Jane and Walt Ride West on Motorcycles By Walter F. Kern Part 1: Why we took up motorcycling
It was August of 1993 -- the year of the great Midwest floods. I was stopped behind a car towing a trailer. A Wyoming state road employee was holding a stop sign up ahead. I was on my 1990 Honda PC-800 motorcycle. My wife, Jane, was immediately behind me on her twin PC-800. We had ridden up from Cody after an overnight rain had stopped. We were on our way to Bear Tooth Pass. After waiting for five minutes, I could see cars moving. I pulled in the clutch, jammed my left foot down to engage first gear, let out the clutch, gently rolled on the throttle, and began following the trailer ahead of me. That was to be a mistake. Almost immediately I knew something was wrong. The road surface was becoming soft. Now it was mud. Then I realized that the drivers ahead of me had misinterpreted the signal of the person holding the sign and had taken the side of the road that was under construction. This mistake was no big deal for the cars. It was a giant mistake for anyone riding a motorcycle. My bike was now swerving. Then I thought of Jane behind me. I looked in my rear view mirror just as she fell. It was only an instant in time before I reacted but before that, my mind raced recalling the events that got us here... It started in 1989 when we traveled back to our hometown in Illinois. We always stayed with Jane's sister, Carol. Carol's husband, Jack, was a Renaissance man. He had no college degrees but was a self-made man who undertook everything with a passion for excellence. He loved motorcycles. He had a complete machine shop in his garage to maintain his own bikes. At that time he had two BMW motorcycles. He and Carol had traveled everywhere on those machines, even to the top of Pike's Peak. I had always harbored a secret desire to ride but had never acted on it. On our last day there we were standing in the garage seeing off Jack and Carol's son who was packing up his motorcycle to return to Chicago. I stood there looking at the bike for a long time. Suddenly, I knew that I had to learn how to ride before it was too late. On the way back to New Jersey I brought up the subject and to my surprise, Jane was enthusiastic and said she had always wanted to ride but thought I would never go for it. When we got back, we acted quickly. Jane immediately found someone at work who had a used 400 CC Honda for sale. We bought the bike, got our permits and scheduled our road tests. We still didn't know how to ride. I had heard about the Motorcycle Safety Foundation classes that were taught at a local college. We enrolled in the 3-day course and passed. Now we needed a second bike and it had to be a new one. By nature, I'm a pretty easy going guy and very conservative. I'm not into intimidation. So, the first time I screwed up enough courage to walk into my local motorcycle dealer looking to buy a new bike for Jane, I could just feel the intimidation as I stood there among those sparkling chrome machines. I could hear the subdued tones of the salesmen and customers talking about motorcycles using language I could not comprehend. There were rows and rows of machines all lined up like silent soldiers. I was afraid someone would come up to me and ask me to leave for being so much out of place. Oh yeah, I was intimidated by it all, but I was not going to leave. We had decided that Jane would get the first new bike. She got a 1989 Honda Shadow VLX. We found that the people at the dealership were really nice people. In fact, we began to see that almost everyone we met was nice. The media image of motorcyclists did not seem to be true. Shortly thereafter I traded in our first bike on a new 1991 Honda Nighthawk 750.
We started going to rallies but had not joined any clubs. Jane needed to find other women riders who could act as a support group. We quickly found the Spokes-Women Motorcycle club. Jane joined and I became an associate member. Shortly thereafter, I heard about a group called the Polar Bear Grand Tour. This group had 400 members that rode throughout the winter to points within NJ, NY, PA, and DE. I figured there was no way Jane would want to do this. However, when I brought it up, she was all for it -- so long as we could figure out a way for her to stay warm in the 20 degree New Jersey winters. On Halloween in 1992, we sat around a table in Lewes, DE at a Polar Bear gathering when one of the women said, "How would you and Jane like to join us on a trip out to Cody, Wyoming next year for the Rider Rally?" Well, that was something to think about. We knew that we would never know whether we had the ability to go on a long trip unless we tried one. And the fact that we would be going with experienced motorcyclists made the decision easier. However, we needed different bikes to do this 6000 mile trek. We ended up with twin 1990 Honda PC-800 bikes. We did a lot of planning into 1993 and ended up with four bikes and five people going.
We had a lot of fun on this trip and learned a lot. We found that we could ride 500 miles in one day if we had to. We met many colorful riders and swapped hundreds of stories -- I'll save those for another time. We rode through the desolate Sand Hills of Nebraska where you can ride 50 miles without seeing another vehicle. We rode into Sturgis, SD where the giant Sturgis Rally was being held. We headed to Cody, Wyoming for the Rider Rally. Cody is the next town out of Yellowstone Park. We toured Yellowstone on two occasions and almost froze to death. Our Polar Bear electric clothing saved us. => Part 2: Off to Beartooth Pass 
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© 2018 Walter F. Kern. All rights reserved.
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