Biker’s 200,000 miles on bike he bought aged 17

Old BMW's! You may hate them or you may love them. Either way they are virtually bullet proof and seem to keep on going. I have an 89 R100GS that I used for a back up bike for my motorcycle tours here in the South of France.....it has 220,000km on the clock and then some. It's outlived all of my other bikes (Triumph Speed Triple, Triumph Daytona, Suzuki GSXR 750 etc etc) and still gets used for trips to Spain, Andorra, Corsica and Italy. Like Andrew says at that kind of mileage they owe you nothing. Talk about cheap motorcycling.  Shame that BMW don't make em as good as they used too. Plus on the older ones you can literally tear them apart at the side of the road should the need (hopefully not) arise....and normally fix them...There's none of this several hundred pound servicing either....a good ol' Haynes, a bit of common sense, a set of decent spanners and watch as your annual dealer servicing costs drop to virtually zero. I think I've spent maybe the equivalent of £50 at my local BMW specialists...in the past two years!! I've ordered parts off the net, but they are plentiful and cheap. Plus the tyres last forever. I get around 20,000km on a rear and around 25,000 on a front.....a drastic change from my sportsbikes where I was changing them once a month at between 3 & 5,000km. There really is something to be said for older bikes.

Ride safe, Martin www.st-georges-fr.com

Hello there fella.

My mate is just round the corner from you at a place called SidsMums.  They are based in Preixan on the outskirts of Carcassonne.  Sid is currently in China but Jan, his mum runs the hostel.  Sid sold his GS a little while back having taken it to Oz and back.  I bought mine on the back of riding his, but it just wasn't the same.

Reminds me of the broom my mate has. It's still original - only had one handle and two heads.

But seriously, if you look at the mileages some Yanks do on their bikes, 200k is nothing.

And they are not always riding BMWs.