Hmm, a diary of motorcycling.  Where did it begin.  Way back with a little 3 1/2 hp scooter at a friend of my fathers home.  We happened to be visiting and I wanted badly to ride it.  Not sure why but it was definitely the case.  That ride ended with me on the ground after I couldn't figure out how to stop it so I just crashed over sideways to get stopped.  Thus began a life long love affair with motor powered cycles and zero support from my parents.  They never stopped me but they never really helped me either.

I found out later that my grandfather, Monte Ross, was a total motorcycle rider.  I do not have pictures of his Indian but I wish that I did.  I hear stories about his riding from my Grandmother all the time.  It appears that the disease skipped a generation and landed on me.

I am not the greatest biker in the world.  I have very much to learn and find that I learn things nearly every day that I ride.  I would be very happy if I had the skills of say a full time racer or MX specialist but I will just have to live with my normal level of skill and ride what I can. 

I'm fairly proud of the fact that other than one high speed damaging accident, I've been clear of problems for at least 300,000 miles of riding.  For some that's not much mileage, for many it's a great deal of mileage. 

I've ridden everything from an old Harley with a suicide shift and mousetrap clutch, rice bikes and now a BMW R1100GS.  I've gotten rid of most of the bikes that were in my stable and reduced to just the 2002 Goldwing and the 1995 R1100GS.  What you see above is some of the bikes (the ones that were running) at the time that the picture was taken.  I've since had an FJ1200 added and then removed from the stable, gotten rid of the old 1978 Suzuki GS 1000 and added the BMW. 

I keep trying to go places with the Goldwing that you shouldn't take a Goldwing so it may be time to consider the GS as the answer for all of the bike I really need.  Of course I try to do things on the GS that end up with me lying sideways in the mud as well.  It is again all about how much fun you can have and strangely, I have the most fun when challenged beyond my limits.

Passing Through Time

I started on a small scooter.  What you should picture in your mind is a little 3 1/2 horsepower mini scooter.  I have no pictures of this which is something sad because it was the start of al ife long obsession with these things.  It was several years later in high school when I finally became able to try to ride powered bikes again.  Until then I was stuck with manual powered bicycles which I had managed to do many things to.  Not all of them good.  One of the things you have to do to be a good motorcyclist is learn to be a mechanic.  New bikes tend to spoil riders because most manufacturers have gotten them so reliable that no maintenance is really needed.  You just go turn the key and ride (after inspecting the bike for problems of course).  During my learning phase with bicycles I took apart and then could not put back together the brakes of the 10 speed I was riding.  The final fix for that was too many ruined tennis shoes.  I ground through the bottom of two different left shoes using them as brakes before my parents gave in and got me new brakes that worked :-). 

One of the first lessons I learned when getting into this is be careful buying basket case motorcycles.  What's a basket case?  It's boxes, stacks, etc of parts that someone tells you could be a motorcycle if you "just put it all back together again".  There WILL be some expensive parts missing.  Yes, I did "learn" this but slowly.  The first time was with an old Kawasaki 250 enduro that was missing it's stator.  That little part was like $300 plus in 1979 which is a lot of money to a 15 year old kid who can't buy it.

Back to the drawing board. Found someone who had two Honda SL125's.  Hmm, enough parts to make a bike I thought.  So I got them both for the small sum of $100 I think.  It's interesting to note that that bike was one of the worst love / hate relationships I have ever had.  It was stubborn and painful to get it running.  It took months to learn it's secrets.  By the time I was done, I could strip apart that engine and put it all back together again without seeing any one of the tools or parts.  The love part of it is that once running, nothing really stopped it.  I learned the great secret of this and most Honda motors of this vintage is they are just flat tough.  As long as they have oil, gas and you do not do anything really stupid to them, they run.  I leaned a lot about dirt riding with this beastie.  Rode it into the Virginia mountains and around on fire trails a lot when I was a teenager.  I loved it but wanted something in a two stroke bike.  Still having no money I went for an old Yamaha RD 125 which I then did a radical country conversion to a dirt bike.  It being neither fish nor fowl was lousy at both street and dirt riding.  Interesting to note that during this time I would do anything for rides on any kind of bike I could get my hands on.  I fixed things for people without charging any more than 1/2 a day of test riding.  I was not licensed to drive motorcycles and had to do all my riding off road or on the back country roads of Virginia.  In the four years that I can remember doing this, I only got one ticket for unlicensed driving of an unregistered vehicle.  That was on the old RD.  No pictures of it but imagine this bike with dirt tires, a country built expansion chamber, all the road gear stripped off of it and looking just plain dirty and you will be able to see what I was riding.

Some of the bikes I fixed an rode on at that time where various Suzuki, Kawasaki, Honda and Yamaha dirt and enduro bikes.  I really only rode on one street machine during that time other than the modified RD.  That was an old 1949 Harley Davidson set up with the mousetrap clutch and suicide shift.  That was an eye opener compared to the dirt bikes I had been riding. 

What I really lusted after was my friends IT 175.  That bike had power to spare and would climb up trees if you wanted it to.  Well not really but it went up and down mountains in Virginia the way nothing else I had ridden could do.  I also road regularly on a Suzuki RM 250 which was the first scooter I ever ran into that had a power band.  When that kicked in and the bike really wanted to go . . . .  Well lets say it was interesting and whole lot of healthy fun.

After a few years of moving around and "growing up" I found myself wanting to street ride for real.  No education other than what I had from riding dirt.  I earned my learners permit in New Jersey and went and found a "learning" bike.  This is such a subject of debate with people now but what I usually tell a new rider is, buy cheap and not pretty.  You "will" wreck it even if the wreck is no more than dropping it in a parking lot.  All kinds of breakage will occur while you are learning.  My learning bike was a small Honda.  CL350 twin.  This was a great bike to learn on at the time. 

I never really took a lot of photos of these bikes.  You either do or don't think that way as a kid.  I did not so I have spent some time hunting up pictures from others who have the same type and color of the bikes I owned in the past.  Salutations to all who have and maintain these older bikes.  One of these days I will have a garage where I can do projects and I will pretty much have these kinds of things in there.  Wonder what the wife will think of all that?

The two other bikes that qualify as getting ridden or owned in this time frame here are a Honda 250 Elsinore that was another basket case where I had big plans that never came to fruition.  And I had and rode for awhile on a Honda CB350 four.  That little wonder had pistons the size of thimbles but was an ok bike to play with.  I think that bike still sits at a old friends house rusting away now.  Sad but is true that some of your oldest friends (I'm talking bikes here) end up rusting away somewhere.

My First New "Big" Bike

After about 6 months or riding in New Jersey on this machine I started to yearn for a modern street bike.  This was around 1984 when you could buy leftover bikes from the oops that had happened which had left new bikes in crates for too long.  I ended up at Freemont Honda in Freemont, New Jersey looking at and drooling on new bikes.  I financed and got myself a CB750 Custom in two tone Aqua over Blue metal flake.  That was probably my favorite bike in all that I have owned up until my current BMW R1100GS.  You wonder why but I can tell you that after having ridden many different motorcycles when you get on one that fits you correctly and ride it, it will feel "right".  There is no way to describe what that feeling is.  That CB750 just fit me perfectly.  It had all the power I wanted or needed without being hopped up.  It road very well for long periods of time.  Since I was using it as my daily commuter, that was a good thing. 

New Jersey weather can be both beautifaul and nasty.  At one time or another I found myself riding that Honda in blistering heat, deep snow and perfect days that are hard to live without and forget.  You can ride a street bike in snow but it is not something most want to try.  Right now riding machinery that is so much heavier and much less nimble than when I started, it is a lot more of a challenge.    I did everything from hauling myself everywhere you can imagine to hauling 50lb bags of dog food on this bike.  It got a Windjammer II fairing and a sissybar and backrest combo to allow for more haulage and passenger ability. 

This is also probably one of the first street bikes that I started to learn I had a bug for off road riding with street bikes.  It got dumped at least twice that I can recall in sand running around off the street in the back lands of New Jersey.  Silly of me but I can not to this day get the "I want to ride everywhere" bug out of my system.  I had never really gone for dual purpose bikes even though I had ridden a lot of the older ones.

Accident

This bike is also the one where I had my most damaging accident.  Sadly I learned a lesson I guess we all have to sometime.  Road conditions can reach out and bite you if you are not ready.  It as a a beautiful spring day when I found this out.  I rode away from home early in the morning using back roads in Virginia to get from home to a scheduled exam at Virginia Tech.  The roads were good all the way up and with the weather being great I was riding frisky.  I got to the exam fine.  Took the exam and finished other things that day.  It was the last day of the quarter and I had nothing else to do but head home and start hunting for some kind of work to do where I could make a buck.  On the ride home the same way I had come up to work I thought I knew all the road conditions. I was sadly mistaken.  Virginia uses a method to repair back roads much like many other localities.  They tar coat and then spread chip stone on the road.  When this has just been completed the road surface becomes something very different than dry pavement.  I came around a corner on the same road I had ridden 5 hours earlier to find that the road was covered with fresh loose chip stone.  At the time I was not nearly as skilled as I am now.  I don't think I could have saved it now either. I low sided the bike but because of all the dirt riding I had done, I did it with my left leg off the peg.  I should mention that I was not a light guy.  At the time I was probably at least 300 lbs.  I put all that weight through my left leg with a twisting impact that according to the driver who saw the accident from behind me, caused me to do two full revolutions in the air over the top before I landed on my back in the ditch.  The bike if you look closely at the photo near the beginning of this page shows the bike a few months after the accident.  It is sadly the only one I actually have of the original bike.  The wrap around engine guards did their job and stopped the bike with little damage. 

Now on the subject of protective gear.  At the time I had the accident, protective gear amounted to what the guys used when road racing or some esoteric stuff I could see in catalogs.  I was young, broke, a college student, and not smart enough to know you needed this stuff let alone able to go find it.  I had a light leather jacket on, a reasonable plastic shell helmet and gloves.  I was wearing jeans and I seem to recall tennis shoes at the time of the accident as well.  I landed on my back.  The helmet hit a rock in the ditch and split the shell.  I did in fact walk away from the accident.  It took awhile to get my breath back.  The adrenalin allowed me to walk on my left leg which was not able to do the job shortly after that.   If you are going to ride, you are going to wreck.  Wear the gear.  It will pay off in the long run.

So after getting my breath back and getting back up on the road.  I had some help to get the bike up an then checked it out.  Bits bent, bits scratched but it started fine and looked road worthy.  I hurt and wanted to get home so I took off on it.  Now the first thing I noticed besides being very sore was that I could not seem to shift the bike up in gear.  It hurt too damn much to do that.  I ended up putting the bike in 3rd gear and riding home that way.  That was about 26 miles of back country roads including a ride over a mountain.  When I got home I noticed that the left leg was if anything much worse.  I couldn't get it to come off the left peg.  I rode up to the house right beside a tree.  Stopped and let the bike lean over against the tree on the right side and called for help to get inside.

Long story ends this way. I had done something called a radial fracture of the fibula in my left leg.  When I got a look at the x-ray I saw the break was from the knee almost all the way to the ankle.  Nasty but survivable. 

I learned a number of lessons from this. 

Short Pause

For a few years I didn't ride.  That was a mistake.  Should have been riding all the time.  I made one half hearted stab at riding again with a very old and very nasty Suzuki TS400.  I never took pictures of it but what I ended up with was a TS400 chassis with the entire front end off a Yamaha IT475 welded on.  It was a one of a kind interesting ride.  The angle of the attachment was not the best and made the head of the bike fight you all the time but it would walk over anything in the woods.  I did this of course at a time when I had no money again.  Was working in the construction business as an equipment operator (read guy who digs ditches with a backhoe) and had to do everything on a shoestring.  You can see an ever so much prettier version of what the bike is supposed to look like as shown in the clip from Suzuki's advertisement for that year model.  That Yama-zuki?  Suzi-ha? whatever hung around for years in my father's barn until I finally gave in and scrapped it.  I am at some point going to sit back and think about all the stuff that ended up in the scrap heap at some point.  It's almost enough to make you think.  I would rather ride though.  On to the next one.

Another Short Pause

What got me back into riding seriously was a need for some cheap transportation that would actually fit in a parking place at Virginia Tech.  A university that at the time was not well known for parking space for students.  I hunted around and looked for a cheap but big bike I could use and afford.  What I found was an older 1978 Suzuki GS 1000.  This was one of the early liter class bikes and it fit my needs at the time.  It really was not very pretty but it ran and I could do what I needed to with it.  I was also ignoring almost all the rules as the bike was old, my skills were nothing but rust after a few years off the critters and I needed a refresher course.  I didn't actually get hurt, drop the bike or do anything damaging but I did scare myself a few times while getting back into tune. 

That old GS served me for about 4 years before it ended up parked as it was nearly in need of a complete rebuild.  It looks kind of sad here.  Poor thing gives me all those miles of fun and games and then ends up stuck out to pasture literally. Ah but she lives on now.  In the process of getting all my "scrap" out of my father's and my households, she has gone on to a better life.  A gentleman in Virginia has taken her to work towards making her into another Wes Cooley replica racer.  Since she was once upon a time in her life a racing bike that seems ever so appropriate.  It's hard to make out from these pictures but all three brake rotors on this bike had been professionally drilled out for cooling purposes and to lighten the rotors.  Additionally there were several significant changes to the frame and the engine.  I hope the new owner and the bike enjoy life as she get reborn as something. 

This was never a good touring bike even though they can be.  I had somehow forgotten how much I enjoyed riding off into the distance and going to just see stuff for no more reason that that I could.  I suppose as an excuse I can hold up that I was often broke beyond reason and could not do some things that I felt that I needed to if I wanted to tour a lot.  That is really not a good enough reason though.  As a younger guy I did not care as much and would just do stuff.  Oh well.  The future would see a change in that.  My heavy touring was about to kick back in.

My first foray back into bikes yet again after a couple years without riding came with the change in my health.  You can read about all that in one of my other stories posted on this web site.  When I feel good I like to ride.  I did not have a ride.  I wanted a real ride and for some reason started seriously drooling after a Harley Davidson.  I wanted something nice and something cool.  I ended up with a 1981 FXB Sturgis.  That bike was back to the serious love hate relationship that made me so understand why you have to love those bikes to be able to ignore all the crap they give you.  It was a beast that constantly would foul out the front plug.  It was nasty about starting from time to time.  It leaked oil all the time.  It was LOUD enough to wake the dead. 2" porker pipes on a shovelhead is something to hear at full bellow.  It vibrated bad enough to numb your hands and feet within 60 miles.  It didn't have enough power to get out of the way of the rice bikes that would pass it while laughing.  But it looked SO DAMN COOL.  It was a pretty bike.  The graphic art on it was very good.  It was chromed nicely without being dreadful.  Sadly it was not the right bike for me even though I owned and rode it for almost 2 years.  It also lost value in the time I owned it.  So sad.  What killed it and made me get rid of it was a desire to get back to touring.  I wanted to do the US from left to right.  I had been flying over it for a few years and wanted to get some serious time down where I could look it all over.  Motorcycle tour.  Yes that was the answer.

Tour Monster Is Born

Touring the US required a touring bike.  Now that could have been anything but I remembered how I drooled over the Goldwings when I first purchased the CB750 Custom.  That was back in 1983/4 when the first of the 1200's was coming out.  A very nice touring bike from all that I could see.  I hunted around California for a few months and finally found something cheap that would work.  I have this nasty habit of buying used stuff rather than new bikes.  I've only owned two new bikes in my life.  I ended up at a Triumph dealer that sold lots of used bikes in LA.  They had a 1984 GL1200I that was going for a reasonable price.  I packed what I thought I would need (tools) and a bit of this and that (clothing and such) and boarded a plane for LA.  No transport on the other end other than a bike that I was buying sight unseen.  I have been told that sometimes I am a little bit stupid :-).  Anyway, the bike had only one major problem.  The front brakes were sticking.  That turned out to be a goof on the part of the shop mechanic.  They put a damper back into the master cylinder wrong and it would not allow backflow into the reservoir until pressure built up. The only way to build up pressure was when riding with the left front brake partially applied.  This is not a good thing. I ended up with a warped rotor before the shop would admit that something was wrong and we could get it fixed.  That was irritating.  Other than that thing, the challenges of getting the bike fixed and getting myself headed east so that I could work my way home was in front of me.  There is a long story in all this, check out the stories section to read it all.  Suffice it to say that it was eye opening to get back into the distance touring again.  I was like an addict and did not want to stop.  For the next 6 months or so I rode that Goldwing all the time I could and the Harley Davidson sat.  I made the decision to sell the HOG and go with what I was riding.

Time for a new bike yet again.  I wanted to ride off road.  Can not get the dirt out of my system.  I hunted for what would work best and came up with an older Honda single monster.  1983 XL600R.  This was a really fun ride in the woods. Yes it is not nearly as good or as light as the new dirt bikes are but I never was  a high performance artist.  I like riding somewhere and having fun.  I also really liked the idea of getting back without having to use a cage and a trailer. 

The 2002 Goldwing

Where did she come from.  Well I spent most of 2001 and 2002 not riding one of these.  I knew what would happen and on a nice sunny day in July in North Carolina it did.  My friend and I went to a Honda dealer locally where I was going to look for some accessories and other stuff.  They had  GL1500A sitting in front that I took for a test drive.  That's the first big bike I have ever ridden with the clutch that far gone.  It would slip if you pulled any more than about 1/2 throttle.  Was interesting when you expected to get acceleration and did not.  Now sitting right beside it was a GL1800 demonstrator.  I gave in to temptation and took it out and rode it.  Bad move.  Worse was that the dealer was willing to give me a reasonable break on the price and decent trade on the old Wing.  I was so done.  I ended up with that lady in my stable. 

She and I have ridden over 30,000 miles in two years.  She only has had one major problem mechanically and one problem aesthetically.  I can not keep front tires on it and it feels lousy when I try to push it hard when riding it in twisty conditions.  This is one of the few wings you will find that has had all the hard parts that can touch the ground showing that they do that all the time.  However she is the greatest of road cruisers. 

In the last 2 years I have added two Yamaha FJs, a 1989 FJ 1200 and a 1984 FJ1100.  I got rid of both of them when I got the BMW R1100GS.  Things keep changing. 

Right now the Goldwing and the BMW R1100GS are all that exist in the stable but I am having much fun riding them. 

Living in North Carolina where we do allows for a decent day or two day ride to the beach with swimming or to the mountains with hiking and such.  It is the perfect world much like California but has a bit more humidity and bugs :-) 

Happy riding to all of you who do and take the chance and learn all the stuff you can about riding if you do not.  See you on the slab somewhere along the way.

See the stories section for more as I add and update things going on.