Hi all.
My name is Phil, I live in Ontario, Canada, and I have an amazing story to tell about a Monster 750. Grab a bag of Cheetos (trailer shrimp) and a beer, and if you are sitting comfortably, we will begin.
I started riding this summer after swearing I would never do so. I missed out on SO much!
I bought a few different bikes, then found this sweet 97 M750 on local classifieds, but it was cheap because there was no paperwork. The guy who owned it apparently rode it around the world, and he
stopped in Toronto, left the bike at a friends place and carried on by sea. He was from Geneva, Switzerland (CH).
So, I figured, what the hell. The seller said he might have the paperwork for it somewhere but he had moved a few times since buying it so I gambled six hundred bucks on the bike, loaded it up and brought it home. I'd send him a text message every couple of weeks just to see if he found anything, but he never responded again. Turns out this guy has a California cell phone. Weird. So now I'm wondering, how DID he get the bike?
Fast forward a few months, and I've taken my gal on a European trip, mainly for medical reasons, and we stop in Geneva, then go to Italy, and eventually back to Switzerland.
We were hiking in the mountains around the third week of October, and met a young police officer who was on the trail, struck up a conversation, and spent the rest of the day with him and his group. When we finished, he invited us back for dinner with his family, and have a drink and chat some more. It turns out he is also a motorcycle enthusiast so that's when we really connected. He showed me his bike, I showed him pics of mine, and when I got to the Ducati, I stopped talking....... And did a double take.
I almost had a stroke. I was IN Switzerland, for the second time in 2 weeks, and hadn't even thought about the bike! I told him about it, and his eyes lit up. Before I knew it, we were at the Police Station, pulling up the registration for the bike, and I left with a name. My jaw was hanging open the whole time.
Unreal.
A few days after returning home, I searched the Web and after a few messages to possible matches, this fellow reaches back to me through Facebook Messenger. After sending him a pic of his bike, his first reply was, "WTAF?
?". So I knew I had the right guy.
He was stunned to hear from me as he had not seen nor heard of the bike for over 12 years! He was taken aback by my story about finding the bike, how I found him, and we had a lengthy phone chat about the journey, both of us in stitches at times, both in amazement of how this all unfolded.
He, in fact, bought the Ducati privately in the same town where we happened to be recently, seeing a medical specialist, quite some distance from his home in Geneva! This was only a short distance from where we met this helpful policeman in fact! So bizarre....
He then offered to get me a copy of the title and send it out, so I can officially import and register it here in Canada. So, I'm now planning to restore this bike, which has indeed been through 18 countries, and I already have pictures of it in front of the Kremlin, and a few other places, still waiting on the full photo album. At one point the bike had to be completely dismantled and shipped by Freight across the border into China and then reassembled there in order for him to continue his journey due to some bureaucratic BS that prevented him from traveling into China without a paid guide for the entire duration. That is dedication, my friends!
I've left out a ton of details which would make your jaw drop at the sheer cosmic alignment of all the pieces of this puzzle, but if time permits, I will document that along with the whole build on a new website, yet to be created.
In the interim, I will be reaching out for advice, guidance and parts as this goes along.
Cheers for now!
Phil
