How long was your longest relationship? Ten years? Twenty? In May of 2022, my wife and I celebrated 20 years of marriage. That’s on top of the six years we spent living in sin throughout the Rustbelt, for a total of 26 years of teasing, hassling, laughing, crying, fighting, and loving. Since 2010, that also included parenting our two bright, willful, tough, funny, and occasionally maddeningly annoying daughters. We’ve been together, in essence, all of our adult lives, a fact that neither one of us lets the other forget.
I bring this up because, as I mentioned last time, my wife and I used our June 2022 trip out to Oregon not just to pick up my new Gear Up, but also to celebrate our 20th anniversary. We did so in style with a three-day, 500-mile, three-day (and most importantly) child-free trip up the Oregon coast. At one point, as I flogged the fully loaded Gear Up north along the breathtaking stretch of Highway 101 between Coos Bay and Depoe Bay, I had an epiphany—a Ural is kind of like a marriage.
No, seriously. Hear me out. In our time together, my wife and I have split our lives into three semi-separate parts—my stuff, her stuff, and our stuff. My stuff is all the motorcycle-y, music-y, old-timey horror movie stuff. Her stuff is all the earnest, public service, non-profit, do-gooder stuff. Our stuff, the stuff that we love doing together, is all the nerdy, D&D, board game, superhero movie, and road trip/travel stuff. Well, that and the parenting of course.
A Ural has, in its own way, that same kind of three-in-one existence. My stuff is the piloting, the loading, the maintenance, the big-picture planning, and the constant paying attention to weather and traffic. The strategic stuff, as it were. Her stuff is the sidecar sitting, the navigating, the water, coffee, tea, and snack organizing, the map holding, the finding good ice cream places, and the micro, hour-by-hour planning. The tactical stuff. Our stuff is the adventure, the travel, the fun, the joy of each other’s company, and the joint suffering through bad roads and bad weather. It just works, much like our marriage, and brings a lot of happiness despite some setbacks. Again, much like our marriage.
Okay, look, I know it's not a perfect metaphor and it doesn't quite hold up under tough scrutiny. Here's the thing, though. Buying the Ural has, in a way, brought us closer together than we've been in a long time. It rekindled my desire to travel and camp and rough it—things that used to be our stuff but, over the years, slowly turned into her stuff as my interest in it waned. That’s the old Ural magic, though. The adventure inherent in the machine, its very essence, can help you remember what’s important and what isn’t. It did that for me, at any rate.