I love motorcycles. My father loved motorcycles.

Here he is on a springer Harley during WWII...

I rode dirt bikes and motocross bikes mostly when I was young. I had one of those Honda Ascot V-twins for a while. I never licensed it, but I rode it all over the state, to the beach once. That was a simpler time. I even had a Sportster for a while. When it came time to get a "Real" street bike, I searched for one similar to my father's springer... Harley still made springers with leather saddlebags... still makes them I guess...

The springer was fun, but it couldn't get out of its own way. Then one day I learned about Honda Valkyries, giant watercooled flat-six motorcycles with chrome car engines in them.

So I've ridden a Valkyrie for the last twelve years. Honda made a new Valkyrie, and I got one of them too. It was hard to make it comfortable, but it is a nice bike...a stripped down 1800 Goldwing. The original Valkyrie didn't really have a car engine in it, it had a souped-up 1500 Goldwing engine, but was a totally different bike from the Goldwing otherwise. Here's my 1800 Valkyrie next to a Motus that I got to ride for 65 miles out in the country. Holy cow, what an incredible motorcycle the Motus is!

Turns out my father had one of these after the springer, perhaps it would have saved me a lot of trouble if I'd seen this picture before the springer one...

After I got interested in Valkyries, I learned about the VRCC, where I met a ton of great people. We ride all over the Southern mountains. Here's us at the Shady Valley store in Tennessee. The mustachioed fellow is working on 600,000 miles on his Valkyrie!

Every summer the VRCC hosts a gathering they call INZANE at some interesting place. Here's us on a ferry in the middle of nowhere crossing (the Ohio?) river on the way to the Wisconsin INZANE.

Charging around the mountains all day (or for days at a time), just to be doing it, with people you like and trust, on these incredible motorcycles is living the life!