Many thanks for the kind words regarding my last posting. Here’s a few more items that might interest people.
To start with, one of the dealers here in England (Harleyworld at Chesterfield) had a ‘50th Anniversary’ Sportster day, the flyer for which I’ve pasted here.
Good to see lots of people turned up, some from a fair distance away. We even had a guy down from the north of Scotland, a member of the Dunedin Chapter, though most of the riders were from the north of England. Quite a number had ridden over the Peak District hills (across the Pennines) from Manchester. I’m still waiting for the official photo and T-shirt from the dealers though! Lots of Big Twins turned up too as it was a dual celebration to mark the anniversary of the dealership as well. I took a couple of pictures on my own camera; this is one of them here.
All Sportsters of course! We parked up separately for the official photographer. Obviously the one at the front of the picture is mine. There was a good selection of machines; the earliest one was a 1969 model. There was another machine with 80,000 miles on the clock too. Quite a few new (post 2003) machines with the rubber-mounted engines as well. Amazing how the engines shake in the frame at tickover! It was a good day out, lots of sunshine, good barbecue; they even had a rock band playing. Incidentally, but an important point, we don’t seem to have the Sportster versus Big Twin schism here in the UK, at least not to any real extent. If you ride a Harley, you ride a Harley and that’s the end of it. It makes me a little sad that in the USA especially there seems to be a number of Big Twin riders who dislike Sportsters and vice-versa, despite Harley-Davidson’s efforts to play it down. Maybe it’s part of the British tradition of lighter, faster, sports-orientated motorcycles that makes Sportsters acceptable among the Harley community as a whole. Or maybe it’s the fact that the UK had such a huge motorcycle industry with all kinds of machines (though it’s all gone now of course, apart from the new Triumphs – all credit to them, though for myself I’m really not so keen on re-badged Kawasaki’s…) I don’t really know. Still, I think that’s one of the good things about the Sportster scene in Britain as these days the two-wheeled brethren really need to stick together. In fact, that puts me in mind of another good reason why we do all seem to get along together; the point that motorcycling itself is pretty much under siege from government and has been for a long time. I’ve lost track of the license requirements for new riders these days (I used to teach starters as part of a government scheme called Star Rider) but I know there are various compulsory basic courses and examinations, then several power/weight tiers to be taken into consideration. It’s all quite expensive too. The overall effect is to put the kids off riding at all, which is no doubt what the government always intended. It’s all very different to my day, when the suburbs were knee-deep in Jap 2-strokes like my RD200…
On to more cheerful things. ‘Easyrider’ – hope you realise just how good you’ve got it in France when it comes to food. Things aren’t as bad as they used to be here in England, but this still isn’t the country to come to for a gourmet holiday… All the same, we do a good Yorkshire Pudding like you said; here’s some we had yesterday.
And just a quick hello to Rick as well – sorry Rick, no whisky distilleries in Yorkshire :( , or the whole of England in fact. (Plenty of breweries though :) ). The whisky comes from our Scots friends north of the border. I admit I’m into whisky in a
big way, so here’s another photo, with my whisky in it.
I’ll put together a few notes on whisky for next time; my thoughts on which are the best ones for you good people to try!
Ride safe,
Ian
Inloggen
V&A
Zoek
