From the Library

[Biggles]

Germany is a hard country in which to navigate.  Unlike, say France, which has numbered roads, Germany depends on clusters of destination signs to point the way.   
You come to a sudden cross-roads, and instead of an arrow that says "Route 19" you are confronted with one small yellow sign that says.

Marktoberdorf
Klosterlechtfeld
Totenschweinhocksmitstuffin .. .
and another one that reads...

Pfizerknottendinkelrude
Rotenkaisersunterwarren
Bad Rainagain
Behanginwashonderseigfriedline

As you go flying past the intersection at about 120 kph, your navigator/wife leans forward and shouts, "What did those signs say?"
Struck completely dumb in the presence of a thousand Teutonic syllables, you simply skid to a stop and put your head down on the tank and groan.
Leanings  Peter Egan p200

[Biggles]

On the road, fellow tour member Peter Wylie on his Suzuki TL1000 passed us with a wave, sailing off into the distance at high speed.  Five miles later, we found him standing in the road next to his bike, at the end of a 50-yard streak of rubber.  As he was accelerating through the gears, his transmission had suddenly seized up solid in fourth gear, locking the rear tire.  The TL had been a test bike for several German magazines, so its trans had probably seen better days.
Leanings  Peter Egan p201

[Biggles]

Saturday was race day, but the Friday night before was festival night in downtown Assen.  Unlike Douglas at the Isle of Man, which is Bike Central, Assen has its guest park just outside the barricaded downtown, which is as charming as Disneyland's European Village, but real.  Bands play on every other street corner, bungee jumpers leap from cranes, beer tents sell beer, food tents sell pretzels and sausages. and everybody walks.
Everybody:  Kids, grandmas, bikers, riders in full leathers, moms, young couples with prams, all circulating in a huge, swirling counter-clockwise flow through jam-packed streets.  No pushing, shoving, or swaggering, just a polite, cheerful crowd out for a mass stroll.  I've never seen anything quite like it.  In the U.S., we seldom get an all-ages family crowd at a bike rally.
Leanings  Peter Egan p204

[Biggles]

On Saturday we rode to the track, joining the flow down A28 until we were ducted into one of a dozen parking fields whose size and glittering mass of handlebars, gas tanks, and headlights almost defies description.  How many bikes do you picture on Earth?  Triple that number, square it, and then multiply by your age and envision them all parked at Assen.
Ever wonder where all the cowhide goes when McDonalds is done making hamburgers?
Leathers.  At Assen.
Leanings  Peter Egan p204-5

[Biggles]

I later stopped again at the Nurburgring, the famous 14-mile race circuit tested in the Eifel Mountains.  The track was open for anyone with the 22-deutchmark ($13)-per-lap fee. So our group lined up behind various Porsches, taxicabs full of tourists, sportbikes, and teens in hot-rodded Opels (can you imagine this happening in America?) and paid our money, just as the rain began pouring down again.  Before we pulled onto the track, Christian walked up and said, "A road- racing friend of mine recently won a race here in the rain because he didn't crash. He normally finishes 14th."  He peered in through my helmet visor to see if I understood.
Message delivered. The track was indeed quite slippery in the rain- slick with oil and rubber- so we didn't exactly set any new two-up lap records, but the length and difficulty of the track, one of the most beautiful on Earth, made its impression.  With 174 corners per lap, you feel like you've been gone for a month when you finally get back to the start-finish line.  And, in my case, I probably had.
Leanings  Peter Egan p205-6

[Biggles]

El Chico Loco rejoined us for dinner that night, seated in a wheelchair.  Seems the surgeons had not only fixed his broken leg, but repaired the botched job done by an American hospital back in the 1970s after his dirt-bike accident.  He read us a hilarious account he'd written of his week in the hospital, and said he'd seen the Dutch TT on TV in the hospital lounge, sipping champagne ordered from the maternity gift shop.
Seems a German policeman came to his hospital room and served him a traffic ticket for going too fast.
"I was going fast," Chico told him, "but certainly not too fast.  If I'd been going too fast, I'd be dead.  All I've got is a broken leg."
The cop agreed and reduced the fine.  A happy ending, all things considered.
Leanings  Peter Egan p207

[Biggles]

Over dinner, I learned that Stan and Herb have been riding since high school and, between them, have owned, restored, broken, or patched up just about every motorcycle ever made: BMWs, BSAs, Ducatis, Harleys, Hondas, Kawasakis, Laverdas, Nortons, Triumphs, etc.  Motorcycle guys of wide focus, lifelong and hopeless, which we now know to be the best kind of person. They've got the disease.
Leanings  Peter Egan p213

[Biggles]

And, as usual, we had a great bunch of guys to travel with.  I looked around the table at our typically hilarious farewell dinner and thought of that old saying about the pioneers and cowboys who settled the Old West: "The faint of heart never left, and the fools perished along the way."
Motorcycle tours have a little of that same filtration process built into them.  Only folks with a sense of adventure and the ability to keep it on two wheels for a week ever sign up for these trips, and they are by nature a lively bunch.
Leanings  Peter Egan p225

[Biggles]

(Remember- this is USA- LH drive, so the sidecar is on the right...)
A sidecar, of course, is not like any other vehicle. It doesn't- as some have suggested- exist halfway between a motorcycle and a car; it's simply a Third Way.  It lacks all the saving dynamic virtues of both bikes and cars, so driving one ("riding" seems an inadequate verb) is an art form unto itself. 
In right turns, the car feels as though it wants to lift and flip over on you, while the motorcycle itself leans and groans vertiginously outward in defiance of all sound motorcycling instinct. In left turns...  well, it doesn't want to turn left.  It prefers to go straight and can be made to change its mind only through brute force on the handlebars.  Until you get used to it both motions set off primitive alarm bells in your brain that Something is Going Wrong, inducing the occasional cold sweat.
In straight-line cruising, inertia and wind want to hold the car back, so you have to keep a steady pressure on the right bar to hold it straight.  In hard downhill braking, the car wants to circle the bike, unless you use plenty of rear brake- which, on the Harley, is linked to a nicely effective disc brake on the outer wheel of the car.
In other words, its more work than riding a motorcycle.  But once you get used to the rig, you begin to relax and it becomes fun.  It's simply a unique and refined skill, like flying an airplane, or playing the dulcimer with a sledgehammer.
Leanings  Peter Egan p228

[Biggles]

I'd been standing by the highway for some time when two full-dress Harleys came thundering by.  To my amazement, the front rider signalled a stop and pulled over.  I ran up to the bike and an older man in a white T-shirt and a yacht-captain's hat grinned and said, "Hop on."
I climbed on the back of a huge sprung saddle with fringe and conchos and we roared on down the road.  I remember looking over the guy's shoulder at the speedometer and noting that we were going 80 miles an hour.   The whole ride was a crazy overload of sounds and sensations: too much to take in.  What struck me about it, though, was the absolute sense of freedom.  I looked around myself at the Harley and thought,  "With one of these you could go anywhere."  On that big motorcycle, the open road seemed to beckon endlessly as it never had when I rode in a car.
Leanings  Peter Egan p240-1

[Biggles]

Novellist D. H. Lawrence once asked how it was possible that so many young Englishmen were able to leave the green, pastoral beauty of their farms to work in the coal mines, living deep underground for all their daylight hours. His answer?
Motorbikes.
Young men wanted motorbikes, he said, so they could return to their villages and farms, take their girlfriends for a ride, and generally Be Somebody.
Leanings  Peter Egan p245

[Biggles]

The only disconcerting part of these rides home was that there was something slightly odd about shutting down a lawn mower with a big four-stroke single, and then firing up a motorcycle with a 50cc fan-cooled two-stroke that would have been right at home on a lawn mower. I felt, as Kurt Vonnegut would later say, that some terrible mistake had been made. Bigger bikes with Turtle motor mower quality engines would come later, along with larger loans.
Leanings  Peter Egan p247

[Biggles]

Not only do I have plenty to do until spring, but I sometimes find myself overwhelmed with the myriad possibilities, suffering from a condition that has recently been called "option paralysis". This is a malady where you have so many things to do that you can't focus on any one task, so you end up (in my case) sitting on a workbench, staring happily at your bikes, sipping on a Guinness, and listening to Bonnie Raitt and John Lee Hooker on the garage boom-box.
This is not a bad thing in itself, but it raises the spectre of spring arriving with bikes only half ready to be ridden. I still picture them, poised like a row of battle-ready fighter planes, waiting to take off at the first sign of warm weather, then to be ridden like crazy all summer without guilt or mechanical hassles.
Leanings  Peter Egan p252

[Biggles]

Then, suddenly, there were Hondas. Word spread like wildfire, and so did the bikes, all through the early Sixties.
The price range was $245 to $700 new, depending on the model. Most models (other than the 50cc step-through) had slick, four-speed transmissions hidden inside engine cases, where they couldn't even snag your pants cuff and leave grease marks. Electricity actually reached the headlight, which in turn lit the road. Performance, per cc, was amazing. A Honda Super 90 would go about 60 on the highway while getting around 100 mpg. The CB160 was quicker than most of the old 250 British singles and cost less. The 305 Super Hawk was a giant killer. What's more, these bikes looked good. Someone in Japan understood. Goodbye, Cushman scooter.
Leanings  Peter Egan p258

[Biggles]

It was assumed, for reasons I will never understand, that motorcycles had to be wrenched upon constantly, that they were destined to leak oil and vibrate excessively, scattering parts and vaporizing light filaments.
Perhaps I'm painting too bleak a picture of the pre-Honda era, as there were many fine and relatively refined bikes made earlier, but the majority of 1950s motorcycles had what seemed to me a World War I aircraft flavour to their mechanical innards- and outards. ("Advance the spark, Biggles! We've a Hun on our tail.")
My own first bike was not a Honda. After a brief fling with a semi-functional James/Villiers 150, I bought a Bridgestone Sport 50, mainly because we had a local dealer. A good little bike, but it was a two-stroke and had the usual oil-mix/plug-range hassles.
Shortly thereafter, I got a Honda Super 90 and decided I was a four- stroke kind of a guy.
Leanings  Peter Egan p258