Is it time to wave goodbye to our beloved Honda Valkyrie and try something smaller, lighter, more modern? I mentioned when writing about our Norway trip that I’d found my Valkyrie a bit of a handful at low speeds in heavy traffic. It hadn’t been a problem before – was it me, or was it the bike?

When we got home, I weighed our luggage equipment. I was a bit surprised by the results: the round Kuryakyn bag that sits on the rear carrier weighed 3.5kg empty, when the factory weight limit for the carrier is 3kg. We normally pack two sleeping bags in there (1.5kg combined), along with sundry items like a tent lamp, Peter’s Scott waterproof jacket, some adapter plugs and charging wires for the phones and helmets, and a beanie (this trip only). The total with gear was probably 6kg. On top of that we pack our two super-thin air mattresses in a plastic waterproof roll-bag, weighing a further 1.5kg, so we’d been carrying between 7 and 7.5kg up high and well behind the wheel spindle. Some obvious room for improvement there: I plan to ditch the Kuryakyn bag and replace it with another plastic roll-bag, which weighs almost nothing; that would give us a total of a fraction over 3kg back there.

VRCC Norway friend Tommy Oppegaard told me he’d upgraded his rear suspension to take the extra weight of a trailer and suggested I consider the same. That got me thinking: I’d stupidly left the rear shock preload settings at 3, which I used for normal UK riding, instead of 4, which I’ve always used in the past for two-up touring. I realised this early on but my wife said it was comfortable for her and the suspension wasn’t bottoming, and we weren’t planning on riding fast so that we could conserve expensive fuel, so I left it at 3 and forgot about it. It now occurred to me that this could have been a contributory factor to the pendulum effect I’d felt, so that now needs investigation.

I can’t do that just yet, because while we were in Germany we noticed that a weld on each chrome Givi pannier bracket had started to split. The splits never got any worse, but nonetheless they can’t be left like that, so I took them straight off when we got home. We both far prefer the look of the bike without the panniers, so I’m in no rush to get the brackets welded and put everything back on.

While I was weighing everything, I found that the Givi panniers weigh 5kg each and the brackets 1.1kg, meaning that the panniers and brackets add 12.2kg to the bike before we add even a pair of socks. With the Kuryakyn bag, it all comes to 15.7kg of luggage equipment. Maybe that’s not out of the ordinary for motorcycle luggage (I’ve never bothered to check before), but it got me thinking that I need to check out other options before re-fitting the Givis. My last Valkyrie had the factory panniers from the Touring model, which weren’t ideal (won’t take a full-face helmet and aren’t that capacious) but looked fabulous and probably weighed less. I knew from my initial search for luggage some years ago that they were horribly expensive now, borne out by an ad last week on eBay for a second-hand pair, complete with a few paint scuffs and rusty hinges, for £1,000!

So much for the luggage: what about the bike itself? My lower back pain is probably a semi-permanent fixture, possibly an inevitable feature of being 68; some massive proportion of older folk suffer from it, I believe. My physio told me it was all down to bad seating posture, specifically crossing my legs and especially resting one ankle on the opposite knee – my long-preferred position for using my laptop. I’ve written hundreds of thousands of words in that way. Stop that, he said, and it’ll all go away. I did stop, months ago, and the pain improved considerably, but it hadn’t gone away.

However, I recall that the conventional wisdom used to be that the ideal riding position on a bike was one that splits the rider’s weight between wrists, bottom and feet. The Valkyrie’s cruiser stance puts all that weight on the bum, down through the spine. Can that be good for someone with lower back pain? Maybe a new bike with a less upright riding position would help? An hour or so on my Ducati Sport Classic after we got home suggested that the solution may lie in that line of thinking: no back pain whatsoever. Obviously the single-seat Duke would never make for a comfortable touring mount, even with its after-market, flatter bars, but maybe other bikes with flat-ish bars would work?

I sat on a BMW R1200RS in a dealership yesterday and the riding position certainly felt much more comfortable, and the 236kg weight would be an improvement on the Valkyrie’s 309kg. I owned a new BMW R100 back in 1979 and never really loved it, perhaps because the day after I bought it I rode the new Gold Wing K3 and decided that was better! In comparison, the BMW seemed too tappetty and unrefined. Still, it’s worth a test ride. The new Triumph Tiger 900 GT Pro looks interesting, too, with its 198kg and all manner of modern features, from built-in satnav to a phone charger. Having owned three Valkyries now, for a combined total of 15 years, not to mention the Valkyrie Rune for a further seven, I have a huge affinity for these bikes and a massive resistance to change. However, if changes in my skeletal structure mean that there might be more suitable touring bikes out there, it makes sense to check them out.

First, though, I owe it to the Valkyrie to see whether lighter panniers, a lighter carrier load and the correct suspension setting can redeem it. I’m hoping they can.