My first ride on a motorcycle was when I was eight years old. My father had purchased a Yamaha YDS7 to commute to his new job in Weston-super-Mare from Bristol. We lived in a house in Stockwood which backed onto some open land and fields. My father let me ride the YDS7 around the edges of the field – it was really much too big for me but I had been bitten by the motorcycling bug!
My first venture on the roads was on a Honda SS 50 moped all the rage back in the late 70s. The Honda was a great bike and would do 150 mpg with ease – they say you ‘do meet the nicest people on a Honda’ but my most important lesson was defensive driving: I was knocked off twice in three months and luckily came through uninjured. But I had learnt the lesson, assume if a car/truck driver can do something stupid and probably illegal they will, your job is to anticipate and avoid it if you want to survive. Trained on the streets of Bristol, I found these skills very useful on the roads of Manhattan years later.
My first real motorcycle was a Matchless G2 that I purchased in two tea chests for £40, the previous owner had taken it apart but could not put it back together – a real bargain. The Matchless was a lovely bike but unfortunately it needed aluminium welding on the halved crankcases which was beyond my budget at the time. I swapped it for a Honda CB 250 K4 salvage and managed to fit a later G5 front-end to the bike. I was on the road on a relatively modern and quick 250 which I passed my test on in 1977.
As a student at Oxford I had a range of bikes from a Yamaha XS 500 to a lovely BSA B40 SS90 a BSA Bantam, RD400F and a lovely Norton commando 750 interstate (combat engine!) all funded by my holiday work as a road sweeper in Bristol. I also acquired a Royal Enfield constellation 700: Oily Enfields were popular around Bristol due to the excellent L&D Motors dealer in Brislington for parts and support. I still have the engine and frame of the Constellation at least!
I met my wife Catherine at Oxford and once Catherine had tried motorcycles and absolutely loved them we needed something more serious: it was time for my BMW riding career to start. We lived only 3 miles away from SPC motorcycles in Alton, now Bahnstormer Motorrad and our first BMW purchased in 1984 was a lovely red K100 RS 8 valve which was brilliant. Quickly followed by a K100 RS 16V and a K1100 LT. We then moved onto the oil cooled boxers with a red R1100RS and an R1100 GS in Kalahari yellow. I had been a BMW Club member in Southern Section (sorry about that!) since 1984 but had contented myself with reading the Journal.
Catherine and I then moved to New York with IBM for three years which dramatically changed our motorcycling lives. After a couple of months in the car I decided I just had to have a bike. The Catskill Mountains 30 peaks over 3,000 feet were about 25 minutes ride from where we lived! So I passed my test and purchased a Ducati 900SS which proved to be unreliable so I traded it for a brand new Honda VFR800 at an incredible end of year price. Finally I returned to the BMW fold with a nice white R1100GS from BMW New York in Manhattan.
There was a free Motorcycle Safety Foundation course at Albany. I enjoyed the course and met John riding a white Goldwing 1200 who lived close to me in Wappingers Falls. John told there was a great local motorcycle club called the Lost Wheels Motorcycle Club (LWMC) and if I came next Tuesday he would introduce me. No ifs or buts John was moving to Atlanta the following week so it had to be done. When I arrived at the regular monthly indoor meeting I discovered the bad news there was a waiting list of over 100 people waiting to join but the good news was as a friend of John’s I moved me to the head of the queue. More bad news you don’t just join you are a probationary member for six months where you cannot miss more then 2 events (these guys do at least one ride out a week sometimes two) and then your membership is voted on by a closed meeting of the club. Catherine and I made it and still have our patches with pride.
By now we we had decided to trade our R1100GS for a BMW R1100RT as it was better suited to some of the long trips the LWMC were doing. Luckily the LWMC Treasurer’s brother owned a BMW dealer in Wilkes-Barre in Pennsylvania and Dave Williams arranged for the LWMC to have the dealer test fleet for a day of riding. We tried everything available: the R1150GS came close but the R1100RT won out in the end! On this bike we covered a 4,500 mile trip in two weeks to Nova Scotia, Cape Breton and Prince Edward Island, setting for the novel Anne of Green Gables. We also covered a west coast tour of about 6,000 miles again in two weeks from Denver via Yosemite to Portland and down Highway 1 to Monterey for World Superbikes at Laguna Seca. Americans have less holiday than we do so all LWMC long trips started on the 4th July weekend and lasted two weeks – this meant the riding was very disciplined as we often covered 450+ miles in a day. Providing the President Ed was in the hotel pool with his Martini by 16:00 it was a good day! I also learnt that long distance travel together deepens motorcycle friendships. We have run a UK tour for LWMC and our American friends are lifelong.
The US Motorcycle Club scene is very different to the UK. LWMC only did ONE event a year! All the rest of the time LWMC would attend all the other Motorcycle Club events in our area. The social secretary would negotiate with all our fellow clubs to bring the Lost Wheels to their events and in return they would come to ours. At the last LWMC barbecue event Catherine and I attended in 2000 there were 1,300 attendees. It takes a lot of riding and friendship, supporting each other’s events to get those people out. In reality we were very well connected to all our local Motorcycle Clubs with many friends. Many of the events were run for charities, cancer, veterans, sick children etc. I have never done so much charity work as when we were with LWMC in New York – it definitely helps with the image. The town of Lake George in the Adirondacks used to turn the whole town over to the Americade Rally (third biggest US rally after Sturgis and Daytona with about 120,000 motorcycles) one week of the rally paid for the town’s education system – motorcyclists were honoured guests during Americade!
Back home in the UK and on a yellow R1100S a second critical point in my motorcycle journey occurred. I had gone up to Hughenden on the M40 to get something for the bike and I met a very nice fellow motorcyclist with a turquoise R1100RS called Nick Dingwall. He asked if I was a BMW Club member, I said I had been for about 16 years, he asked which section, I said Southern. I think Nick snorted (😀) and then told me to get to the Fishes Pub in Oxford to see how the BMW Club really worked. Shortly after that like many others I transferred into the Oxford Section (well it is the best after all). After that I was fully involved with the Club and with our US LWMC experience this time we wanted to be fully involved.
Shortly after this we purchased our R1150GS from SPC (now Bahnstormer Alton) and we had a fantastic time on this bike. On two identical R1150GSs, we spent 12 years touring Europe and the UK with the BMW Club Oxford. There were many highlights but the club trip to the Nurburgring was great fun. We established that a 2-up R1150GS was good for 122mph in 4th on our laps of the Nurburgring. I have no photos of the riding as GoPros had not arrived then but here is the then club Treasurer Geoff Clough seeking inspiration before the riding started or perhaps the accounts were looking really bad!
In 2005 I acquired a lovely Pimento Red R1200RT and successfully passed my IAM test with TVAM. Although I was a pretty experienced motorcyclist by now TVAM and the R1200RT improved my riding considerably.
I decided to have go at restoring an airhead boxer as a winter project and purchased a 1982 R65LS in Polaris Silver which need some work. The R65LS was the best handling of the air cooled boxers and was quite a different proposition to the standard R65.
I also purchased a 1977 R75/7 to take part in the Moto Piston rally which Catherine and I attended in 2009 and 2010 with Colin and Anita Bembridge. The R75/7 proved a very capable two-up touring machine with the heavy flywheel and even completed the MC Piston ‘hardcore’ 5,000 curves in 500Kms event. Michael Dore did an excellent restoration on the R75/7 and now it is safely in the garage!
Being from a technology background I joined the Oxford committee to help with the website but a year later, in 2008, I became Chairman to organise the BMW Club National Rally ‘The Cotswold Rendevouz’ at the Fire Service College. We were very lucky that Bob Mack a part-time fireman and engine driver got us right in with the FSC. The rally was a great success with 52 Oxford members volunteering.
In 2011 I went back to the K bikes with a lovely K1600GT in dark red. I didn’t really need a K1600GT (but who actually needs a motorcycle?) but it was an amazing machine. The K1600GT took us on a fantastic trip to the small village of Malta in Austria, one of many organised by Dave and Rosemary Hicks. Here are four club K1600s at the Slovenian border on the three countries ride out (Austria, Slovenia and Italy). A fantastic machine I can understand why owners are so attached to them.
In 2013 I fulfilled a longterm dream to ride from one side of the USA to the other, and back again, by shipping my R1200GSA with W2W to Baltimore and then riding up and down the east coast and then across the US to Seattle. Catherine was with me for about half of the trip and we rode back from San Francisco to Baltimore in two weeks – about 3,500 miles. The R1200GSA was a superstar, here she is at Crater Lake in Oregon. My GSA experience in the US finished off the K1600GT, when I came back I decided to get a water-cooled GSA!
In 2014 our first R1200 GSA LC took us on a wonderful BMW Club trip to Greece, organised by the Rev. Derek Spears, with help from MCi Tours. Derek was the tour expert on Greek and Roman history. Here is the GSA at Nikopolis founded in 29 BCE by the Emperor Augustus to commemorate his victory over Antony and Cleopatra! In 2015 the GSA also took Catherine and me on one of our longest journeys, a solo trip to the Nordkapp and back 5,700 miles in 16 days. We visited the Tirpitz museum at Alta which had a WW2 R75 from the Tirpitz which had been finished in desert sand! Maybe the Germans hoped to deploy the Tirpitz elsewhere?
One pf the problems with being a BMW owner is that BMW is very good at just improving its products. If everything was just new and different it would be easy to resist but when Bahnstormer offered us a 2016 R1200GSA which was the same but just a bit better than our current bike we had to change. The new R1200GSA LC took us on memorable trips to Sicily, Italy, Spain, France and Portugal before we decided to have her customised by Image Design Customs with paintings done by Becky Forster, an artist friend of Catherine’s living in Milan. John Gilbride of Bahnstormer took some fantastic pictures of the R1200GSA LC in the old Mill at Bahnstormer Alton which is now the main workshop.
The R1200GSA is a brilliant machine for travelling long distances and we upgraded to the most recent version with TFT and Dynamic ESA. With the right choice of tyres and equipment it can tackle almost any journey.
I ride all year round and I started running an RT as a winter bike. Having owned a number of RTs over the years it is a great bike and a fantastic touring machine although I have to admit we do prefer the GSA for serious travel. In 2019 I managed to get a RoSPA Gold pass on my R1250RT and went to North West Scotland to ride the North Coast 500.
During 2020 with lockdown and no holidays or travel possible we decided to open the money bags upgrading to an R1250GSA HP, the ultimate GSA. This one has Wilbers suspension and now we have covered 3,000 miles, it is starting to feel really smooth. This GSA has only taken us as far as Wales but it has provided a real escape in very dark times.
There are two important questions to answer in my motorcycling journey, how many motorcycles have I owned since I started at age 16? I think the answer is about 30 in 45 years. I used to be able to jump from one bike to the next but as I have got older I find it takes me a little time to adapt fully to the new bike so maybe I need to change bikes less often! The second important question is which BMW motorcycle is the best? I do have a definite answer to that question from the film ‘The Best Bar in America’ – the best motorcycle in the world is the one you are currently riding! Ride safely and enjoy the next steps in your motorcycle journey.
Originally posted 2021-08-27 17:27:12.
