Passes & Canyons Blog

A larger OFMC in 2013.

The OFMC started off as just three of us, John, Bill, and me. Over time it grew to where we once had about 11 guys on our annual ride. Now we’re back to three: Bill, Dennis, and me. As this year’s trip nears I’ve been thinking about all those guys who came and left.

The big number one is John. John got this thing started. He was the first of us to buy a motorcycle, and after riding behind him for a while I figured I had to buy my own bike. When Bill saw us having so much fun he decided he needed one, too, and the OFMC was born.

So why is John out? Age and health. He’s suffering from macular degeneration as well as a number of other health issues. He has finally grown into the original name of the group, Old Farts Motorcycle Club. We weren’t old farts when the name was chosen with tongue in cheek but he has definitely gotten old now. We’re sorry to lose you John.

Not everyone ages at the same rate, however, and Bill and I are both much younger than our years.

Johnathon, John’s son, was the fourth member of the group. John bought a new Honda Shadow and gave his old Yamaha Virago to Johnathon. So Johnathon started coming along. After a number of years though, he felt the pressures a lot of dads of young families feel: his kids need a dad and motorcycling is too hazardous. So he gave it up, and has not come back.

Bill’s son Jason followed a similar arc. His dad gave him the old bike when he bought a new one and he rode with us for a few years. Then he decided he needed to do the dad thing and choose his kids over the bike. Jason, however, was recently given another bike and is riding again. But he’s still not coming on the trip; too much of a time commitment for someone with a family and not a lot of vacation time.

Friggs was the fifth member of the group. Friggs is Bill’s older brother and while he is in good health, he took a spill down in New Mexico a couple years ago and that convinced him to give up riding. He’s not the first to make that decision.

Back in 2004 we were joined by Todd, who was the friend of Jason. We figured Todd would become a regular but a couple months after the trip he got in a very serious crash and that was it for Todd. No more riding.

Along the way Dennis joined us. Dennis is married to Friggs and Bill’s sister Janice. And Dennis is still with us.

Randy was a friend of Johnathon’s and he came with us for a good number of years, even after Johnathon dropped out. But now he has just faded away. Didn’t come a couple years ago and not since; no real explanation.

Brett was a friend of Jason’s as well, and he came along for plenty of years. He doesn’t have any kids but following a divorce and a new wife he seems to have concluded he would rather spend vacation time with her than with us. So he has faded as well.

Brett has a brother, Matt, who came with us one year, but I think he felt he was a bit young to be hanging with the geezers so he never came back.

Ray is the cousin of John’s wife, Cheryl. Ray is a hard-core biker and he joined us on a couple occasions but with John out I doubt we’ll be seeing Ray again, although he definitely still rides with his own group.

That’s where we stand today. I expect the three of us to continue riding for many years yet. Maybe Jason will rejoin us in a few. Who knows, maybe Johnathon, too. Or maybe someone else–you never know.

Biker Quote for Today

You know you’re a biker if when you plan a vacation you set up time to visit the bike shops first.

Scooters are harder to break than motorcycles.

At this point I’ve been riding motorcycles for so long it’s all become so second nature. I remember at first when it was new and I always was fully alert and focused just because I had to be. I thought back then that the idea that I would ever find myself struggling to stay awake while riding, as often happens in a car on a long drive, was totally absurd. Not true these days.

Thinking back even further, though, I go to a trip my lady friend and I made to Mazatlan. This was the only time I’ve ever ridden a bike in Mexico. It’s not a tale of glory, though; it’s a tale of ignominy.

Although I’d ridden motorcycles every chance I got since the time I was 15, I never had that many opportunities in those early years so the skills never had a chance to solidify and settle permanently in my brain. That only happened when, at 37, I finally bought my first bike and started riding a lot.

I was probably about 30 when Sue, my girlfriend at the time, and I took a week’s vacation to Mazatlan. Unlike me, Sue had owned motorcycles and ridden a great deal. One entire year in college her only transportation had been her motorcycle and she had even managed to ride it when there was snow on the streets, using her feet as outriggers.

It was only natural then, when we saw a place in Mazatlan renting motorcycles and scooters by the hour, that we decided to go for it. It turned out that the place only had one motorcycle available at that moment, plus some scooters. This being Mexico, of course the guy in charge set me up on the cycle and picked out a scooter for Sue. No self-respecting man would want to be seen on a scooter while his woman rode a cycle, would they? No way.

Never mind that Sue was the experienced one and ought to have been the one on the bike. We could swap once we had gotten away from the rental place.

Scooters, of course, have no gears; you just twist the throttle. Motorcycles have gears and you flip the toe lever down to get into first, and then flip it up for all other gears. Surely I must have understood this other times I had ridden but it was one of those bits of knowledge that had not stuck. Sue probably mentioned it to me before we took off but in the excitement of the moment that didn’t stick either.

We blasted away from the rental place and as the revs went up I pulled in the clutch and toed the lever down to get into second. Down. Letting out the clutch, the engine revved very high and I was clearly not in a higher gear. Again I clutched and toed the lever down. Again the engine raced and things were not right.

Maybe I was doing something wrong, I thought. Maybe I needed to be going faster before I shifted. I cranked the throttle harder, the engine really screaming now, and pulled in the clutch, flicked down on the shift lever. Releasing the clutch it was just like before.

It was about this time that the rental guy came racing up on a scooter waving us over. “Stop! Stop!” he yelled. “You break the bike!” Not allowing any protest he informed us he was taking the bike and giving me his scooter. And he kept muttering about “You break the bike.” Sue told me again after he left that second and higher gears are up, not down, not that it mattered any more.

So we scooted around Mazatlan for awhile and had a fun time anyway. Hey, scooters are fun. And they’re a lot harder for idiots to break.

Biker Quote for Today

I get up every morning determined to both change the world and have one hell of a good time. Sometimes this makes planning difficult.

How can you call this an old bike?

Maybe you’ve had this experience. You buy a brand new motorcycle and you ride it. And you keep on riding it. And then one day someone mentions that you sure have an old bike. What? This is not an old bike! But then you count the years and . . . yes it is.

My 1999 Kawasaki Concours is like that. I bought it new from Vickery in ’99. About 10 years or so later I took it over for service and they told me they don’t generally like to work on older bikes like mine. They fired me as a customer. Aurora Honda had done the same some years earlier.

I will interject here that recently I learned that you can sometimes get your older bike worked on at a dealership. But it’s iffy.

So I turned to Mountain Thunder Motorsports for all my service needs. Joel was operating out of a building on old Hampden over near Federal Boulevard for many years and he became my go-to guy. Then his landlord terminated his lease. This may have been a boon for Joel because he now works at home–no rent!–and he tells me he’s very busy. The one hassle is that he now has to pick your bike up, take it home, do the work, and then bring it back to you. But he makes it work.

Anyway, my Concours needed a new front tire. I want to ride it on the OFMC trip in a few weeks and that old tire was not going to make it. For good measure, I asked Joel to also do a complete tune-up, something the bike had not had in probably way too long.

This morning I took it for my first ride since Joel brought it back and oh man, what a difference! I pushed the starter button and it fired up instantly. That was what it used to do when it was new but it hadn’t done that in a very long time. And it ran so smoothly. Plus, now it has a brand new front tire. How nice to have tread.

So now it’s just like new, right? Unfortunately, no.

When we were getting ready two years ago to go on a trip to Canada with Willie and Jungle and some other folks I arranged for Jungle to put a new rear tire on the bike. When he got the rear end opened up he showed me that some seal back there had failed. He packed the rear hub with grease and said that would take care of it but at some point I would probably need to have some work done.

I mentioned this to Joel and asked him to take a look, and he did, but he said while there was clearly a leak somewhere he couldn’t tell where without removing the radiator and other stuff up front. His advice was to clean away all the oil and dirt accumulated down there and then watch to see where new leakage might be coming from.

But oh golly, when I was riding the bike this morning it was just like new. How can you call this an old bike?

Biker Quote for Today

Why motorcycles are better than women: One gets in no trouble for storing disassembled pieces of the motorcycle in the basement.