There’s a scene in Jim Jarmoush’s movie Dead Man which I absolutely love. A very colorful American Indian character who calls himself Nobody tells William Blake, the main character played by Johnny Depp how amazed he was by white man’s big city logistics. Somehow, he tells Blake, every time Nobody travelled to a new white man’s city, the white men managed to move ALL the white people in the world from the last city he visited to the one he just discovered right in time for his arrival.
Getting a couple motorcycles in a foreign country over the internet is a similar experience. The country doesn’t really exist and neither do the motorcycles, never mind the company that promised to provide them and yet, just before your arrival, they manage to pull it all off. The country, the city, the company and the motorcycles. An amazing experience. I highly recommend it.
So, above, a couple of photos from the Italian matrix, right after our first ride and just before I started working on the upgrades.
Implausibly, all the accessories we ordered for the bikes and had delivered to the shop in Italy AND/OR brought from the US via Mexico actually fit! No redrilled holes, no broken engine bolts, nada. Magic realism, I tell you.
Here’s the proof, no AI image generation harmed in the process.
T7. Outback Motortech racks with the top case plate modified to fit an aftermarket Pelican case snap.
T7. New crash bars. Neither top nor bottom per se, but fully tested in mud and rocks on my ’22 Tenere.
MT450. A heavy-duty aftermarket engine bash plate now replacing the factory tin visible in the before photo.
And here’s the complete Tenere 700 (EU ’24) setup. Includes fixtures for carrying LiteLock, metal-grinder-defeating devices attached to the tire-side of the symmetrical left rack. Rack previously tested on a US ’25, crash bars on a US ’22.
I will get into much more detail on each of these upgrades in future dedicated posts that will include field testing.
For now, all that’s left is a phone holder and Double-Take mirrors which I install on all the bikes we own.
Well that and soft luggage fitment. Should have plenty of time for all the minor tasks tomorrow, right in time for our Saturday ride down to the Sardinia ferry departing from Genoa.
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