{"id":13691,"date":"2026-09-17T11:53:33","date_gmt":"2026-09-17T17:53:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/motorcyclecolorado.com\/blog\/?p=13691"},"modified":"2026-09-16T18:57:41","modified_gmt":"2026-09-17T00:57:41","slug":"a-beloved-honda-pacific-coast","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/motorcyclecolorado.com\/blog\/a-beloved-honda-pacific-coast\/","title":{"rendered":"A Beloved Honda Pacific Coast"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>


\nI saw this guy up on top of Cottonwood Pass.<\/strong><\/p><\/div>\n

When I first started riding motorcycles for real–as opposed to once in a while as a kid–John was receiving copies of various motorcycle magazines from the wife of a friend of his who had died. John would read them and pass them along to me. <\/p>\n

One of the very first magazines I ever saw was Rider magazine with a picture of the brand new Honda Pacific Coast on the cover. That cover really struck me, such an unusual bike, and while I have no recollection of so many Rider covers over all these years, I still remember that one clearly.<\/p>\n

The Pacific Coast was a dud for Honda. It was really not much more than a glorified scooter and at 800cc it was universally agreed to be seriously underpowered. You saw a few for a few years and then they just pretty much disappeared.<\/p>\n

I saw one last week. Nick and I were up on top of Cottonwood Pass and this guy came in and parked. I said oh my gosh and went to have a look.<\/p>\n

Nice guy. Loves the heck out of that bike. He told me he bought this one used (not his first) about two years ago and it had 20,000 miles on it then. It now has 89,000. He loves that bike.<\/p>\n

He hasn’t had a bit of trouble with it but there is one difficulty I’m familiar with. It’s almost impossible to find the right tires for it. I had a 1999 Kawasaki Concours for 25 years and in later years the only tires I could find of the right size cost me about $250 apiece. If I could find them. So at the suggestion of Jungle, who had a nearly identical Concours, I took to running tires that were not what Kawasaki intended. That is, Kawasaki wanted radials and I was running bias-ply. You know what? They worked just fine.<\/p>\n

So now the guy–I didn’t ask his name–was headed down to Arizona. Decided to come through Colorado and the mountains on his way. Stopped on top of Cottonwood just long enough to take a break and then he was off again.<\/p>\n

Got more miles to put on this baby.<\/p>\n

Biker Quote for Today<\/h3>\n

To me it doesn’t matter whether it’s raining or the sun is shining or whatever: as long as I’m riding a bike I know I’m the luckiest guy in the world.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When I first started riding motorcycles for real–as opposed to once in a while as a kid–John was receiving copies of various motorcycle magazines from the wife of a friend of his who had died. John would read them and pass them along to me. One of the very first magazines I ever saw was […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[197,460,228,135],"tags":[253,1448],"class_list":["post-13691","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-colorado-motorcycle-rides","category-honda-motorcycles","category-motorcycle-touring","category-vintage-motorcycles","tag-cottonwood-pass","tag-honda-pacific-coast"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/motorcyclecolorado.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13691","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/motorcyclecolorado.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/motorcyclecolorado.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/motorcyclecolorado.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/motorcyclecolorado.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13691"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/motorcyclecolorado.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13691\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13695,"href":"http:\/\/motorcyclecolorado.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13691\/revisions\/13695"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/motorcyclecolorado.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13691"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/motorcyclecolorado.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13691"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/motorcyclecolorado.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13691"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}