When the news broke about the incoming Honda Trail 125 - or CT-125 to the rest of the world - I was disappointed. I was almost certain that Honda would have chosen the Trail 70/Dax/ST stamped steel framed bike that were all the rage back in the 70's to throwback to. Especially after the successful launch of the 2019 Honda Monkey 125 throwback!
What I didn't understand at the time however, was that the Trail/CT-125 was probably the more popular bike the world over. I also didn't understand that the Trail/CT had a deeper history than the ST/Dax (as I'll refer to it going forward as Honda chose to use "Trail" and "CT" for their new reissue). Before the history though, I feel it necessary to explain the confusion with namesakes between these two bikes. Across the different markets, these bikes have different names that crossover, unnecessarily in my opinion too! Ok, so let's break this down:
A Honda "Trail" was first to the market and was a ruggedized scooter, more accurately the Trail Cub series is an offshoot of the popular Super Cub line. Like this:
The Honda "Trail 70" (as North Americans know it) was produced from 1969 to 1982, and reintroduced in 1991 until 1994. In non-NA markets, it was the ST70 Dax. To complicate things worse, in North America it was also sold under the CT70 designation. WTF?! Let's just call it "The minibike distinguished by a pressed-steel "T-bone" frame, and equipped with folding handle-bars" model! Sheesh... Anyways, this is that bike:
Confused yet? Good, you should be... Maybe this handy piece of memorabilia I found will help sum it up a little better visually (and add another player to the game, the Z50 (Mini Trail):
Ok, so back to the point. I was hoping for the reissue of the Dax ("The minibike distinguished by a pressed-steel "T-bone" frame, and equipped with folding handle-bars"), but was met with the news of the CT-125 "Hunter Cub" reissue (there's another moniker we can add into the already maddening super-similar whirlwind of names for these bikes). I didn't know anything about the Hunter Cub - as I'll call it from hereon out - so naturally I saw it and immediately thought "scooter with a cargo rack". Hard pass for me, and I sulked that I would have to further wait for a modern Dax to match the 1970 in my garage. So time went on and the new Hunter Cub was released in the Asian market - which it is probably a gift from god for - and there wasn't much fanfare like there was for the Monkey. Probably because people were using these bikes as everyday workhorses and not for pleasure so much. In the meantime, my YouTube channel was blossoming and gaining subscribers interested in the Monkey at first, but also attracting hardcore Honda small-bore enthusiasts who took an interest in all of the bikes, not just the Monkey. The questions via comments started trickling in:
"have you seen the new CT-125?"
"are you gonna get the new CT-125?"
"when are you getting the CT-125?"
Ok ok, I guess I should take another look at this bike... I started browsing a few videos on YouTube and reading a few articles, and I'll admit the bike did peak my interest, but man I just thought it looked too much like a scooter and I never really had much interest in scooters. Hell, most of my research led me to "postie bikes", which are the Honda CT-110's that looked exactly like the new Hunter Cub which the Australian post office uses to deliver mail! How is this an exciting bike?!
It wasn't until I watched a few far East based videos of riders taking the CT-125 through water that I decided I might need one of these bikes! I don't know what captivated me so much about a bike that could go waist deep into a lake so much, but I did... Maybe it's the lake across the street and accompanying creek through my yard combined with my redneck intuitions that beckons to me to "take something through"? I don't know, but I was listening at this point. The defining moment that prompted me to go ahead with it was when I started looking at the interest on YouTube for this bike. The videos out there were driving MAJOR view numbers, and the quality of them wasn't too stellar in my opinion, which meant people were just eating up CT-125 content. Considering my channel was growing, I never expected it to maintain growth with just the Monkey and knew I needed to inject some diversity in my content. The wheels started turning in my head (pun intended. Fully) and the thoughts of producing content of me taking a Trail 125 into the lake across the street were now churning. It was then I decided to pre-order the bike that day at my local dealer Central Florida Powersports.
I was a little late to the pre-order game. With the Monkey, I put down my deposit a good 3-4 months out. With my deliberation on the Trail, I preordered the bike a scant 1-month before it was supposed to arrive at dealers. Albeit, I was still the first at my dealer to get my money down (although just barely! another customer that same day, but later than me put down a deposit too! wow). So the wait was on, and this wait kinda sucked... With the Monkey, we knew it was coming in October, and it did, on the 2nd day of October. Simple. The Trail? Not so much. The original ETA was around Thanksgiving (late November). That date came, and turned into early December. That came, and turned into before Christmas. My sales team was baffled, and I was getting frustrated, as I was seeing Trails appear across the country on Facebook groups. Mostly in Western and Mid-Western states, which were getting their first snows of the season. In my mind, I'm thinking "why the hell are these states getting their bikes that are going to go straight into winter storage before the states like Florida that have no end to the riding season?!" This was never answered and a mystery (but I bet those Mid-Western folks were happy!), but as we're winding down the Covid pandemic situation, we're seeing that there were A LOT of melee's involving international shipping and ports. I assume that was the reason, but it makes sense maybe the bikes left Thailand (where they're produced) on time, but remained in some sort of shipping/port purgatory as the industry dealt with lockdowns and quarantines. Understandable, and greedy of me in retrospect to be frustrated about not getting my new motorcycle when I expected it. Finally on January 27th I got the call that my Trail 125 had arrived. FINALLY! I was pumped. In the months I had to wait, I watched more and more videos, and got more and more involved with the Facebook groups living vicariously through those who had received theirs already. Wasting no time on igniting my Trail 125 content campaign, I was allowed to film the unboxing and dealer prep process of my very own bike:
After unloading the Trail at home and using it for a few weeks, I then realized that this quite possibly would be the greatest motorcycle I've ever owned.
That's a strong statement above, isn't it?! Let me elaborate. So, some more reasoning I had to purchase the Trail was that I most often seem to use my motorcycles for chores and "run-a-bout" type tasks around the house. I live on 1-acre of land here in Central Florida, which we have our 5X Racing warehouse on. We also have a mini-motocross track in the backyard for the kids (yeah, "the kids"...), so it's a bit dirty at times. Also to note, my parents live on the next road down from us - about 1/4 mile - and I transit myself back and forth to their house almost daily as our racecar shop is located there. My "run-a-bout" tasks often included:
Ferrying packages from the front of our house to the shop in back, previously accomplished in several trips carrying by hand or hand-truck.
Bringing the trash bins back to the house from the side of the road (about 100ft)
Carrying tools and yard equipment like ladders, leaf blowers, weed eater, bounce houses, kids toys, etc... to various locations around our property
Running up to the gas station to refill containers for the lawn tractor or dirt bikes
Running up to the gas station to refill my beer fridge
Carrying racecar parts back and forth to our race shop at my parents
Taking my kids on "sunset cruises" through our lakeside neighborhood
Stopping in at my friends/neighbors houses for the occasional beer session
I could - and did - these things on the Monkey and Grom, but there was a few hurdles to these tasks on those bikes, mainly: they had a clutch, which required both hands to be used to operate the bike, and they didn't have any dedicated space to carry any cargo. The Trail solved both of these issues with having the semi-auto clutch, and a pizza box size rack on the back for carrying anything. Bingo. Here's a good example of me carrying "stuff" on the Trail:
Fast forward almost 6-months and many, MANY "things" carried by way of Trail 125 rack, and my Hunter Cub is easily my most used bike in my fleet. In fact, I hardly use my other bikes because my Trail is so perfect for almost every occasion. This makes me happy, but also sad, because I now question the logic behind keeping my other bikes, such as the Monkey and Grom. Is the Trail better than the Monkey and Grom? Maybe, depends on what we're doing with them (I'll write another blog on that question, too long for this!), but that's for my particular case, and my particular case doesn't involve a whole-lotta road riding.
So that's the story of the Trail 125 and me. The "bike I almost didn't get" is now the "bike I can't do without" in my fleet. So if you're asking yourself "should I get a Honda Trail 125?" the answer is "yes" if you do any of the things on my tasks list above. If you have a farm and need a utility bike, yes. If you have a little bit of property and enjoy using a motorcycle for helping with chores, yes. If you stick strictly to the road and commute to work on a motorcycle, no (unless you live in a congested city or India). I'll dive deeper into these in a future article however, gotta save some for later...
Thanks for reading,
John