Kawasaki Announces Vulcan 1700 Voyager Tourer And a Vulcan 1700 Classic, Classic LT and Nomad! By Evan Kay

The new Kawasaki Vulcan 1700 Voyager makes its entrance. This past weekend at the Gaylord Texan Resort & Convention Center in Grapevine, TX, Kawasaki held their 2008 dealer show. The biggest announcement was a complete line of Vulcan 1700cc cruisers, topped by a new Vulcan 1700 Voyager touring bike, were on their way.

I say ‘announcement’ because the four bikes are all “coming soon” according to Kawasaki. That means they could be late-arriving 2009 models or early-release 2010's. As the bikes seemed to be complete and not prototypes, there are two possible reasons for this. One is that the current 1600 Vulcan line is languishing on dealer showroom floors and Kawasaki is giving them an opportunity to clear the decks before bringing in the 1700s. The other - and more likely reason - is that there are production line/raw materials issues preventing more timely shipping for the coming year.

Harley Davidson Around the World

BEIRUT -- He’d had a rotten day at the office -- the boss had barked at him, ordering him to get some mammoth project done within an impossible deadline. So he got aboard his pearl-white Harley-Davidson Street Glide, turned the ignition, gripped the throttle and revved the engine. He rode through streets crowded with apartments, past well-lighted skyscrapers. The city faded behind him and he breathed in the cool nighttime air, his motorbike roaring through the desert. For a few minutes, he felt free of his job, his family, of pressures and demands on his time --just heading out on the highway atop nearly 800 pounds of pure American thunder. On a Middle Eastern highway. ”My mind just clears,” says Rakan Talal, a 26-year-old from Riyadh, Saudi Arabia’s capital, who was among a small but fervent crew of hog fanatics converging on Lebanon the first weekend of October for the country’s first Harley-Davidson tour. “I don’t think about anything. Just the road and feeling the wind. Riding on two wheels is something else. Riding a bike makes it all feel better.” Even as clerics and politicians in the Arab world ring out denunciations of U.S. foreign policy and the encroachment of Western-style decadence, these gleaming emblems of American freedom are growing in popularity here, says Marwan Tarraf, who sells Harleys in Lebanon and helped organize the tour. It’s all about freedom and the exhilaration of the open road and, like, wow, man. “Once you get on a Harley you feel that you are
really free and that your spirit is always up high and you’re going through the wind,” said Abraham Kadoumy, 51, who discovered motorcycle culture when he lived in Los Angeles in the late 1970s and early ‘80s.”Freedom is what it’s all about,” he says.

 daragahi@latimes.com

(see the complete article at http://www. Ia times. com/news/nationworld/world/Ia-fg-harleyl 4-2008octl 4,0,800366.story)