Punctuation Marks: Making the Most out of Mishaps

Reader Contribution by Richard Backus
Published on October 27, 2016

There’s a photo on my cellphone, a selfie of me and new riding pal Davis Aites. We’re both smiling, a motorcycle just visible in the background. We’re at the side of a road somewhere, and from the look on our faces, we’re having a great time. And we were. It’s just that we were broken down, somewhere south of Birmingham, England, on the A40, Davis’ bike struggling to get enough fuel to run on two cylinders.

It’s a memorable photo on a number of levels, a reminder of my recent trip to the Isle of Man for the 2016 Classic TT races. Fourteen Motorcycle Classics readers and I had met up outside London, England, before riding across England’s midsection, stopping in Birmingham and then Liverpool before riding to Heysham to board the Ben-my-Chree (“girl of my heart” in the Manx language) ferry for the 3-1/2-hour crossing to the Isle.

The selfie was taken on our return to London, eight days after we’d started. In between, we had experiences for a lifetime, riding through places we could hardly believe for their beauty. We’d also run out of gas, gotten lost and ridden through the rain at night with no headlamp. And here we were, broken down and smiling.

It’s a truism in my travelling that the most memorable trips are the ones punctuated by the unexpected. Touring — especially on two wheels — is ripe for exposure to the unexpected. Factors beyond our control including weather, people and luck — both good and bad — play a heightened role in the experience because we’re so much more exposed, physically and socially, when we ride. Over the years, my perspective has evolved to the point where I view a road trip devoid of unexpected deviations as almost forgettable.

Fortunately, that almost never happens, and precisely because we’re exposed, although I find keeping to the back roads helps. The super slab is a corridor, a broad path packing us together to funnel us from Point A to Point B. But the back roads, the little two-lane highways that string together towns large and small across the country, are connectors, intimate avenues that give us the opportunity to see what’s on the other side of the highway and peer, literally, into the backyard of wherever we are.

I prefer to ride old bikes when I tour, which potentially exposes me to a higher risk of breakdown on the road, the logic being that new stuff breaks less than old. That’s mostly true, but I’ve found you can ride a 40-year-old bike anywhere you want, you just have to take a little more time getting ready.

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