Motorcycle Quote of the Day

[Biggles]

Eureka was the first town and I stopped for gas and groceries and drank an entire bottle of iced tea while reading the cover story of the Montanan Standard. It seemed that Sonny Barger and the rest of the Hell's Angels were having their annual gathering and vacation outing in Missoula that week, and police presence was expected to be heavy. Aha, I get it now. Did the officer at the border think I was some sort of an outrider for the Angels, on my way to hook up with the gang in Missoula? It explained her initial frostiness. The newspaper's front-page picture was of Barger. He was photographed with three fingers closing the hole in his throat, a memento of cancer surgery, so that he could speak to the reporter. At his side was one of his lieutenants, a massive, black leather-clad man with a goatee and a spill of dark auburn curls that fell well past his shoulders. Although there was little to admire about the criminal activities of the Hell's Angels, I did have to laugh at Barger's quote, given in response to a clearly nervous reporter's question about the expected behaviour of the Angels in Montana: "We're just like your neighbours, only better looking."
Breaking The Limit   Karen Larsen  p269

[Biggles]

Motorcycles are a great leveller of humanity and an enormous point of connection between people who take them, and their riding, seriously. You may have a thirty-five-thousand dollar custom machine straight off the dealership floor, and I may have a six-hundred dollar fourth-hand clunker with a suicide clutch and three gears out of five that actually work, but we are both out in the same wind and the same weather. Both of us are going to get hit with splattering bugs and have to watch for the same ignorant parent chauffeuring their kids to piano lessons who just doesn't "see" us as they make that left turn across our lane. We are all going to see the beauty of the landscape, to inhale its scents, and to experience the lift and drop of the road from a very different perspective than those within enclosed vehicles do. Regardless of race, class, gender, creed, language, or sexual orientation, regardless of whether we talk for five minutes or spend an evening over burgers and beer, and regardless of whether or not we ever see one another again, we are going to have common ground. We are bikers. At a gas station I have never seen anyone step from a car, turn to a stranger getting out of another and say, "Hey, you drive one of those, too? Isn't it great? How’s it running? How's the road ahead?" This happens all the time between motorcyclists.   
Breaking The Limit   Karen Larsen  p272-3

[Biggles]

It was so easy to edge the pace higher and higher. I hadn't seen a police officer in days. Perhaps they were all in Missoula hanging out with the Angels? At a long sloping stretch I ran Lucy up to sixty, then seventy, eighty, and ninety miles an hour. She was a powerful machine for her size: we hit ninety five miles an hour, and could easily have flown faster.
Wide-eyed mule deer watched a few yards from the pavement, ears lifted long and alert above their delicate faces, as I whistled by. Occasionally a flash of white painted metal glittered at roadside. The state of Montana had placed as many small white crosses as there had been deaths at the sites of highway wrecks. The memorials were an attempt to remember the dead, but even more so to remind the living of the fatal consequences of excessive speed and inattention. After a few miles of earthbound flight I slowed Lucy to an easy seventy-mile-an-hour pace, thinking of my own reaction time, the speed of bounding mule deer, and the small white crosses beside the road.
Breaking The Limit   Karen Larsen  p277

[Biggles]

At the other end of the pull-off a biker with an immaculate green Electra Glide crouched near his front wheel adjusting the footbrake with an equally gleaming wrench. It is one of the understood codes of the motorcycling community that if you see a biker who looks like he or she is having mechanical difficulties, you pull over and ask if you can help. Prevalent stereotypes are such that people in cars will rarely, if ever, stop to help a biker parked on the shoulder of the road.  However, before I even started walking toward him, I knew that the man didn't need my help. He had a look of control and capability about him, expressed in the practiced fluid rotation of his wrist on the wrench, but there are times when code should be followed.
"Problems?"
"Nope. Loose foot brake."
He was tall. Even as he crouched I guessed that he stood about six feet, maybe a little more. A beaded belt fed through the loops of his spotless blue jeans and a pressed denim shirt hung across broad, square shoulders. The shirt buttoned to the neck and wrists, but as he worked and one cuff rose, I saw the band of heavy tattooing that encircled his lower arm. It was the terminal edge of an elaborate design and I guessed that his arms, if not his entire torso, were gloved in ink.
Breaking The Limit   Karen Larsen  p290-1

[Biggles]

Just like the time that I lost my balance in Colorado, there was not even a scratch or dent to mark her fall, but dropping Lucy on the outskirts of Sturgis as bikers went by in the hundreds, was devastating to my pride. More importantly, it nearly caused an accident as three bikers locked up the brakes on their own machines in their attempt to stop, turn around, and come help me. I already had Lucy back up on her kickstand and was checking her over when my three would-be knights errant roared up the gravel drive. All were truly beautiful men in their late twenties or early thirties, cut-off T-shirts exposing heavily muscled, tanned, and tattooed arms. This was awful. Was it too much to ask that the people who witnessed my humiliation should be kindly grandfatherly types? Was it strictly necessary that the men who viewed my weakest moment as a motorcyclist look as if they had stepped directly from a Chippendale calendar? At that moment I fervently hoped that the fuel-saturated earth would open and swallow me whole. It did not.
"Are you all right?"
Fine, just damaged my pride. "We saw you go down and thought you might need help." I could feel the scarlet of my face. I felt like an idiot. I was an idiot. I babbled some nonsensical explanation about slow turns, gravel, and distractions, thanked them for pulling over, swung a dusty leg over the saddle, and got the hell out of there as rapidly as possible. Dropping a motorcycle at Sturgis is the equivalent of the springboard diver who does a belly flop at the Olympics or the professional ballroom dancer who steps on her own dress and lands in a most ungraceful heap in front of the judges.  Humiliation.
Breaking The Limit   Karen Larsen  p313

[Biggles]

In the distance, thick bolts of lightning dropped straight out of the lowering cloudbank, followed almost immediately by thunder so intense that I could feel it through my sternum. I was only ten minutes out of Rice Lake, driving the line of an eastbound storm of Wagnerian proportions, when I decided that it was time to look for roofed shelter for the night. I estimated I had half an hour before the system was on top of me and real trouble began. Hunching down behind Lucy's windshield as the rain began to fall, I twisted her throttle and ran for the next community. Birchwood had a single motel; at forty-four dollars a night, had what looked like a flight of Valkyries not been lowing in, I would have kept driving. However, after one last hurried perusal out the motel office window, I dropped a credit card on the reservation desk and asked the woman to charge it.
Wrenching my luggage from Lucy's frame, I tied her tarp as tightly and as strongly as I could through her wheels and forks, gave her gas tank one final pat, and sprinted for the room. Five minutes later, walnut-sized hail joined the drenching rain and blasting wind. After changing into dry clothes, and tuning in the Weather Channel's tornado warnings for Rice Lake and northern Wisconsin, forty-four dollars did not seem so extravagant.
Breaking The Limit   Karen Larsen  p333

[Biggles]

In the elegance of the cafe with its polished glass cases or handmade chocolates and cakes, I felt tattered and a little road weary, but also strong and experienced, accomplished and capable. What a magnificent journey this had been. Now that there was so little of it remaining, I resolved to do the last four hundred miles with reverence, to pay attention to every lift and curve, and to make a song of this last stretch or road that I could carry with me for life.
Back on 221 noticed anew the sensuality of moving through space, riding the back of a motorcycle that swooped over hills and swung into corners like bird on the wing. Fifteen thousand miles and I still loved that flying, floating feeling and could wonder at it afresh each time I called it to consciousness.
Breaking The Limit   Karen Larsen  p348

[Biggles]

On the open road I had learned to accept each day for what it brought and each turn for what it revealed. I had learned something of strength and stamina, something of vulnerability and loneliness. I had learned when I had reached my limits, and when to push on. I had learned how to listen to both my machine and my inner voice, and to pay attention to what they suggested. Rather than looking to find myself, I learned how to lose myself in the road, to take each moment for what it was, and to open my eyes and heart to what surrounded me.
Breaking The Limit   Karen Larsen  p358

[Biggles]

That, I thought, could be my last ride: to rediscover the United Kingdom before the age of motorways, very slowly, between towering hedges, over moors, along leafy lanes and back roads, to places I've been, and even more I haven't. There would be all of Ireland to conquer, and much of the north. There would be pubs, inns and B&Bs galore. I'd be on a small bike, very understated, no fancy gear or space-age suit, preferably just carrying a toothbrush and a credit card; I'd never do more than a hundred miles a day. Perhaps I'd find Trench Hall, the stately home where I spent two years as an evacuee, and I could reminisce about the house where my sweetheart lived on the Dumbarton road.
And then, as I thought about it, more and more episodes of my early life came to mind, some hilarious, some sombre.
Rolling Through The Isles  Ted Simon  p4-5

[Biggles]

Trying to identify what this bike would be, I began to wonder whether I had trapped myself with an idea that couldn't be realised. And then, while l was in London, a strange little machine came tootling past me on Putney High Street and I was sold.
It was a scooterish affair with two wheels at the front. I had never known that such a thing existed. I looked it up on the Internet and there it was, the MP3, half scooter, half bike, made by Piaggio who also made the Vespa. It was strange enough, I thought, to unseal the lips of all the bibulous bystanders in Blighty. I had in my mind's eye an enticing, if rather quaint, picture of myself as an elegant gentleman of a certain age, probably in kid gloves and a silk scarf, rolling up to a rustic coaching inn where loquacious locals lounging around with foaming pints would be intrigued by this phenomenon - "Why, sir, may we enquire what brings a fine gentleman like yourself to these parts, and on such an unusual conveyance?" - thus unleashing a tide of tales and reminiscences, which I would dutifully transcribe that night behind mullioned windows by the light of a guttering candle... maybe the picture was somewhat overdrawn, but you get the idea.
Rolling Through The Isles  Ted Simon  p8

[Kev Murphy]

What an odd little toy?

 

[Biggles]

I was really surprised, but by now even it I'd had the chance to change my mode of transport I wouldn't have taken it. How can I explain why this little contraption I was riding seemed so perfectly appropriate?
It has the innocence of a toy, nothing so purposeful as a motorcycle, let alone a car, yet at the same time it is a definite conveyance, a rolling seat, a vehicle out of a children's story - you get on it, and off it goes, like an ambulatory armchair. No gears to think about. All you have to do is steer it. I could have been Toad of Toad Hall, or Pooh Bear. I was wearing my elegant light tan leather jacket, my yellow kid gloves and a silk scarf. The only thing wrong with this picture is that I wasn't wearing my flat hat and goggles.
Rolling Through The Isles  Ted Simon  p29-30

[Biggles]

Sorry about the hiatus.  I've been through a house move, a house sale and am still trying to retire by selling my business.
I am reading (when able) "Rolling Through The Isles" but it's more about his youth and the English countryside, so bike-specific quotes are a bit scarce.
I'll be back to full service soon, hopefully.

[Brock]

 

[Kev Murphy]

 

[Shiney]

Thanks mate, I look forward to the next quote.
I hope the sale goes well and you settle in to you're new place soon

Sent from my SM-N9005 using Tapatalk

[Biggles]

Still hoping to find a route away from the main roads I wasted a lot of time dodging off into inviting little lanes only to find myself forced implacably back on
to the highway. The weather - my enemy - looked awkward, and I could see I was fairly sure, sooner or later, to get wet again. Of course, getting wet is a big part of biking, but I couldn't bring myself think like a biker. I clung to the illusion that I was a gentleman of leisure, ambling across the countryside, and
such a person travels in sunshine. He would not be seen cocooned in waterproofs. The rainclouds were interspersed with patches of blue and I rode on determined to slip between them. And, in fact, I managed quite well for about twenty minutes, until a great ugly black mass reared up in front of me. With my tail between my legs I scooted back to the last petrol station and waited until the doom-laden cloud had passed over.
Rolling Through The Isles  Ted Simon  p70

[Biggles]

At the time, of course, as we sailed down the A6 in the Austin Baronmobile, everything appeared normal, but in my mind's eye I can still see the open road. Imagine it. An open road.  In England.  Not just a gap in the traffic. Emptiness.  Ah, here comes a bus, all alone. It stops. It starts again, and disappears in the distance.  More  emptiness.
On this journey, as I ride around on my little praying mantis I curse the traffic. There are times when I see the endless onrushing horde of cars hurtling towards me as a Hitchcockian nightmare in which blind metallic things have taken over world.  And they have, and it is a nightmare.  Even though the people in the cars think they know what they're doing, where they're going and why, the sum effect is mindlessness.  Outside the metallic skin of the car, at a different level of perception, it is all insanity.  No intelligent being would ever design a social order in which hundreds of millions of people are forever dashing around in boxes on wheels.
Rolling Through The Isles  Ted Simon  p77

[Biggles]

Today the volume of traffic on British roads is ten times what it was when I started travelling around, and the consequence for drivers in this small, densely populated island was inevitable.  Most driving in Britain today is like navigating a board game - snakes and ladders but without the ladders.  On the main road system, at junctions and elsewhere, the surface is a grid laid out with multi-coloured lines and symbols, and every square confronts the driver with signs imposing new rules and threatening new punishments.  It has happened gradually, and I suppose most British drivers scarcely notice it, but coming from the wide open freeways of America it hits me hard.  Today the control exercised over the average journey is so thorough that it is now quite reasonable to expect thinking machines to do the driving for us, and there are plans to make that a reality.
Rolling Through The Isles  Ted Simon  p81-2

[Biggles]

The next day I made a life-changing discovery and, as with all such revelations, wondered what had taken me so long.  I found that I could set my Tom Tom to a maximum of 30 mph, and the result was breathtaking.  It was like stepping back into a different world where everything was small-scale and local, where the important thing in life was not how to get to London or even the nearest big town:  what really mattered was the shortest way for your horses to go from the hayfield to your barn.  Most of the way from Newport Pagnell to Dorchester, I travelled on tiny lanes without names that skirted fields of rape and corn and cattle, sometimes between high hedges, sometimes with glorious views.  I disappeared into forests, plunging through viridescent tunnels of greenery to burst out into sunlight again.  Most of these roads were so narrow that two cars could scarcely squeeze past each other.  Sometimes my path would dog-leg across a busier road, or pass through some small village, but hardly ever did I meet anything that could be called traffic; when I had to cross over a motorway or some other high-speed corridor I could look down and gloat over the poor creatures caught up in their mechanical madness.
Rolling Through The Isles  Ted Simon  p94-5

[Biggles]

And because the buses in those days all had open platforms, with a single vertical rail to hold on to, there were challenges to be met when running to catch a bus or jumping off at the lights - all much too dangerous, of course, for our modern, foolproof age.  It was generally assumed that people would behave reasonably, and the conductor was there to control things, with shouts of "Move along, please," and "No standing upstairs".  Although I never personally saw an accident caused by letting passengers take their lives into their own hands, there must have been some.  My cold-blooded inclination is to believe that there are people who will find a way to have an accident however hard you work to prevent it, and the more you do to prevent it, the more tedious life becomes for the rest of us.  Perhaps this cynical attitude was born during those days on the 31 bus because quite often, as I rode to school, a house that had been there the day before was now just a heap of tangled iron and masonry where, during the night, a flying bomb had landed or a rocket had ploughed into the ground.  At the corner of the High Street and Earl's Court Road, there was a big restaurant that was blown up during the lunch hour.  Nobody could tell where the next bomb would fall. Life was evidently a lottery.
Rolling Through The Isles  Ted Simon  p106-7

[Biggles]

One evening after dark, when I was driving with a friend through the Hammersmith area, two cars passed us, one following the other in close succession. They were both black and unmarked, and in the second or two that I saw them I thought they might have been Jaguars. They were moving at a speed that seemed utterly impossible. There was a reasonable amount of traffic on the road but they moved through it silently, effortlessly, and so unbelievably fast it was as though we were at a standstill. Indeed that was the effect they had on me. One second they were there, the next second they were gone, and we had hardly moved. Their drivers' ability to manoeuvre through the traffic was superhuman. They might have existed in a different dimension. Never before or since have I seen anything like it. I waited to hear the crash which must surely come, but they vanished into the night without a sound. Who and what they were I never knew. Was one chasing the other? Were they together? Nothing surfaced in the news, and there was no one to ask.
The memory of it recurred many times. Gradually it settled into a realisation that while we follow our normal behaviour and assume it to be the only reality, there may be others living at a quite different level which we only occasionally glimpse. A similar window opened when I once saw, quite incontrovertibly, a ghost - or rather, as would-be experts later told me, an 'astral projection'. It changed everything about my beliefs, and nothing in my life.
Rolling Through The Isles  Ted Simon  p120

[Biggles]

At one point, where the road with its hedgerows seemed almost unbearably beautiful, I thought I really should take a picture, and just as I had stopped to get out my camera, a girl came cycling up the gentle slope. I asked her if she would snap me. It was probably thoughtless of me to stop her on an uphill climb. With a French accent but not much pleasure, she agreed, took two pictures and cycled on up the hill. Annoyed with myself for stopping her, I thought rather stupidly that I might make amends by taking a picture of her, giving no thought at all to how I would get it to her, but imagining that in some way it might become an amusing episode to write about.
So, some way after I had passed her I stopped to take her picture, and found myself taking a picture not just of her but of a man cycling behind her who was obviously her father. When he glanced across at me I suddenly saw myself, through his eyes, an elderly man lurking in the bushes, grey hair blowing in the wind, surreptitiously photographing his daughter.
Mercifully they didn't stop. I have no idea how I could have explained what I was doing. This confusion that I have with my own identity is ongoing. The person I see when I look in the mirror is not at all who I think I am, but usually when people talk to me they seem happy to accept me as the person I feel myself to be. Suddenly, and disturbingly I saw that this might not always be the case. I could get into trouble. Soberly I rode on, digesting this unpleasant information, as I made my way to my next destination, the Smuggler at Lyme Regis, where I had a friend.
Rolling Through The Isles  Ted Simon  p144-5

[Biggles]

When I rode around the world on a motorcycle it never occurred to me to do it for charity.  I wonder why not.
Perhaps I'm just not very charitable, but something about the whole business makes me uneasy. There's a sweet smell to it. If people want to give away money (and I'm all for that), why does someone have to push an ice-cream cart across the Sahara or bicycle backwards to Burundi to make it all right? From the point of view of the performer, I guess it stiffens the resolve to know that there are people watching. Otherwise, if I were halfway across the Sahara, unobserved, and all my ice-cream had run into the sand I might question the meaning of it all and give up. Doing it for charity, I suppose, gives the goofiness some kind of cachet. You'd never do it if it wasn't for a good cause and, in the end, you get a shot at celebrity. These days, that's as good as gold.
Rolling Through The Isles  Ted Simon  p149

[Biggles]

I had an important meeting in Sussex in a couple of days, so there was no time to go further west. I plucked a couple of B&Bs out of my book, at strategic distances, and started buzzing back through Bodmin, Liskeard and Tavistock, and before I had come to my senses I was in the middle of Dartmoor without much petrol in my tank. I suppose of all the ways of dividing people into two kinds, one of the most common would be between those who are prudent (and boring) and go back, and those like me who are in denial (and stupid) and decide to chance it.
There are not many parts of England where I feel vulnerable, but I suppose Dartmoor might be one of them. For the first thirty miles I can't remember any traffic, or any sign of life. A perfect location for a highwayman to be operating, I thought. Well, at least that scourge has disappeared off the roads of England. Little did I know what would be coming my way.
Rolling Through The Isles  Ted Simon  p167