2. Time to Buy a Bike

It was time to buy a bike. After spending the summer baking my head at the local road race track I noticed an infield MX track, hmmm, what's this I wondered. I took a walk to examine the dusty track more closely, a sign greeted me with the words : Thursday night motocross. Then a list of dates, which I hastily seared into my brain.

A week later I worked through lunch so I could finish work an hour early, and make it to the track by six. Ah, to taste the dust, breath race gas fumes, and hear the ring, ding, ding for the first time in twenty some years.

Yes, the past twenty years were spent with my buttocks firmly planted atop a road bike. Sometimes on a "cruiser", which is my trusty, rusty rat bike, a Virago 920 circa 1981 that I had to create from boxes of assorted parts. The Virago and I have made many a trip, in many a season around the old haunts of Michigan and Wisconsin.

My butt doesn't really sit atop my other road bike, it is more my crotch. A Gixxer 1100, nearly 25,000 miles around the midwest over a period of 4 years. Trips to AMA road races at Elkhart Lake and Brainerd, camping trips in Iowa, Minnesota, Michigan and Wisconsin. Wasps down my leathers working there magic over and over again.

These bikes have made the long trip from Wisconsin to Oregon, new roads to discover, little unknown towns to dawdle in. Only time will tell whats out there.

I gave up on my woods bike, an XL 250, my enduro dreams, and lust for motocrossers after moving to Wisconsin twenty years ago. Wisconsin is an Indian word meaning: no place to ride off road without asking 60 people for permission and then trying to avoid the obnoxious throttle only has full open speed freaks. The trails are deadly, I went once, about 500 yards and was nearly run over by something I still could not, to this day, identify.

The Virago, my gixxer, they have been life savers, quite a strange thing to say about motorcycles, but to me no statement could hold more truth.

Time to get back on track. What, no ring, ding, ding....? Four strokes? I thought those were for old guys who liked to ride slowly over wet logs, and putt through swampy mud puddles. Yet, here they are burping over table tops and taking apart berms. Well, they did the trick anyway, I have never looked back since, the dirt bug bit again, and it bit hard. Now all I needed was a bike.

The ad above says it all.