Way too many years ago, several of my middle-school friends started riding motorcycles. More truthfully, they were riding scooters, mopeds and a few of the old dual-purpose Honda CT Scramblers. It did not take long for the bug to bite and I talked my dad into buying me a used Honda CB 100. It was a street bike, but it saw more than its share of off-road action! I took the front fender off just to make it look “cool”. A few years later my little brother wound up with a 185 Suzuki dirt bike and man did we have a blast! In our part of rural central Texas, there were plenty of gravel roads, lake shores and dirt fields to explore. We made our own jumps and pretended to be great motocross riders. We also managed to bog those poor little bikes to their axles more than a few times in either deep sand or mud.
As I grew older, bikes came and went. I spent most of my 20’s on a Suzuki 650 street bike. To me, the best sounding bike has always been the old Honda CB 750 Four (sorry Harley). The most awesome crotch rocket I’ve ever seen was the old Kawasaki KZ 1000. It sounded mean and it would really move! I never owned one, but I always wished I had.
Time moves on and I eventually graduated to the big Harleys. I ride a Softail Deluxe these days. As the wife and I are “empty nesters” now, we have more time to explore and enjoy the backroads and we attend a few bike rallies each year. We enjoy the mountains and we’ve ridden the Million Dollar Highway in Colorado and toured most of the mountains of New Mexico. Not long ago I stumbled across an article about long distance riding (Thanks, Sean Kester) and thought I might give it a try. The first one, the 500 mile Easy Rider, was….easy. A few weeks later, the 1000 mile Full Throttle was…hell! When I got home around midnight, I was stumbling, mumbling, and swore I’d never try to do 1000 miles in 24 hours again in my life. A few weeks later…yes, I managed to capture the King of the Road, 1500 miles in 36 hours. Truth be told, it was actually easier than the 1000 mile ride because of what I’d learned along the way.
Now I have my sights set on the coast-to-coast Born to be Wild ride. Maybe fall, maybe spring, but I’ll get there. Motorcycling has never ceased to amaze me, to thrill me, or to provide me with a sense of pride, accomplishment, satisfaction, and freedom. And while times have changed and the world seems to be standing on end these days, I know that motorcycling adds something special to my life and it makes it easy for me to drift back the those carefree days on that old “Honda ‘Hunderd”. Good riding to all.
Randy
Ps; Don’t let the 1000 mile Full Throttle scare you. It’s really not all that bad. It just takes a lot of planning and about 18 hours in the saddle!