Badge of Courage
Blake and I ended up riding about 400 miles together this weekend, much of it on gravel and dirt roads. On his arrival I noticed that Derek had never really used his bike to its full potential because the license plate was still in pristine condition. See the KLR650 has a design flaw that when the suspension gets fully compressed, the license plate gets caught on the rear tire and the plate either gets mangled or ripped off completely. I lost my license plate in Alaska, and had to retrace my path to find it, and the plate on my current KLR got mangled twice before I got smarter and just bent the whole thing out of the way. On the second day of our ride, Blake finally got the Badge of Courage, and he was proud to take this photo.