The Ride Report

For the first post of a motorcycle blog, where better to start than to tell how I got started riding?

My first time on a bike was when I was 13 years old in Berthoud, Colorado. A friend from school was riding his motorcycle — a little Kawasaki 90, if I recall correctly — in a field on the outskirts of town and he let me take a turn. I don’t remember much about it, just a scary sense of nearly out-of-control speed as I clung to the handlebars for dear life and the bike tried to race away without me. Really scary … but really fun.

Fast-forward to age 18 and I’m living in a suburb of Los Angeles (Reseda, for any Angelenos reading this) and my room mate is selling his Suzuki GS450L and suddenly I own my first motorcycle and I’m on my way.

From such humble beginnings I went on to…

• A Honda Hawk 400 that I have almost no memory of.
• A Honda CB750F — this was one of my favorite bikes. I named it “Spend-a-Buck” after the Kentucky Derby winner of the same year because the damned thing was always breaking down and always in the shop, but when it ran it was a beautiful thing. One of my favorite memories on that bike was making a beer and cocaine fueled speed run through Topanga Canyon to the beach at about 5 a.m. one morning, scraping my pegs the whole way. I never rode it better than I did that night — and believe me, I know how lucky I was to have survived it, given my condition.
• A Kawasaki 750 that I eventually crashed on the way home from work one day. Fortunately, I had my helmet with me that day. Unfortunately, I wasn’t wearing it. I was getting on the 101 freeway at Western and I have a vague memory of coming down the on-ramp to the bumper-to-bumper traffic and seeing a Chuck-sized gap in the second lane over and sort of dipping toward a small gap in the first lane to get to it … and then I woke up in the hospital the next day with 15 stitches in my head, road rash all over my back, and a major concussion. Fun.

That pretty much suspended my motorcycling career for awhile. I ended up selling the Kawasaki to my younger brother, who also crashed it and broke his nose and arm. I guess the bike must have been cursed or something.

I went on to become a full-time cager, just driving cars to work and play and thinking “I used to be one of you guys” when motorcycles went by. I went through a few cars, went through a few years, got married and had a little girl, went through a few jobs… And then I landed a pretty well-paying job about 65 miles from my house, down in Aliso Viejo.

If you know Los Angeles, then you know that commuting from Van Nuys to Aliso Viejo is insane. 65 miles through the worst traffic L.A. and Orange County have to offer. Easily a 2-hour trip during the heart of rush hour. You’d have to be stupid to drive that in a car every day. Well, I’m not stupid, I drove it in a Toyota Land Cruiser with manual transmission that only got about 10 miles to the gallon. No fool, me.

A commute like that will get you to thinking about motorcycles again, and within a year I was back in the saddle again with a Honda Shadow ACE 1100. 35 miles to the gallon and about an hour and fifteen minutes to the commute. Nice. But statistics are a bitch. There’s a current trend with riders my age (early 40’s): they rode when they were younger, took a few years off, then they get back in the saddle right about the same time I did. And this particular age group of riders are statistically very likely to crash. And that’s what I did.

On my way home from work one day, heading north on the 5 freeway, I was getting off at El Toro Road to go to a motorcycle shop to buy some new goggles. I was looking over my shoulder to see if the store was still open instead of watching where I was going, and when I looked eyes-front again the off-ramp was turning to the right a lot more sharply than I was. Looking back on it with the experience and skills I have now, it would have been easy to counter-steer to make the turn, but I didn’t have that then. Instead, what I did was target-fixate and drive straight off the pavement and crash the bike. End result: four broken ribs … and I learned to counter-steer.

Another two years down the road I moved up to a Yamaha Road Star, the biggest bike I’d ever ridden at 1600 cc. I put quite a few miles on that bike and really loved it, but everybody thought the damned thing was a Harley, and I kept feeling like I was making excuses when I said that it wasn’t. Because truth be told, I really wanted a Harley. I liked the Road Star, but I wanted the Hog.

So last year I finally bit the bullet and bought a Harley. I had always lusted after the Road King Classic in Vivid Black, so of course I bought a brand new 2006 Road Glide. Go figure. But I loved it; the Road Glide is Harley’s best-kept secret.

With apologies to anyone who doesn’t share my love of H-D, in my mind Harley is the top of the motorcycle food chain. Most Japanese cruisers today (like my Honda Shadow and Yamaha Road Star) are copying Harley’s styling. They’re wanna-be Harleys for guys who don’t have a Harley wallet, and I was settling for an imitation because I didn’t want to pay the price for the real thing. I still like the metrics today and I respect those who ride them — but I ride a Harley now.

I’m on my second Road Glide now, a 2003 with a 95″ motor and 6-speed transmission. (What happened to the first one is a long story involving a bad transmission, multiple failed warranty repairs, and an unheard of dealer buy-back.) I’ve had it for almost a year now and I’ve put just over 10,000 miles on it so far. I love this bike, it’s the best one I’ve ever owned. I’m going to ride this thing until the wheels fall off. Don’t get me wrong — I’m not a Harley snob by any means — hell, I’m lusting after a BMW R1150GS as a second bike right now — but I love this bike.

I’m going to be writing a lot about my experiences on it here. I hope you enjoy them.

Stay tuned…