K11 Owners Group

[lexxol]

The leaves danced and I rode upon a cloud.

I love to ride motorcycles in the peace and solitude of the country side where I can enjoy nature and all it’s beauty. I ride the country roads every Sunday morning. This particular Sunday was different because we had a very late cold front come through with temps in the high 50’s and high winds. We rounded a bend in the country side lined with trees. The leaves seemed to be dancing in front of us. Instead of blowing a cross the road the leaves seemed to be on their ends spinning like a tops. The pavement was a long strip of dancing brown for several hundred feet. Around the next bend the temperature dropped suddenly and a layer of fog rolled across the ground as far as one could see. Trees, cows, horses, and barns seemed to float on a cloud of fog. It was breath taking. The K1100rs purred along quietly to add to the experience. Nature never ceases to amaze me.
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1995 K1100rs
1987 k75/Pichler fairing

[Off the grid]

I've had moments like that. They are the reason we ride.

Thanks for sharing.
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Bane of your existence since July 2006
2007 Triumph Tiger ABS. "Sabertooth"
2009 Husqvarna TE610. "The dirty Italian mistress"

[Flying Duck]

Stay away from the brown acid.
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93 LT (x2)
94 RS
86-97 K75F(K75/100/1100 Frankenbrick)
86 K75C w/paralever, hi perf cams,TURBO!
91 & 92 K75Ss
91 K1
86 custom K100
14 WR250R
IBA #17739 (SS1K, BBG, 50CC)
Buy parts HERE

[MakaSichu]

[SugarHillCTD]

Nicely said.

Cathy and I are going for a ride & dinner late this afternoon.

Temps are supposed to be up into the 70's.

And my brick NO LONGER LEAKS>

Just another day in paradise.........

Thanks again,
John
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John & Cathy

'92 K100RS4V Pearl White SOLD
'04 K1200GT
IBA Several-SS1k, BBG, 50CC NYC to S.F.

[Saltcreek]

I think we need a separate creative writing forum!
_________________
Jim

1994 K1100LT Mystic Red, bfd, 37000 miles, sold
2009 Wilderness Systems Zephyr 155 ST
2002 Litespeed titanium

[Beachcomber]

Maka Sichu,
wonderful vision - feet down in the leaves - here in the UK we have horses and cows also use our roads [ country ] - get my drift?

TJ
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Beachcomber '93 K1100RS / '93 K1100LT and several K100's

[MakaSichu]

[Saltcreek]

In the interest of keeping the writing thing going, a friend sent me this, I'll pass it along:

There is cold, and there is cold on a motorcycle. Cold on a motorcycle is like being beaten with cold hammers while being kicked with cold boots, a bone bruising cold. The wind's big hands squeeze the heat out of my body and whisk it away; caught in a cold October rain, the drops don't even feel like water. They feel like shards of bone fallen from the skies of Hell to pock my face. I expect to arrive with my cheeks and forehead streaked with blood, but that's just an illusion, just the misery of nerves not designed for highway speeds.
Despite this, it's hard to give up my motorcycle in the fall and I rush to get it on the road again in the spring; lapses of sanity like this are common among motorcyclists. When you let a motorcycle into your life you're changed forever.
The letters "MC" are stamped on your driver's license right next to your sex and weight as if "motorcycle" was just another of your physical characteristics, or maybe a mental condition. But when warm weather finally does come around all those cold snaps and rainstorms are paid in full because a motorcycle summer is worth any price.
A motorcycle is not just a two-wheeled car; the difference between driving a car and climbing onto a motorcycle is the difference between watching TV and actually living your life. We spend all our time sealed in boxes and cars are just the rolling boxes that shuffle us languidly from home-box to work-box to store-box and back, the whole time, entombed in stale air, temperature regulated, sound insulated, and smelling of carpets.
On a motorcycle I know I'm alive. When I ride, even the familiar seems strange and glorious. The air has weight and substance as I push through it and its touch is as intimate as water to a swimmer. I feel the cool wells of air that pool under trees and the warm spokes of sunlight that fall through them. I can see everything in a sweeping 360 degrees, up, down and around, wider than Pana-Vision and higher than IMAX and unrestricted by ceiling or dashboard.
Sometimes I even hear music. It's like hearing phantom telephones in the shower or false doorbells when vacuuming; the pattern-loving brain, seeking signals in the noise, raises acoustic ghosts out of the wind's roar.
But on a motorcycle I hear whole songs: rock 'n roll, dark orchestras, women's voices, all hidden in the air and released by speed. At 30 miles per hour and up, smells become uncannily vivid. All the individual tree-smells and flower-smells and grass-smells flit by like chemical notes in a great plant symphony.
Sometimes the smells evoke memories so strongly that it's as though the past hangs invisible in the air around me, wanting only the most casual of rumbling time machines to unlock it. A ride on a summer afternoon can border on the rapturous. The sheer volume and variety of stimuli is like a bath for my nervous system, an electrical massage for my brain, a systems check for my soul.
It tears smiles out of me: a minute ago I was dour, depressed, apathetic, numb, but now, on two wheels, big, ragged, windy smiles flap against the side of my face, billowing out of me like air from a decompressing plane.
Transportation is only a secondary function. A motorcycle is a joy machine. It's a machine of wonders, a metal bird, a motorized prosthetic. It's light and dark and shiny and dirty and warm and cold lapping over each other; it's a conduit of grace, it's a catalyst for bonding the gritty and the holy.
I still think of myself as a motorcycle amateur, but by now I've had a handful of bikes over half a dozen years and slept under my share of bridges. I wouldn't trade one second of either the good times or the misery.
Learning to ride was one of the best things I've done.
Cars lie to us and tell us we're safe, powerful, and in control. The air- conditioning fans murmur empty assurances and whisper, "Sleep, sleep." Motorcycles tell us a more useful truth: we are small and exposed, and probably moving too fast for our own good. But that's no reason not to enjoy every minute of the ride.
-Author Unknown
_________________
Jim

1994 K1100LT Mystic Red, bfd, 37000 miles, sold
2009 Wilderness Systems Zephyr 155 ST
2002 Litespeed titanium

[Jim]

I probably posted this before - but it may be gone now - I'll add it to this thread.

"I ride a motorcycle. I want to experience the world. I want to feel the wind against my body as I connect with the road, the sky. I want to remember this lonely emptiness across the desert. I want to feel this when I close my eyes, 50 years away. To be one with the machine, turning and twisting under my control. I am the machine. My legs wrapped around an engine, my arms attached like wings, spread out across the handlebars. My every sense connected to my brain, like lighting bolts of thought pushing out the pistons. I concentrate on everything around me. I relax with a feeling of completeness, focused on the horizon. Over the next hill lies everything. Another breath, another vision. I ride a motorcycle." Daniel Cohen, motojournalist

To read the ride report and see the pix: http://www.danielcohen.org/100days/journals/day001.htm
_________________
Jim
1997 K1100LTSE 94,000 - still has gremlins!
1995 R100RT Classic 16,650 crashed - repaired!
1992 K75RTP 46,000

"We shall not all die, but we shall all be changed."

[SugarHillCTD]

[Shoganai]

I like this thread a lot also.

I'd like to add to it from an old posts of mine elsewhere on the web.

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The Edisto river is enhanced by the cooler air.
As I watch the breath of the river exhaled in the cold morning air, my own visable breath flees my lungs, and joined together, they dance in the cold sunlight.



The Gerbing is on broil, trying to stay ahead of the cutting cold, and I draw a slow icy breath in, inhailing deeply, then I expand my rib cage to press my skin against the hot wires. Ah, that is nice.

I love to see the morning light through the gossimer of winged seeds.





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Last night I got to go home early at 0300. This gave the ride home a new spirit. Orian's open arms pointed me home and even though I was tired and the cold pushed me towards my nice warm bed, I lingered.

I loped along at a gentle pace.

I was thinking about the moon. It'a a powerful totum in my life.
I marveled at the sunshine brightly caressing it's slender face. How some of that light then falls to Earth onto the seas. Onto oceans I'll never behold with my own eyes. And then the Earth sends some of that light back to the moon. There becoming Earthshine when it falls once more to my eyes.

Sunshine

Moonshine

Earthshine


I roll through the sleeping little town of Ridge Spring.





And, just a quick swing by New Moon Coffee.



What a wonderful ride that was, and though it warmed my heart and set my soul off to walk among the stars, I was so very grateful to shed my motorcycle skin and crawl into my heated waterbed at 0500.

==========================================

I’ve been think about the moon a lot lately. I look at it often with my telescope or just glance up at it on my home from dinner. My thoughts have wandered from the scientific to the surreal.

Would life on Earth cease if there was suddenly no Moon? The tides would stop, the oceanic ecosystem that feeds the world would collapse thereafter as a cascade system wide failure.

Isn’t it fascinating what the mathematical probabilities must be to have a planetary body like the moon orbiting another body in such a manner that it keeps only one side facing us. This is not unique but still interesting. And what a deep well of metaphors that is.

It’s beautiful, predictable, mysterious, comforting and aloof. I’ve walked many a moon light mile through cold winter woods with my breath scattering it’s subtle light around me. Or stumbled under it’s gentle gaze through tall, wet grass on warm summer nights to spread out a blanket to sleep under the stars.

But the thought that brings me to my knees is this.

When I look at the Moon, I see what EVERY human being that has ever lived that had eyes to see has seen. Aristotle, Leonardo, Jesus, Mary Queen Scots, Kennedy, Churchill, Keats, Hitler, Buddha, Tolstoy, Bach, the fearful caveman, all my ancestors, and all the ancestors of all mankind. And I have a odd sort of comfort from believing that future generations will behold that same Moon and maybe think of all those who came before. This ONE thing links us spiritually and temporally with all mankind.

So the next time you look at the Moon, maybe imagine standing somewhere and somewhen in the past and look at it with new eyes.


Just thinking out loud tonight.
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1993 K1100RS aka The Shop Whore
1994 K1100RS aka Blue Streak

The long road is a rainbow and the pot of gold lies there.
So slip the chain and I'm off again,
You'll find me everywhere. I'm a Rover. - JT


Nana korobi ya oki

[Off the grid]