Motorcycle Quote of the Day

[bazza1946]

Never ride your bike where your eyes haven't been already 

[Biggles]

On the single-lane 'motorways', the tarmac was warped from wear and cold and heat, and the ruts trapped my wheels from time to time like tram tracks and took them off towards the oncoming juggernauts. Target fixation's not an issue in Poland. It's perfect midlife crisis territory. You just get in a rut and see where it takes you.
Leapfrogging a track at a time was the only way to progress - escaping the fog of exhaust, a brief face-off with a wall of metal speeding my way, a sonorous blast of a horn, and a return to a warm lungful of diesel. It was like a perpetual game of chicken.
Uneasy Rider  Mike Carter  p167

[Biggles]

I rode through one of Europe's last primeval forests in Bialowieza, and as I emerged an acute pain shot up my left leg. At first I thought I might be having a stroke, but then it occurred to me that it was possibly even worse: there was a wasp in my boot.
Ignoring the sensible action of pulling over and removing my boot, I started to smash myself in the left foot while riding one-handed through the traffic. This only seemed encourage the wasp to intensify his attack.
It also encouraged the attention of the local police who'd been sitting in their squad car in a lay-by and, in this most Catholic of countries, probably concluded that here was some kind of self-flagellating tour of penitence.
They drove behind me and gave their siren a quick toot. I pulled over, dismounted Frankie Dettori style and hopped around in circles, simultaneously punching myself in the foot while trying to get my boot off, shouting 'wasp! wasp!,' which, in all probability, was not the Polish for wasp. The two policemen looked confused, unsure of what the appropriate action was to take.
The stings kept coming. Finally they stopped. I removed my boot and a battered wasp fell out. Can wasps smile? This one looked pretty happy. The policemen looked pretty happy, too.
'Wasp, wasp,' I said, pointing to the lifeless stripy corpse.
'Osa, osa,' they said together.
Uneasy Rider  Mike Carter  p168-9

[Biggles]

In Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert Pirsig talked about his motorbike and the moods it had and its living, breathing soul. And you think, for crying out loud, I know you've had a nervous breakdown, matey, but it is only a machine.
But here's the thing. You spend hour after hour, day after day, listening to your bike, and you do begin to hear it speak. Some days, there's a sweet mellifluous, contented purr and on others a distinct grumbling and weariness.
And the really weird thing is, you start to talk back to I encouraging it, patting it gently on the petrol tank like you would a horse when it's done something desirable, like stop in time in an emergency, for example, and gently scolding it when it does something not so clever, like wobble or slip on a bend.
And you know logically that this is arrant nonsense, that maybe you need to seek out more human company, that a BMW R1200GS is not a horse, despite its dead-sheep saddle and coterie of flies, but simply a marvellous piece of Teutonic engineering, that the only variable here is the lump sitting astride it, and that if I were reading this instead of writing it, I'd be making that twirling gesture against my temple, but...
I'd been talking to my bike a lot in Turkey.
Uneasy Rider  Mike Carter  p224

[Biggles]

So, as the bike pointed due west for the first time in three months, I opened the throttle and hurtled, helmetless, across the desert, touching 70, maybe 80, miles per hour, egging the bike on, patting it on the petrol tank, slipping and a sliding and a hollering and a screaming in the pouring rain; the exhilaration and sense of freedom quite indescribable.
For about two minutes, anyway, until the smell of burning filled my nostrils. I pulled up and killed the ignition. There was smoke rising from my radiator grill. The engine was oil-cooled. I'd only discovered this a couple of days before when the same thing had happened after I'd pulled in for petrol.
Seeing me looking puzzled at the smoke pouring out of the bike, the garage owner had come over.
'Your bike is oil-cooled,' he'd said.
'I know that,' I'd said. 'Tsk.'
'In this heat, it will use much oil.'
'I know that.'
'You need to fill it up more often here.'
'I know that.'
'Or else it will overheat.'
 'Obviously,' I'd said. 'Tsk.'
Would you like to buy some oil?'
'Of course,' I'd said. ‘That's why I stopped here.'
He'd gone off, returned with a bottle of oil and handed it to me.
Thank you,' I'd said.
We'd stood there for a minute or two. I was subtly scanning the bike.
'Nice garage you've got here,’ I'd said.
Would you like me to show you where the oil goes?' he'd asked.
‘Yes, please,' I'd said.
Uneasy Rider  Mike Carter  p228

[Biggles]

We stood there for a minute, awkward. I was frustrated that I couldn't ask him anything about his life. I had so much I needed to tell him. So much I wanted to ask.
He looked over at my bike again.
I pointed to him, then I pointed to myself, then I pointed to the bike. His face broke into a huge grin.
I lifted him up on to the pillion seat, climbed on myself and fired the engine. Then I took off across the scrub, slowly at first, then getting faster, faster, in the rain. His hands dug through my T-shirt and into my skin. I could hear him screaming. I slowed down. The screaming stopped. I turned the throttle, the screaming started again.
Finally, I pulled up outside the tent, put the bike on its stand and lifted him off. He stood there grinning. He didn't look old any more. He looked like a boy.
 He put his arms around me and squeezed tightly, then he ran off towards the tented village.
Uneasy Rider  Mike Carter  p230

[Biggles]

I stopped at a garage for petrol. As ever in Kurdish Turkey, and most other places in Turkey for that matter, I was immediately mobbed by men looking at the bike and asking me questions: always 'how fast?' followed by 'how much?', then gazing at the bike with awed reverence. It was always men. Women, I had disappointingly discovered- were supremely indifferent to motorcycles; if women responded to them the way that men do, I'd still be on the road. Perhaps next time I'll ride a giant shoe.
Tea was always brought out as a matter of course and, as at every garage in Turkey, I was presented with a man-size of tissues. Finding space on a motorcycle for dozens of breezeblock-sized boxes of tissues was problematic. refusal was impossible without causing major offence. Believe me, I'd tried.
And so I took them graciously and cleaned my visor with them, my sunglasses, my windscreen, my exhaust pipe, rocks by the side of the road, mopped up oil spills, plugged holes in dams and, just when I'd managed to get through a whole box, the petrol gauge would start flashing and soon I'd be saying '125mph', '£9,000' and 'thanks for the tissues, just what I needed'.
Uneasy Rider  Mike Carter  p232-3

[jackndon]

 
has life has gone full circle????? when I was sixteen with no arse I was trying to push my Royal Enfield up onto the pavement, off the double yellow lines in the town of Pontypridd  ( look it up?) steep pavement, two Telecom blokes with nothing better to do watching, after said bike made it up over pavement, me covered in sweat, one bloke said, well mate that's the only thing your likely to have hot and throbbing between your legs in the near future, I would not trust you with my sisters pram! I am heading for seventy and what little arse I did have has now disappeared, but I still have a bike hot and throbbing between my legs!

[Biggles]

I'd never ridden along listening to music before, because clearly that would be hazardous on a motorcycle. But whereas listening to music on a normal road might prevent you from hearing a car horn, and thus failing to take evasive action, I doubted that, on a deserted road in these parts, hearing an incoming RPG would leave you much time to do anything apart from say, 'Fu-'
I put on my headphones, replaced my helmet, clicked play, put on my Best of MGM Musicals came the soothing tones of Debbie Reynolds: 'Good mornin', good morrrrrrrrnin.
It's something the world has seemingly known for some time, but only latterly discovered by me, about just how totally music can affect your moods. In no time, I was riding with a happy heart, joining in with Debbie and Gene and Donald, all thoughts of snipers and landmines and RPGs gone.
The iPod shuffled into its next song. If there's another disadvantage to listening to music on a motorcycle, it's that, what with the thick gloves and the iPod being tucked away in your pocket, and the desirability of keeping two hands on the bars, you're kind of stuck with what you get shuffled.
On this occasion it was 'The Ride of the Valkyries'.
On the shadowy ridges, there were small figures moving everywhere I looked.
Uneasy Rider  Mike Carter  p234-5

[Biggles]

I rode south from Cappadocia, across the Anatolian plateau and up into the Taurus Mountains. I was flying quickly around the bends, recklessly even, the false sense of invincibility that can infect you on a motorcycle - like riding with angels - burning strong. I was in a hurry to get to Bodrum.
But there was an atmosphere on the roads that day, a dissonance, like there sometimes is, where the synchronicity was missing.
Everybody seemed nervous or distracted, things that you are far more attuned to with the vulnerability that comes with riding a motorbike. You can instinctively tell if somebody is on their mobile, or having a row with their passenger. Bad driving just becomes so obvious.
Maybe it was the full moon, but the near misses came thick and fast. Something was going to happen; I knew it, everybody else on the road seemed to know it. 
Uneasy Rider  Mike Carter  p245-6

[Biggles]

I came round a bend. Ahead of me was a crowd gathered in the middle of the road. As I drew nearer I could make out the body of a man, lying on his back, hideously twisted and contorted into an impossible shape, thrown clear from the mangled wreckage of the car some 50 metres away.
I noticed a big, dark stain on his trousers around his crotch, and then the woman, a wife or girlfriend maybe, bent over him, bloodied, sobbing. I pulled over and sat on my bike at the side of the road, some distance away, smoking a cigarette. I don't know why I didn't just ride on. It seemed somehow more respectful to wait, quietly.
An ambulance arrived, and they gently, tenderly, straightened out the man, put him on a stretcher and loaded him into the back. Then the woman climbed in, too, slowly, reluctantly. I followed them down the mountain, hurtling along, sirens blazing, although there was little traffic on the road now.
Uneasy Rider  Mike Carter  p246

[Biggles]

I had no idea of what was going to happen. For a split second, I stood there, all the benign and quixotic explanations rushing around my brain. They're out hunting with AK47s? They're lost? He wants to look at my bike? He's from northern Cyprus and wants to practise his English? It all went into slow motion. I stared at the scarf tied around his face. Then I stared at the gun. I remembered the border guard's warnings. I thought about Herr Flick. He was about 60 yards away now.
My legs were growing rapidly heavier and my hands had started to tremble. Any longer and I would become frozen and whatever was going to happen would happen. Weirdly, there was a grain of comfort in this thought, the passive prostrating before the aggressor, curling up in a ball, at the mercy of others. Fifty yards. It was now or never.
I swung my leg over the bike, kicked it off the stand and pressed the ignition. As I smashed the bike into gear and released the clutch too quickly, causing it stutter before catching, I hunched my shoulders, waiting for the sound of the gun. The bike picked up speed, I stayed in a crouched position on the saddle, braced for the impact. It never came.
Uneasy Rider  Mike Carter  p283-4

[Biggles]

Boris drained his can, crushed it on his forehead and let fly with a sonorous belch. 'Now we go to the Pit. Follow me!’
By now, Boris had perhaps drunk enough to not be considering anything more complicated than falling over. But for some reason he thought it a good idea to jump on a powerful motorcycle and speed off through the Zagreb traffic. Just in case balancing on two wheels wasn't difficult enough, Boris rode the first 50 metres pulling a wheelie.
‘The cops here are idiots, plonkers. They never pull over bikers in Zagreb,' Boris told me at the next set of traffic lights,
We waited for the lights to go green.
'But if they try to stop us,' Boris added, 'we will make a run for it. We can cut across the parks. They'll give up. Just follow me and everything will be cushtie.'
It seemed to me somewhat unfair that my blood had been refused when, if anybody was showing the signs of a fondness for tainted Aberdeen sirloin, it was Boris Trotter here.
'Let's go,' he yelled. 'Yeehaa.' And he was off again on one wheel.
Uneasy Rider  Mike Carter  p303

[Biggles]

My mum will not share in your pleasure. I'm not even sure I want her to read this book. You see, my mum really believes that one day I shall come to my senses and stop riding these wretched, stupid and improbably perilous motorcycles. She has believed this since the first day I started riding them, more than thirty years ago. It is a constant in our relationship.
Every time she sees me she asks me if I'm still riding bikes. I tell her I am. She frowns and advises me, yet again, that they're very dangerous.
Because I love her, I refrain from telling her that that I exactly what attracts people like me to motorcycles in the first place. Instead, I lie to her and assure her that I am always careful. I know she doesn't believe me, but I tell her anyway.
The uncomfortable truth is that I actually came to my senses the day I started riding bikes. I so very much came to my senses it was simply not possible to come to them in any greater degree. All the senses there ever were for me to come to, had been arrived at on that fateful day. And the ensuing decades of riding have only served to confirm that arrival.
My Mother Warned Me About Blokes Like Me  Boris Mihailovik  p2-3

[Biggles]

'Giz a go!' I screeched unthinkingly, convinced I'd never get one, but I was a little maddened by the smell of burning oil and exhaust fumes.
'Can you ride?' he asked. A fair question, given Gronk didn't know me very well.
'Yeah!' I lied, fully aware that a detailed rundown of how I crashed a two-stroke Rockhopper into a tree six years before was clearly not what Gronk would want to hear at this pivotal moment.
He shrugged and got off. I had a quick look around to see if there were any teachers nearby, and got on. My toes could barely touch the ground and the bike felt vast. It was hot too, and seriously heavier than I had imagined.
Suddenly I was a little scared. My mates all stood around me, honking and giggling and keeping a look out for teachers, so there was no question of a change of heart In the eyes of my peers, a backdown would be tantamount to admitting you preferred kissing boys. It was a ride-or-die moment.
I revved it. Nothing happened.
Put it in first!' Gronk instructed.
Easy for him to say. I had a vague notion he was talking about gears, but none at all about where they might be found.
'Hold the clutch in!' he demanded, tapping helpfully on the lever.
I duly pulled it in and held it. He kicked the bike into first for me, via a small lever near the left foot peg, and I felt the Honda lurch a bit.
 'Now give it some revs and let the clutch out slowly.’
 And that was pretty much that, as far as my riding lesson went.
It also pretty much sealed the deal on the sale of my soul to the infernal two-wheeler. I was doomed before I'd even pogoed madly out of the car park and onto the street, helmetless and in school uniform - an instant and irredeemable motorcycle tragic, world without end, amen.
I couldn't sleep that night. I had never got the bike out of first gear, stalled it 100 times and ripped open my leg kick-starting it 101 times. But something profound had occurred inside my head in the hour I'd spent 'riding' Gronk's bike in the streets behind my high school - and it was playing on a constant loop as I lay awake in my bed. The sheer atavistic rush of speed that only a motorcycle can provide is so addictive it makes crack cocaine look like a bitch.
My Mother Warned Me About Blokes Like Me  Boris Mihailovik  p8-9

[HONK]

So.
Are you going to put in the story about Squirm and the dog?

[Biggles]

Right then I was about as thrilled as a fifteen-year-old boy could be without bursting spontaneously into flame. All of this excitement stemmed directly from the fact that I was at the controls of a proper motorcycle for the second time in my life and I hadn't the vaguest idea what I was doing.
I understood that a horrible outcome awaited me if I crashed. I wasn't precisely sure what it would be, but I was sure it would be horrible on a scale yet unimagined by me. Interestingly, I did not even consider the physical implications of hitting the road at 80kms per hour dressed in a school uniform. I was more concerned about how I would explain riding and crashing bikes to my father, who was delusional enough to imagine his only son was at school being taught to read and write and hate quadratic
equations.
My Mother Warned Me About Blokes Like Me  Boris Mihailovik  p12

[Biggles]

I nodded, kicked the bike into life and roared off. It took me thirty seconds before I successfully slotted the Honda into second gear.
My heart sang and I must have been grinning and gurning like a fat chick eating biscuits. I subsequently found third and fourth and ultimately fifth, whereupon the bike stalled violently and slammed my balls hard into the petrol tank as I slowed to make a U-turn.
Obviously, there was more to this gear-selection caper than my spray-painted mate had revealed. It took me the best part of the next hour to work out that one must be judicious in one's gear selection by picking the gear most suitable for the speed at which one is travelling. The price for failure was pulped testicles. I was also quickly discovering that motorcycling is a cruel, Darwinian mistress.
But as I worked the gears and felt the bike responding with even greater speed as I careened up and down Cardigan Lane, motorcycling held me ever tighter in its grip and bound me ever closer to its bosom.
My Mother Warned Me About Blokes Like Me  Boris Mihailovik  p14

[Biggles]

I discovered true fear by riding the track at night, the wrong way around, which meant going up Conrod Straight in the other direction - back when it was a real straight and not the effete chicane-shamed atrocity it is today. I can still taste the acerbic tang of pure dread as I hammered up that long, long straight at almost 190 km per hour behind one of the Laverdas, then leaned my bike into the sharp, totally blind uphill right of Forrest's Elbow, followed by the even blinder and steeper uphill horror of the Dipper. This feat was made all the more memorable because people were actually riding the other way at the time.
Oh, and we were drunk. So that helped.
My Mother Warned Me About Blokes Like Me  Boris Mihailovik  p35-6

[Biggles]

'What's that stinkin smell?' Terry groaned as we stood beside a heater inside the Holbrook truck-stop at some obscene and frigid hour of the night.
 'It's piss,' I hissed.
 'What piss?' Terry asked, iris nostrils twitching and his head swivelling from side to side due to his recently acquired blindness.
'My piss,’ I said through clenched teeth. 'I thought we were dead when you ran off the road. I didn't see any point holding it in.’
That was a lie. I could no more have held in that wee than I could have turned the tide. When Terry's bike left the road and started tankslapping along the verge, my bladder unilaterally emptied, clearly of the opinion I should arrive at the Throne of Jesus with a freshly flushed urethra.
 'Why's the back of my pants wet?' Terry gasped in horror as his hands patted the arse of his jeans, which were steaming as they dried in front of the heater.
'Please don't make me tell you,' I grated.
‘AARRGGHH,' Terry moaned, wincing in revulsion as my fright-wee dried on his body and made his skin prickle.
It was too cold to go outside and wash our clothes in the toilet, and in any case our more immediate concern was Terry's blindness and how that would impact on the fact that we had to be in Albury to get my bike off the train in three hours.
'How blind are you?' I asked him.
 'What?' he keened, his head radaring from side to side as it locked onto my voice.
My Mother Warned Me About Blokes Like Me  Boris Mihailovik  p43-4

[Biggles]

Radiant dealerships full of embossed leather duds, piratical bandannas and faux Nazi helmets were still some way off as I began doing time with My Shovelhead.
And what a time it was! We were nothing if not busy, that's for sure. I spent more time with that bike than with any other bike I have had before or since. And a lot of that time was spent on the side of the road in places as diverse as inner-city Melbourne and the table drain on the Hay Plain eighty-five kilometres from Balranald. I've sheltered beside it in pouring rain outside of Murray Bridge and cursed it from the shade of a solitary tree near Coonamble. I would have put in, and observed the departure of, at least 10,000 litres of 20W-50 Pennzoil, smeared a billion metres of Silastic around its ever-leaking primary and wondered how, by all that is holy, anyone could build a bike using self-tapping wood screws to hold the headlight in its nacelle. A nacelle, I might add, I had obsessively rubbed some sixty kilograms of Autosol alloy polish into over the time I owned the bike.
My Shovelhead never stopped leaking oil - though it did vary the amounts from a few drops to 'How the hell am I gonna get home now?' And it never failed to excite me when it barked its unmuffled hatred at the world. Except that one time when I ran into the back of a stationary car while admiring my tattooed he-glory in a shop window. Then it kinda pissed me off.
My Mother Warned Me About Blokes Like Me  Boris Mihailovik  p96

[Biggles]

As we headed further up the coast the next morning, I found myself riding behind Jabba. It was both oily and hilarious. Sitting just behind him coming into Taree, I noticed that every few kays his bike's exhaust note would change. Apparently, one of its leads kept falling off. Not wishing to annoy us any further by stopping to fix it, Jabba would simply reach down and plug it back in. This would send massive spasms of pain shooting through his already road-battered body, as 35,000 volts coursed through him, causing him to swerve wildly across the road as he fought to regain control of the Triumph and his twitching limbs. I was laughing, but I also wondered just how much more of this abuse he could take.
We stopped in Taree tor breakfast, which gave Jabba a chance to forage through some nearby rubbish bins for more cardboard. He also asked each of us in turn if we had any spare foam handlebar grips. When I giggled at him, he held up two very dirty and badly swollen hands. The bike's inherent vibration, amplified by the fact the motor was missing two head steadies, was causing the solidly mounted handlebars to buzz with crippling intensity. The swelling of his hands got worse the further up the coast we got By Port Macquarie, Jabba was no longer gripping the handlebars. He was operating the throttle by pushing the heel of his right hand against it and moaning. His left hand would only go to the bars when he was forced to reach down and reconnect the plug lead with his right.
My Mother Warned Me About Blokes Like Me  Boris Mihailovik  p143-4

[Biggles]

We were to meet at Wisemans Ferry West Crossing at 6 am on the day of departure. This was the ferry one caught to cross the Hawkesbury River in order to ride to the old St Albans pub - a popular Sunday beer-and-lunch spot for lots of Sydney's motorcyclists. But we weren't going to St Albans. We were turning left immediately after the ferry crossing and heading up to the e Putty Road, then down a dirt road to cross the Colo River on some old wooden bridge that had been built by convicts a thousand years before Sydney got electricity. From there, we'd head up into the Great Dividing Range, to Bilpin and Mount Wilson via the Bells Line of Road and onto the Bowens Creek track - which, according to the knot of contour lines, was nothing but a narrow path cut into the arse of a great sandstone cliff with a surface designed to murder the stupid novice dirt-rider with immense malice.
My Mother Warned Me About Blokes Like Me  Boris Mihailovik  p191

[Biggles]

Day Two was to begin with fuelling up, then following the bitumen through Canberra and out onto the Cotter Road to the Cotter Dam. But before plunging into the waters of the dam, we intended to turn right onto the Brindabella Road - which I saw came with its own handwritten aside for me to absorb. The aside said: ‘You will die on this road if you do not pay attention and take it easy. It is steep, twisty and if you make an error, you'll plummet off a cliff and into one of the most beautiful valleys in Australia.'
Should I somehow make it to the bottom on two wheels, I would notice that Brindabella Road met Crace Road on a bridge over the Goodradigbee River. Ten kilometres further up, we would turn onto Boundary Road, then Forest Drive, Broken Cart Track and the Long Plain - which had been marked on the map as twelve kilometres of 'super-fast open plains dirt' - and a place I could crash the bike at velocities I had never even dreamed of.
My Mother Warned Me About Blokes Like Me  Boris Mihailovik  p192

[Biggles]

I showered quickly as tiredness started to set in with a vengeance. I then fell into a bed that was more akin to a hammock, only to find Mick bellowing it me the instant I'd closed my eyes.
'Come on!' he yelled. 'It's four am, we have to go!'
Damn good thing I'd tucked the almost empty bottle of Turkey in Al's snoring arms before I put myself to bed, or he'd be shaking me even harder, I thought I struggled to my feet and started to dress myself. I knew no one had shat in my mouth because I'd been hung-over before and I was on familiar ground, but my head was sore and murky as I squirmed into my boots.
'Good job,’ Ian grinned as he watched me curse and mutter and search for my wallet and phone which had somehow found their way under my mattress. 'I always get pissed on good whiskey before riding 400 kays of really difficult dirt,’ he observed.
 'Yeah me too,' I growled back and swallowed some gooey spit that tasted rather more like some liquefied internal organ than I would have liked. Then I went downstairs, got on my bike in the frosty darkness and headed for Canberra along the Federal Highway.
My Mother Warned Me About Blokes Like Me  Boris Mihailovik  p204