From the Library

[Biggles]

The checkered flag is out for the session and I raise my left hand to signal that I'm coming into the pits.  The pit entrance at Mid-Ohio is curved and slightly downhill.  I'm leaning gently through that curve, left hand still off the grip, already in first gear and already thinking ahead to the next session, when I squeeze some front brake to slow down even more and... Wham! I'm on the ground! Worse yet, I'm lying in the grass with my feet higher than my head and the rear wheel of the Ducati pinning my right leg.  I'm splayed out on the ground with all the dignity of a deboned chicken, flopped helplessly in the grass for everyone to see as they ride into the pits, having just locked the front wheel and crashed.  In first gear. At maybe 30 mph.  On the pit lane entrance.
In the history of motorcycle crashes, many have been worse, but few have been more embarrassing.
The Ride So Far  Lance Oliver p 62-3

[Biggles]

Of all my bad riding habits, turning in early is one I constantly battle.  You'll never find a pro racer or a riding instructor who extols the virtues of an early apex, but anxiety gnaws at my patience and whispers in my ear, "turn now, turn now."  But with McWilliams' advice stuck in my mind like the word God (only with an Irish accent), I check my worst impulses and force myself to wait until my front wheel comes even with that orange cone before banking left.  Then, I plunge over the edge, like riding off the side of a building.  It was with this very moment in mind that I showed restraint at the morning breakfast buffet.  My guts rise to press against my lungs, the bike feels light, and any feelings of two-dimensional illusions are vaporized.  As I fall over the edge and finally get to see the track ahead of me, the importance of following McWilliams' advice is instantly obvious in a way that sears the information into my mind for all future laps.  If I had aimed the bike in the direction I would expect the track to go, if I had started my turn early and lined up for a sweeping curve like I'd expect to find on any other track, I'd be six feet into the gravel and dirt.  Instead, thanks to my strict adherence to McWilliams' recommended line, I'm still on the black as gravity sucks me downward a few stories while I shift from left lean to right lean.
The Ride So Far  Lance Oliver p 77-8

[Biggles]

Strempfer launches into a story about the Benelli brothers having a spat back in the 1950s, with one of the brothers stomping off in a huff to build motorcycles called Motobis.  It all sounds very Italian.  As for mechanical particulars, he explains that a Motobi 125 is a four-stroke with a single, air- cooled, horizontal cylinder.  The five-speed gearbox is operated by a heel-toe shifter on the right side.  In reverse pattern.  The rear brake pedal is on the left side.  So I'm trying to get my mind around the concept of downshifting by pushing down with the heel of what I've always considered my braking foot when I realize, I really ought to test ride this thing before I'm expected to perform anything called an "ability test," or even mingle with unsuspecting Vermont traffic.
The Ride So Far  Lance Oliver p 97-8

[Biggles]

In a lucky lifetime, I've been visit some spectacular capital-D Destinations, the manmade Schonbrunn Palace in Vienna, Glacier National Park in Montana, the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., and many other "sights."  And yes, I've also spent many an enjoyable afternoon in Manhattan, seen the Grand Canyon, and even survived a couple of visits to Vegas.  But just as vivid are memories of places that never make anyone's list of Destinations, anonymous little places such as San Vito, Costa Rica, or Nipigon, Ontario, Canada.  Usually, those memories stick with me because I not only visited a place, but through chance or planning, got a look into the lives of people who live there- people unlike myself- and learned something in the process.
Such was the case with my sojourn in Tuxpan. I can't describe for you, in any detail, the rooms of the Schonbrunn Palace, though I can assure you that all the ones I saw were opulently spectacular.  What I do remember, much better, is the look on the face of the woman rushing to find the T-shirt I wanted before I changed my mind, and how glad I was that I waited.  I remember a teenager washing laundry in Tuxpan while dreaming of making a living as a musician in the United States, and hundreds of children pulling homemade carritos (toy cars) through candlelit streets in memory of children who did not survive.  And most of all I remember the surprising magic of finding myself in the best place I could possibly be on that one night of the year, even though I didn't know enough to choose it on purpose.  Sometimes, it works out that way, and a simple motorcycle journey leaves lasting memories of a very human, if not historic, scale, from a place where nobody goes.  Something to consider the next time you're choosing a destination.
The Ride So Far  Lance Oliver p 110

[Biggles]

Around one of those sweeping turns I find a faded 1976 Honda CB550 Four parked in a wide spot by the road, its owner crouched at its side.  I stop to see if I can provide assistance or, more likely, given my mechanical skills and the near absence of tools on the V-Strom, provide company and commiseration.  The rider tells me that he only recently pulled the old Honda out of storage and is still tracking down electrical problems, one of which has just left him at roadside.  While we examine fuses and poke at the thirty-year-old patina of corrosion on the ground wire, he asks me about my ride and I explain my northward course on Route 100 and my general lack of plans more detailed than that.  "You should ride Lincoln Gap," he advises.  "You won't believe it.  You just go up and up the mountain.  About that time, the Honda's lights come back on, though its hard to say what we did to achieve that success.  I suspect it won't be his last search for wayward electrons in the old bike.
The Ride So Far  Lance Oliver p 121

[Biggles]

I don't remember another specific detail about the ride my wife and I took that Sunday afternoon, but I still remember the old man telling his story.  It's one of those quirks of humanity that define us.  We may love motorcycles with an enthusiasm severe enough to qualify us for a clinical study.  We may suffer an addict's craving for the physical sensations of riding.  We see some of the earth's greatest sights on two wheels, and experience them more intensely because we ride to them.  Yet because we are human, the most memorable part of many a ride is neither the destination nor the journey, but some unexpected character met along the way.
The Ride So Far  Lance Oliver p 127

[Biggles]

If you happen to own a motorcycle bearing the logo of one of the resurrected marques, such as the Triumph I often ride, you're guaranteed to have extra conversations on the road.  It happens to me time and again.  An older man approaches me at a gas station to exclaim, "I didn't know they were still in business!"  Then he tells me about the old Bonneville he had back in the day, and at some point his gaze drifts off to some unfocused place, and I can just hear him thinking, wondering, trying to remember why he ever sold that old motorcycle.
The Ride So Far  Lance Oliver p 128

[Biggles]

Once I stopped for gas in upstate New York on a Suzuki V-Strom and the out-of-state license plate was enough to trigger the forty-something guy coming out of the convenience store to run over to me, ask cursorily where I was from, and then launch into an excited monologue about a cross-country motorcycle trip he took in his twenties, one of those life-altering experiences that's never forgotten, even though he'd hardly ridden since.  His tale didn't slow down long enough for me to get a word out, which was good, because the obvious question was one I didn't have the heart to ask: "Why did you stop?"  Why did that experience have to be just once-in-a-lifetime?  Maybe I was imagining it, but there seemed to be some sadness punctuating the end of his story of excitement, youth, and adventure.  He never really asked a word about where I was going, or why.  He was still running on the fumes of a ride that was twenty years in the rearview mirror and I had places to go that very same evening.  I rode away feeling a little sorry for him, I do occasionally for the men who tell me about long-lost Triumphs and Harleys and Indians, and I promised myself yet again not to travel down the road to regrets, if I can help it.
The Ride So Far  Lance Oliver p 128

[Biggles]

I stop for stranded riders because I've been the beneficiary of kindness many times myself, and from all kinds of people, not just fellow riders.  There was the guy with the shop making customized campers who interrupted his work and drove several miles to fill his gas can for me when I foolishly ran out on the highway, or, when I was a college student travelling on a shoe-string budget, the family at the campground that set up their extra tent for me after someone stole some of my camping gear leaving me without shelter as a night-long rain moved in.  It sometimes seems to me that the farther from home, the better people treat me as a traveller and the more they go out of their way to help me out of a jam.
The Ride So Far  Lance Oliver p 130

[Biggles]

I could be lots of places.  I could be riding in the Rockies or the Alps, and those places make great fodder for bragging about memorable motorcycle rides.  Or I could be riding some not-quite-two-lane past the silence of little country church graveyards where my ancestors lie, past the smell of hay drying in the sun, through the coolness that drifts from a deep fold of a shady country hollow, back through time, back through remembrance, pulled along by the motorcycle's torque, which is another remembrance in itself.  And I could say, this feels right.
The Ride So Far  Lance Oliver p 146

[Biggles]

Exactly why we're hooked is hard to say. A lot of writers have tried to pin down the reasons and come up gasping for words. Others have come close. Robert Louis Stevenson might have had motorcycling in mind when he wrote: 'To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive'. A little ahead of his time, perhaps, but as true today as it was then. Roger Hull, the bard of the American touring motorcyclist, puts it this way: 'It's the going. I mosey across the miles, mingle with the elements, merge with the macrocosm. See and feel for myself what others may have seen and experienced before me. A wandering cowboy, I... with an emotional genealogy which is suspected of linkage back to Cortez or Columbus or Marco Polo or to any other free spirit whose vision tended to focus on that which lay beyond what his eyes could see. Touring is a lonely feat; we are solitary seekers, wanderers sensitive to our physical surroundings, while we live mostly inside our heads.'
Therein lies the greater part of the magic: while touring on a motorcycle your body and your senses are open to an ever-changing battery of stimuli, and your mind in its solitude is the freer to savour them. The combined effect is spellbinding, and that's what keeps the touring rider coming back for more again and again.
Motorcycle Touring  Peter Thoeming p186

[Biggles]

But at eighteen, even the most precocious of us are slates still mostly blank.  And that was the age at which I stumbled into being a motorcyclist, without much planning, by buying a very used, non-descript, massively mass-produced bike with a questionable history (and probably paying too much for it), falling in love not so much with the machine, but with the world of sensations and experiences it opened to me.  In other words, pretty much the same old story. Millions of us did it.
The Ride So Far  Lance Oliver p 149

[Biggles]

In 1973 the big lump of the Baby Boomer bulge was in young adulthood, prime motorcycling time.  At same time, the Japanese manufacturers were importing relatively inexpensive, easy-to-ride, far-more-reliable motorcycles by the thousands to meet the demand, while Harley-Davidson limped toward its darkest years and the once-mighty British motorcycle industry continued resolutely firing repeated rounds into its foot by building the same old thing, with engines guaranteed to leak oil and headlights likely to fail at the first sign of impending nightfall.  Millions of people in the United States at least gave motorcycles a try during that time and while many drifted off, some caught the addiction and never shook it.  And the one thing that absolutely all riders share is a memory, whether dim or vivid, clear-eyed or nostalgic, humorous or heart-warming or traumatic, of a first bike.
The Ride So Far  Lance Oliver p 150

[Biggles]

And yet, as much as the world changes, some human sentiments come close to universal.  Home from college for the summer, I would park that utterly unremarkable CB360T in the garage of my parents' house after coming in from a night-time ride and listen to the tick ticking of the old air-cooled engine as it dissipated its heat, the metals contracting into their resting places. I could detect the distinct burning smell of oil pooling on the hottest engine parts and the few last wisps of exhaust drifting from the twin exhaust pipes. I lingered in the garage, not wanting to go inside the house.  Sitting there, beside that cheap and practical machine few could covet, I savoured the ride, even if it was just an ordinary trip across town to a friend's house, and I was, without knowing it, burning deep and lasting memories into a primal part of my brain.  The right combination of hot oil on hot metal can yank me back to those moments utterly unexpectedly, decades later.
The Ride So Far  Lance Oliver p 153-4

[Biggles]

Now, I could be wrong, but I imagine little happened in Okeechobee, and I'm sure the bored pump jockey hadn't seen many motorcyclists ride up to the full-service pump.  His lack of experience nearly led to my demise.
Having filled the tank, he decided to run up the sale amount to the nearest half dollar, just as he always did, no doubt, with cars.  My little tank couldn't take it.  By the time he gave up, the tank was filled to the cap, and I set off down the loneliest stretch of Florida 710 in the hot sun.  Of course as that hot sun hit my stylish charcoal-coloured gas tank, the cool gasoline inside began to expand.  By the time I was out of town and rolling down the bowling alley-straight two-lane, gasoline was flowing freely out of the gas cap and streaming down the tank toward my crotch, where it threatened to drip onto the rear cylinder of the air-cooled V-twin engine.
Let me tell you, my mind was quite focused as I considered my equally unappealing options.  The thought of stopping by that desolate roadside led to visions of even more expanding gasoline flowing out and dripping all over the hot, air-cooled engine, threatening all-out conflagration.  The thought of continuing down the road led to images of becoming a rolling fire-ball with a freshly filled tank of fuel.  If external combustion did break out, which would be worse?  Abandoning the motorcycle at the first hint of ignition and tumbling down the pavement at speed, or having a fine imitation of a flame-thrower aimed at my most sensitive parts for the time it would take me to slow down and dismount?
The Ride So Far  Lance Oliver p 161-2