Ms. Day wants to travel, somewhere, almost every day for recreation and to pacify or overwhelm her claustrophobia. Me, not so much. I spent our first 50 years of marriage either constantly on the road for a decade in my early electronics career (averaging more than 100,000 miles/year) to being often gone for training courses, field service or product testing trips, field clinical in-service training (as a trainer) or substituting for medical devices clinical engineers, or all-day local travel for my three one-man businesses. As has often been true in our decades together, our moods and motivations are not matching up, but this daily drive mania is a big mismatch.
By the time I was in my late 20s, I’d driven well over a million-and-a-half miles for work and avocation (R&R bands), many of those miles under intense pressure because my bosses were cowards who wouldn’t give a customer a realistic time for my arrival and made insane promises to avoid unpleasantness on their end of the transactions. That meant all of the unpleasantness would be saved up for me, the tech who arrived hours or days after he was expected. Even after that part of my work life ended, I hated being behind the wheel of any 4-wheel (or more) vehicle. We moved to California in 1983, I left first, from Nebraska, by motorcycle and my family followed a few months later by train. That was on my first street bike and my first motorcycle road trip and I was hooked.
I was 35 years old and, already, close to burned out when I left Nebraska, but the long ride from Omaha to Costa Mesa, California and the ten days I’d allowed for the trip and finding a place to stay and getting acquainted with my new home state was rejuvenating. It didn’t hurt that my new job was a giant improvement over any previous work environment I’d experienced. The three months between leaving Nebraska and the day my family arrived in California were enough to free me from the dreaded confines of a four-wheel “cage” indefinitely. Before they arrived, I bought a cage, a 1976 Volvo station wagon, for my wife’s transportation, but I only touched the damn thing to do maintenance (not an infrequent inconvenience). Over the next ten years, I sat behind the wheel so seldom that I practically forgot how to drive a car.
The early 80s were the beginning of the end for the best days of US motorcycling. Dealerships were consolidating and manufacturers were trimming down what they’d import into the US to suit our shrinking market. Last year’s models were this year’s huge discount. I went through a string of motorcycles in California, starting with the Honda CX500 that got me there, moving incredibly briefly to a Kawasaki KLR600, to a pair (in sequence) of Yamaha XTZ550 Visions, and a Yamaha XT350 that, along with the ’83 Vision, moved with me to Indiana and, 30 days later, to Colorado. In a slight nod to practicality, I bought a 1986 Toyota van in Indiana and used/abused it as a camper when I moved from there to Colorado after a failed attempt to upgrade my career in Indiana. As soon as I got to Colorado, I prepped my bikes for life at a mile-high and rarely used the van again. It became my wife’s vehicle a year or two later. Colorado wasn’t California, but it was close enough that I could plan on being on two wheels for at least 10 months of the year and most of the other 2. The US motorcycle business was still in freefall in 1992 and, in early 1993, I picked up a barely used Yamaha 850 TDM, from a discouraged physician who had spent an extra $3,000 “customizing” the bike. I bought the TDM for less than a song, maybe a chorus or part of a verse?
I moved to Minnesota in 1996 when I was 48-years-old. Not so old that I couldn’t ride my motorcycle most of the year, but old enough to need a cage or a bus pass when there was ice on the roads. (No longer made of “magic and rubber.”) I was also often acting as a liaison with medical device company clients and I was required to use my own vehicle to shuttle customers around Denver and, then, the Cities. I had bought a 1990 Nissan Pathfinder in Colorado for the outstanding 4-wheel-drive, passenger comfort, and all-weather transportation. The liaison aspect of my job quickly vanished in Minnesota and, once again, Ms. Day took possession of the Pathfinder. Our Roseville rental house was close enough to work for me to return to bicycling for, at least, half of the year and my Yamaha 850 TDM provided me with transportation, recreation, and utility for the rest of the year. In early 1997, we bought a house a bit further from work but closer to the Cities and we lived there for the next 18 years. That house had an 850 square foot garage and the garage became my “office” at home. Over the years we were there, I cycled through a half-dozen motorcycles, an electric scooter, and wore out three bicycles.
Not long after I retired and we moved to our current house in small southeastern Minnesota town, old age and medical crap made motorcycling less practical and fun. I sold my last motorcycle, a year ago, in early spring. It was definitely my last one because I sold a lifetime of tools, riding gear, and camping equipment, too. It turned out that utility was a big part of why I owned motorcycles. Riding to work every day kept up both my skills and my interest and retirement ended both. Just getting on a bike for a pointless cruise through the countryside never appealed to me and when sleeping on the ground became difficult even a long adventure tour lost its attraction.
After all that, I still do not like driving a car. One of my medical issues has provided me with occasional double-vision as a symptom. When that is happening, I don’t drive. That usually means after noon I’m not getting behind a wheel. Ms. Day has most of 59 years of expecting me to be the primary driver when we go somewhere together, but those days are likely gone forever. She isn’t used to that, yet.
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