Passes & Canyons Blog

Everyone who travels on their motorcycle knows you inevitably end up striking up conversations with other bikers along the way, and people not on bikes also talk to you. It works the other way as well. When you ride, but you’re not on your bike just now, you still end up speaking with other riders. At least I do.

This was demonstrated time and again on this recent car trip to Oregon that Judy and I just did.

I’ve already mentioned Sharon, who we met at Crater Lake in Oregon. And we saw her again in Loveland at the Steel Horse Sisterhood event. I have also already mentioned the three young guys who were riding Sportsters from Green Bay out on old Route 66, to San Francisco, to Las Vegas, and were headed home.

There were others.

For instance, we were stopped at the visitor center for John Day Fossil Beds National Monument and there was a singular Harley parked there. That’s it in the photo above. This guy has done up the entire bike in pennies and nickels.

I spoke with him about the bike and he said he wanted something unique. He wanted something no one else had ever done. So he repainted the entire body portions of the bike either a silver or copper color and then coated them with epoxy. Next he epoxyed the coin and stuck them onto the body parts. Then he put a couple more coats of epoxy over it all for good measure.

This is definitely a unique bike. He also made note that every time he rides it at least a few of the coins fall off so he is constantly putting more on to fill the gaps. Anyone ever seen something like that before?

Then there was Bruno from Belgium.

We were heading east out of Nevada and stopped for the night at a motel in Salina, Utah. The motel offered a light breakfast in the morning so we were hanging out around the office eating fruit, yogurt, rolls and coffee. I very thin young guy came walking up barefoot and while I was refilling my coffee he struck up a conversation with Judy. I came back and joined the conversation and it turned out he had ridden in on a BMW. He was from Belgium and was seeing the western U.S.

We talked about where he had been and where he intended to go, we gave him some suggestions from our own experience, and I pointed him to this website because he was heading to Colorado soon. We also told him if he needed a place to stay when he got to Denver we’d be happy to have him.

What was especially interesting about what he was doing was how he came to be on this BMW. Bruno is living at this time in Hong Kong. He has a friend who was riding his BMW all over the U.S. and had left the bike in Austin, Texas, to come to Hong Kong–not sure why. Anyway, Bruno has a little 250cc bike he rides around Hong Kong. He told his friend he could use the 250 around Hong Kong and in exchange he would fly into Austin and pick up the BMW and ride around the U.S. Then he’ll just leave the beemer wherever he ends up when he needs to go back to Hong Kong and the friend can fly back to that spot and resume his own travels.

We met others on bikes but these four were the most interesting encounters. You do meet the nicest people on motorcycles.

Biker Quote for Today

Why are motorcycle dealers closed on Sunday? Because Sunday is for worship . . . Catholics go to church, motorcyclists go ride.

Tags: meeting motorcyclists on the road

This entry was posted on Monday, June 22nd, 2015 at 1:03 pm and is filed under custom motorcycles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.