So my whole life, I loved the idea of motorcycles. In the 80s I obsessed over motocross, and while other kids begged their parents to take them to the playground, or to the amusement park… I was begging mine to take me here
Fairway Cycle in Somers Point, NJ. My mom would take us down there and my brother and I would collect brochures of our favorite motorcycles and walk around and dream about dirt bikes. I can date this back to 1982, because I thought the Honda CR 480R was, as the great Nico Leonard would put it, the dog’s bollocks.
Back in this time, as I was saying, my head was in the dirt bike world, so I remember looking at street bikes and not understanding how they managed to handle bumps with such a little space between the tire and the front fender. Leave me alone, I was 6 years old and didn’t understand that the fender moved with the shocks. But I tell you that so you better understand how long of a time coming this midlife crisis was.
Now growing up, my brother always had a dirt bike… mostly Honda CR80Rs, I remember him having a Yamaha YZ125, and for a brief moment, a Honda CR125R when they had crazy high seat heights, I’m thinking 1982 model. This latest one lead to one of the weirdest moments of foreshadowing I ever lived through. I was out riding my BMX bike and saw my brother’s friend, John Powers, riding his moped around the neighborhood. We stopped and chatted and I said to him “Mike got a CR125”, and he said “Can he reach?” meaning can he touch the ground while sitting on it. I said “Barely, he uses a rock in the front yard to get on”, and John said “He can’t handle it can he? He’s gonna kill himself on that thing”. It was a couple of weeks later that me and my brother were in the front yard and John rides past on his moped, toots his horn, then a few moments later hear a crash, and John had veered into traffic making a turn and was killed by a car hitting him.
Jeez, I got side tracked. So anyway, he always had a motorcycle, however I did not. Not until I was about 10 years old, and as a deal for us moving away from all our friends, my parents agreed to buy me and my brother motorcycles to ease the pain of the move. My brother got a 1985 Honda CR80R (which he promptly took the engine apart and made it faster, much to my parents dismay), and I go a 1985 Honda TRX 125 (Fourtrax) four wheeler. And let me tell you, this was a BEAST of a machine…
Honda’s raging 8.6 HP 124 cc powerhouse of an engine cranking out 6.4 ft-lbs of torque caused me to alter to rotation of the earth every time those soft knobbies gripped the ground and I punched that thumb control throttle, kicking up rooster tails that were like dirt tsunamis to any insects that happened to be in the way. Now let me tell you, this lead me on so many wonderful adventures in the local corn fields, railroad paths, and woody trails in the metropolis of Washington, New Jersey back in the day. Also lead to my broken thumb, but that was my brothers fault. This thing was such a staple of my life, it’s surprising that when I got rid of it a few years later to eventually buy my first car… that it would be almost 40 years before I ever owned another motorcycle.
So fast forward to the 2020s, and I hit the peak of my Youtube browsing and I stumble onto the video “Creeper Butt Grab” by Jake the Garden Snake:
If you know my friend Grizzle B, you’d hear an uncanny resemblance a few times in this video. But anyhow, this got me on a long kick of watching moto-vlogs and many times I wasn’t even listening to the vlog, I was just watching the scenery and living vicariously through it. Then in late 2021 I got really sick with Covid, my mom and brother both died from it, and after a long recovery from post-sepsis syndrome, I finally was watching these videos and thought “Why am I watching people ride motorcycles and not just going out and riding a motorcycle?”
So in January of 2023, I signed up for a motorcycle license class. Now mind you, the only motorcycle-ish experience I’ve had was that four wheeler…. it was an automatic clutch standard, so at least I kind of understood the shifting, the four wheeler was all up for upshifting though, and all down for downshifting. I rode the shit out of BMX bikes my whole childhood, so two wheels weren’t intimidating, and I always had stick shift cars, so I understood the whole using a clutch concept… So I thought “Hell, I’ll take the class. Worst case scenario, I hate riding motorcycles and wind up with an unused motorcycle endorsement…. best case scenario, I take the class, and my life changes forever.
I take the classroom portion of the class online, and it’s super easy with any idea of how the mechanics of a motorcycle works. But then I show up to the riding portion, and it was in the parking lot of our local Shriners temple, and we sit in the class room and introduce ourselves, and I’m the only person in the class who has never ridden a two wheel motorcycle. No stress, no pressure. There was a fellow in there who was getting his license because, as he put it, “I went to the Harley dealership just to look at motorcycles, and walked own owning a Harley Davidson, so I figured I’d need a license. A few guys who have ridden illegally for most of their lives that had close calls with the law, then one lady who “grew up riding dirtbikes her whole life, and wanted to move to the street” and one who “Grew up riding crotch rockets, but never had a license”. Then there was me, the 47 year old who never rode a motorcycle. And this was the beast that I got to pop my motorcycle cherry with:
Long story short, the girl who “grew up on crotch rockets” ended up quitting the first day because she was scared of the Honda Rebel 250, and the other lady who had decades of dirtbike riding experience, for some reason, had problems making a motorcycle go in the direction it’s supposed to go, and she failed the class. The rest of us were granted our licenses. And to me, IT WAS A BLAST…. the next morning I went down to the local dealership and sat one a myriad of dual sport motorcycles. I went into this pretty much thinking I wanted the Honda XR650. Just for it’s sheer old school-ness, it LOOKED just like the dirt bikes I grew up dreaming of, alas sitting on it felt like I was sitting on a fence, I knew there was no way I’d ride that any distance, so I eventually wound up making this headline with the local shop.
Bought a 2022 Kawasaki KLR 650 Traveler, it was a leftover in February 2023 so basically I got it out the door for the sticker price of a new base model. And thus began my lesson of the fact that the cheapest part of owning a motorcycle is buying a motorcycle. MAN these things microtransaction the ever-loving shit out of you. BUT I LOVED IT. But then after some sore ass trips with it, my coworker and her husband rode their cruisers up to work and I sat on one of them and was like “I’ve been riding the wrong thing!” Now mind you, this was on top of the fact that I found out I didn’t really care for riding off road too much either, I was just using it as a street bike.
So that made up my mind, I’m going to sell this, and get a cruiser. So I did the same routine. I sat on everything I could find and balanced the absolute musts in the biking world… comfort versus looking like a friggin’ cool dude. I tried everything, the Honda Fury was surprisingly comfortable for a chopper, and I liked the old school feel, but ultimately there was a weird wideness about the engine, where I felt like I had to go bow legged to reach the pegs around the sides of the engine. The Kawasaki Vulcan felt pretty good, but it just wasn’t really want I wanted looks wise. Now growing up my dad had Honda Shadows and loved them, so I sat on the Shadow Phantom and it was like “Okay, this is the best one yet”. Ultimately I was hmming and hawing between the 2025 Honda Shadow Phantom and the 2025 Indian Scout Bobber. The deciding factor was I was able to get the Shadow out the door with a 6 year warranty for less than the Scout’s sticker price. I just couldn’t get myself to come off that much money for the Indian.
So I put my Kawasaki on the Facebook Marketplace, and finance the Shadow and wait for it to be delivered (the closest I could find the color I wanted was about 300 miles away). I was like “I’ll sell the Kawasaki, pay off the Honda, and be a financially mature and responsible adult.” And weeks go by and the Honda shows up and not ONE bite on my KLR. More weeks go buy and I start looking into things like Twisted Road for maybe at least making money with the KLR by renting it out, just weighing my options since nobody wanted to buy it. Then it happens…
“Hey, are you willing to trade for the motorcycle?” pops up on messenger.
I start typing “No, I want to get cash and pay off the motorcycle I just bought.”
Then I remembered, if there’s anything I’m not, it’s financially mature and responsible, so I backspace it out and say “What do you have?”
“A 2018 Indian Scout Bobber”
I started typing “YOU MOTHERFUCKER, WHY COULDN’T YOU MESSAGE ME A COUPLE WEEKS AGO AND SAVE ME $11,000?!?!?!?!” then backspaced it and said “I’m interested, tell me more.”
Next thing I know, I own two motorcycles.
I figured I’d ride the Indian for a bit, then sell it…. but I can’t. It’s too much fun. I tell people the Honda is my Toyota Camry, I know it’ll run forever, and will be comfortable and look nice and the Indian is my 1969 Chevelle. Nothing you’d want to go cross country on… but it looks cool, sounds cool, and is powerful enough to be super fun. But let me tell you, getting a motorcycle was the absolute best thing I’ve done. I always tell people “When I ride the Shadow or the Scout, I feel cool… I feel like a biker, like the ones people go ‘man he’s badass’ when they see me. When I rode the KLR, I felt like my 8 year old self, riding my BMX bike through the neighborhood, free as a bird.”
And you know, all the horror stories you hear about motorcycles aren’t what they’re cracked up to be. Of course they’re dangerous, but not nearly what you say. I have way more people pull out in front of me and drive like a momo around my bright orange car than the motorcycle. And I tell people the first 50 miles of riding will terrify you, but after than it all becomes second nature. So if you’ve been thinking about it, stop thinking and start doing. I’m kicking myself for not having 30 years of biking under my belt now.
LIVE!!!!