FlipSide wrote:

On 1 Jul 2006 05:35:24 -0700, "Jay Honeck" wrote:

[snip]

It used to be that most pilots I knew rode motorcycles, but that seems
to be less of a correlation lately. Wot say the group -- do you
currently ride a motorcycle? Did you in the past?



I had a 2002 Harley Dyna Low rider for a while. At 49 it was my first
motorcycle but sold it after 2 years for two reasons.

1. The longer I drove it the better the odds became that some idiot
driver would injure me. I know with more experience I could learn to
reduce the potential dangers, but I have heard of and known too many
guys that have been injured or killed on bikes that I thought it more
prudent to get a boat instead.

Actually, and we had a long thread recently about this on one of the
newsgroups, but maybe not his one, the probability does NOT change based
on the past.


Which leads to the second reason.
2. The motorcycle was such a solitary experience for me. My wife never
liked riding on it. And most of the time I was just cruising places on
my own. I did ride a few times with a buddy and was part of a special
ride with another 700 bikes once, but still it always seemed to be
such a solitary endeavor. I can now take another 10 people on my boat,
about 9 more passengers than the bike would carry. It's just more
fun to be able to hang out in the river, drink some beer, do some
tubing, water skiing, swim and generally just lounge around.

I actually like riding alone, but the good thing is that my wife likes
to ride, fly and shoot, even though she had done none of these before
meeting me. She knew that I was doing all of these before we got
married and wasn't likely to give up any of them. :-)


As of now, between the boat and sharing the flying with a colleague of
mine, I don't particularly miss the motorcycle.

Yes, I know I have too many passions and it is hard now with kids and
such to keep up with all of them. That is one reason I haven't been in
a big hurry to get another motorcycle, although I do miss riding a lot.


Matt