroen DS (Tokyo's Citroen specialist is in the area, Naga-san says), nod to a rider on a '65 Meguro/Kawasaki one-lunger, and watch in awe a six wheel armored carrier in the next lane with two soldiers standing out the holes in top, totally Mad Max style. All the way he rides ahead of me, so he can stop to take riding pics for the article, or ride behind me, filming me ride.

Things go well until we reach the area with the crate, and I thought I would remember the place when we got here. My phone doesn't do anything but messenger calls, making me have Naga-san call Leopard Express for me. Apparently receiving instructions that lead us nowhere he calls again, but almost an hour then goes by before the nice lady from LE shows up, guiding me the last 400 meters. To her eternal credit she brought a bag with rice bits and a bottle of green tea, which is just what I'll need when I start dismantling and packing everything. 3104 kilometers in all, the odometers reads.

Three hours later everything is ready, including strapping and taping the external cardboard boxes with all the things that couldn't readily fit inside the three sidecar sections. An employees takes me to the nearest subway station, once again I enter the surreal spaghetti bowl of subway lines and an hour and a half later I back in Nishi-Kawaguchi, in time for dinner with Andreas and Rasmus at couple of noisy Chinese restaurants, and a good day is over.

The hipster crowd in particular has taken to the kind of bikes 'Bratstyle' got famous for.

In addition to the regular bikes, a pair of Indian Chief bobbers reside outside the shop.

Space age Honda with automatic everything, plus hydraulics instead of a chain or 
shaft drive, if I remember correctly.


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