I made a discovery today.

A species of motorcycles I thought long extinct, the renowned British marque Royal Enfield is alive and healthy and still producing brand-new motorcycles according to an old design - in India.  Not only that, but they are exported to the United States, and can be purchased at your local Royal Enfield Dealer.

Well, if you don't live in California, that is.  This motorcycle and its 1940's iron single-cylinder motor does not meet CARB emissions requirements and is therefore not legal in this state.

However, Royal Enfields may be purchased in any number of other states, including my own home state of Minnesota.  There is a Royal Enfield dealership in Mankato, Minnesota, a small town where, incidentally, my grandmother was born and raised. And it somehow tickles my fancy that perhaps that dealership was around when she was a girl.  Perhaps they were around back then, selling motorcycles to corn-fed teenage boys who had saved their paper-route money for five or six years to buy one, then raced each other on Friday afternoons up and down the gravel roads, scaring the ducks.

Why would one ever want to buy one of these things?  Why? A Kawasaki KLR250 dual-sport is available for $700 cheaper at $4,200, puts out the same 22 horsepower and gets the same 75 mpg, and has a modern and thoroughly competent suspension, and is reliable to boot.

But a KLR250 hasn't been around for 59 years, and isn't produced by the oldest motorcycle manufacturing company in the world (motor bicycle manufacture began at Royal Enfield in 1901).  A KLR250 is built out of aluminium, not iron.  It has all this newfangled stuff like disc brakes, electric start, and transistorized ignition.  Rebuilding a KLR will cost more than $40, and repairing it on the road will probably require tools more advanced than a rock, a piece of angle iron, and coathanger wire. Not to mention that the front and rear tires are NOT the same size and hence are more difficult to buy in bulk.  The KLR probably can't carry a family of five like the Enfield does, day in day out, in its adopted home India.  And finally, there's no way in hell you can play-pretend holiday in England on a Japanese dirtbike with a square headlight....