Motorcycle Bingo

Here's the card, in case you want to play.

Some of these statements are really interesting; to me. The "Have more than 200,000 lifetime miles" question, for example. Several times in the last 20 years I've tried to add up my lifetime miles and mostly I come away baffled that someone would keep track of that. Fifty years ago, I worked with a salesman who quit his job and bought a Chevy dealership. He was probably 45-50 at the time (really old) and said he'd just past 200,000 lifetime driving miles and since the average American in the 70's drove ab out 100,000 miles between fatal accidents (according to him) he figured his days were numbered. So, he bought a car dealership and quit pounding the miles. About 5 years later, I passed 600.000 miles just from that job. 

Six years of 100,000 miles per year and I still wasn't dead. Pure luck, I know. 

Around that same time, I guestimated that I had somewhere around 10,000-25,000 off-road miles and I had tested my luck severely and it hadn't been all that great: a dozen  busted ribs, five broken toes, both clavicles broke, both shoulders separated, broken thumb and index finger, and enough other stuff to entertain every x-ray tech who has ever scanned my body. About then, I bought my first street bike and the rest has been mostly uneventful, but I really haven't kept track of the miles I've ridden, ever. Mostly, my count comes from recollections of the miles the bikes had on the odometer when I bought and sold them. With some bikes, that wasn't particularly accurate because the odometers either failed and were replaced or never existed.  

Here's my score, keeping in mind that some of these points came from a while ago, some a long while ago. The IBA stuff and the intercom system boxed me out of a couple lines. The IBA has always just seemed like conspicuous consumption to me and everything about an intercom system would ruin motorcycling for me.

 I have at least half of a million miles in the saddle, maybe closer to 2/3. I racked up 130,000 miles on my poor Honda CX500 before selling it to a friend. My 1st TDM also had 100k on the odometer when I sold it. I put 30k in a year on 3 bikes between '83 and '95: the CX500 in 1983, a Yamaha 550 Vision in 1988 and '89, and my '92 Vision in 1993. I will be sorry for as long as I live that I didn't put that many miles on my V-Strom, my all time favorite road bike. Every bike I've owned since my first Yamaha Vision has had a custom seat, including my WR250X. 

It's cheating, I suspect, to have ridden 12 months a year in California, but I did for 10 years. I also rode 12 months a year in Denver for 5 years, and 3 or 4 times when I lived in the Twin Cities. I could almost claim "Don't own a car," because the car I did own was my wife's for 5 of the 10 years I lived in southern California. I all but forgot how to drive until I bought a 1973 Toyota Hilux for hauling my kayak. The other spaces are just boring "doesn't everybody do that?" stuff.

I'd hoped to tag all 50 states before I quit riding, but that may turn out to be a pipedream. There are just a few southeastern states in which I have not burned fuel: 6 plus Hawaii.