New Adventures in the Pacific Northwest: A Ural is Like a Marriage

How long has your longest relationship lasted? 10 years? 20 years? In May 2022, my wife and I celebrated 20 years of marriage. Add to that the six years we spent living in sin all over the rust belt, and that's a total of 26 years of banter, annoyance, laughter, tears, fights and love. Since 2010, that also includes raising our two brilliant, opinionated, tough, funny and, at times, tremendously annoying daughters. We have been together, in essence, our entire adult lives, a fact neither of us allows the other to forget.

I bring this up because, as I mentioned last time, my wife and I took advantage of our June 2022 trip to Oregon not only to pick up my new Ural Gear Up, but also to celebrate our 20th anniversary. We did it in style with a three-day, 800km, (and most importantly) child-free trip up the Oregon coast. At one point, as I drove the fully loaded Gear Up north along the stunning stretch of Highway 101 between Coos Bay and Depoe Bay, I had an epiphany: a Ural is like a marriage.

ROBBIE FROM RACEWAY URAL BRIEFS ME ON THE GEAR WHILE KATERINA AND NATALIA TRY IT ON.

No, I'm serious. Listen to me. In our time together, my wife and I have divided our lives into three semi-separate parts: my stuff, her stuff and our stuff. Mine is motorbikes, music and old horror movies. Hers is all the serious, public service, non-profit, do-gooding stuff. Ours, what we like to do together, is all things geeky, D&D, board games, superhero movies and road trips. Well, that and being parents, of course.

A Ural has, in its own way, that same kind of three-in-one existence. Mine is piloting, loading, maintenance, general planning and constant attention to weather and traffic. The strategic, so to speak. Sitting in the sidecar, navigating, organising water, coffee, tea and snacks, storing maps, finding good ice cream and planning every hour. The tactical stuff. Ours is the adventure, the journey, the fun, the enjoyment of each other's company and suffering together through bad roads and bad weather. It works, like our marriage, and gives us a lot of happiness despite some setbacks. Again, 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. The purchase of the Ural brought us closer together than we had been in a long time. It rekindled my desire to travel and camp, things that used to be ours but which, over the years, gradually became her stuff as my interest in them waned. But that's the magic of the old Ural. The adventure inherent in the machine, its very essence, can help you remember what's important and what's not. In any case, it helped me.