Newtown

When I was back east last week, I took a ride into Newtown, Pennsylvania.  It’s in Bucks County and it’s a pretty cool place.  William Penn (yep, the same guy the state was named after) founded the place, in (get this) 1684, and it figured prominently in the Revolutionary War.   Wow.

I say it was “cool” but actually, it was anything but on that day last week.  The temperature was an oppressive 98 degrees, and with the humidity, the official “feels like” was 110.  Wow again!  The town is small (only 2250 people), but the architecture is classy…

While I tried to stay cool on a bench in the shade, this bike parked right in front of me.  It’s a very classy CX500 Honda Turbo from the early 1980s.   That engine configuration is perhaps the worst one in the world to put a turbocharger on, but the magazines of that era said Honda did it just to prove that they could.  It is a beautiful bike, but it has a pretty serious flaw.  The regular CX500 Hondas are reputedly absolutely reliable, but the Turbo version has a nasty habit of lunching alternators, and on this motorcycle, you have to split the cases to get at the alternator.  Yikes!

That Honda sure was pretty though.   I kind of know what it was like riding on that day, too, based on the CSC Baja trip.  I’m usually an ATGATT guy (all the gear, all the time), and the Turbo’s rider was, too.  In that kind of heat, I’ll bet he weighed a few pounds less when he got home.