I’m Peter F. A [show-my-age birthday=”05/16/1951″] year old born and bred UK resident.
I first started riding motorbikes with a friend at his father’s farm in my early ‘teens. If memory serves me well we rode a BSA 500cc single (circa early ’50s) and a Welbike (see picture).
When I was 16 I got a licence and passed my motorbike test. Motorbikes in those days were very different beasts to modern ones. Especially British bikes! They were usually built on designs dating back to around WW2, often two strokes and very, very unreliable. But there was little traffic on the road, no speed limits or cameras and therefore bikes were great fun to ride.
Then came the Japanese bike invasion of Europe and my moving to drive cars.
When I was about 35 I became very friendly with a guy who owned a motorbike shop and yes, I got re-interested in bikes. By my mid 50s I was a hardened biker again and started doing increasingly lengthy European trips on my bike of choice – a BMW GS. A bad back stopped my wife travelling with me so my trips were usually with a group of guys, often hardly known to me bar correspondence on bike websites to organise the trips.
Invariably these trips have been great fun and resulted in me forming friendships with like minded people – usually about the same age – and seeing places and riding roads that have been memorable.
Aged sixty I retired and so I have time to do more trips …………… and California to Alaska and back (though going one way and coming back another) from mid June ’12 to mid July ’12 was the most challenging yet. Though some might say my trip to ‘Confederate’ America this year with my friend Andy was more challenging – I did all the route planning and we hired bikes for just under three weeks. Fourteen states and 3500 miles!
As I’ve got older the Beemer GSA I had until 2014 became heavier – so I changed to a BMW 800GT which did everything I wanted. However the lure of going back to an explorer type bike was too great to resist. A nearly new Triumph 800Xcx now sits in the garage.
