Driving a motorcycle, then and now

Driving a motorcycle. You did that out of poverty or out of passion. A reasonable part of the current motorcyclists drove motorbike until… a Lief, a house and children came. After that the pause button often went on. About twenty or thirty years. One of those brave retractors was happy to realize that in the meantime he had not only become more experienced for a quarter of a century, but that he was also considerably better off financially than in his youngest youth. He bought an impressive all-road / adventure motorcycle and made his childhood dream come true by planning a trip to the North Cape.

It was disappointing

The North Cape of his dreams turned out to have turned into a tourist trap full of campers and motorcycles that were taken from the trailer or from the mega camper 100 kilometers from the Cape. Remy learned to write off when, after the trip, he exchanged his heavy ZGAN allroad adventure bike for a new French / Chinese 400cc-plus-a-bit machine and a 250s Honda CB XNUMX. He rediscovered the stupid fun of motorcycling. he makes up there, they are considerably smaller in scale than those to the North Cape in the south-east of the Netherlands and in the meantime he knows most of the narrow roads in Northern France and the Ruhr Area, which turns out to be considerably less gruesome than the horror stories suggested.

A second leg RECOVERY: Start

In his environment he has found a few peers who have also taken up their second favorite childhood sin again. If you hear them talking about the past, it is clear how well alcohol and traffic went together at that time. And that weekend ride when it was considerably more adventurous than a ride to the North Cape is now. How different motorcycling was then. For example, there was a student / motorcyclist who, with a few pints of beer on his Norton, fiddled his student flat to start the thing there and fall asleep next to it. He barely survived because his door was kicked open by a few angry neighbors.

Talk about stairs

The - by the way - old nobility - chairman / treasurer of an English brand club had a spare parts trade in addition to those honorary functions. He often financed this with club fees, so that the club fund was never right. When confronted with that, he got a beating from his club members. So much was annexed from his trading stock that the cash deficits were leveled again. After taking care of the injuries, the perpetrators and the victim caught a few pints and proceeded to the order of the day. And the man with his impressive first and last name remained in office ... After all, did he provide the club with the cheapest spare parts?

It was out of poverty

At the time that our passion for the full 100% was based on poverty, the winters were also stricter and the motorcycle clothing was of the 1 point 0 version. Under the belt, underpants, long underpants, pajama pants, jeans and a generally safe yellow wind and waterproof PVC pants did a blissful job. At least two pairs of socks had to keep the feet warm. That approach turned waters into an adventure along the way. Above the belt a structurally implemented layer system, including the wildly insulating value of a Saturday gazet, led to gigantic dimensions of the upper bodies.

Hands just frozen.

But people were used to that. When one of the then young heroes reached his parental home, he had been on the road for a long time and it was dark. He fell down on the bike against a barn wall and realized that he was so cold that he could not get off. When his father found him two hours later, he looked like something out of the freezer compartment of the AH. Now it's different. The real guys are in Helly Hansen offshore outfits or Difi thermo overalls. A pity that we no longer have winters. But whether the motorcycle world used to be so much better?