It was the Summer of ’69, and for the Righteous Few Motorcycle Club, Wednesday night was Stag Night. Our regular meetings were held on Fridays, and we were one of the rare clubs that allowed our wives to sit in. Sundays were always club rides—a procession of 15 to 20 motorcycles sometimes followed by a carload or two of moms and kids headed to some race or field meet.

Name: Tim Schneider
Age: 42
Home: Milwaukee, WI
Occupation: Owner, The Shop

“We have three routes laid out for you: Advanced, Intermediate and Scenic,” explains Jimmy Lewis. “The difference between Intermediate and Advanced is how deep the sand is. Intermediate sand has a base; you can stop and get going again. Advanced sand is bottomless; if you stop, you’ll sink.”

The grass smokes different on the other side of the mountain. Shift your angle of view and familiar tableaux metamorphose, wondrous as desmodromic heads on a Harley. Traveling cane strapped across the luggage, Pretty Wife and I pointed our Germanic bike noses north for a trial run to Victoria, B.C.

Rolling onto that shoulder wakes me every time. I limped to the kitchen on my rheuma-tastic ankle and called the dogs in from the freeze. Auggie, our ancient Heinzhund, lunged twice at the iced-over porch. He’s lost a step or two, but was way fast once…

Watching thousands of California Superbike School students do a simple skid-pad exercise over the years brought up enough questions that I was finally compelled to find an answer: Fully 49 out of 50 riders asked to ride in a 50-foot circle look straight ahead, not into the path they are turning. They report concern about hitting something, but the nearest “something” was at least 300 feet away!

For years, decades in fact, I had avoided motorcycle auctions. As neither buyer nor seller, but simply yer humble observer/reporter, they seemed little more than a pain in the ass. Then last year, at the suggestion of erstwhile Motorcyclist columnist Ed Milich, who was otherwise occupied, I covered the Bonhams auction at the Quail Lodge in Carmel Valley, California, for Sports Car Market magazine. Since they covered my expenses I figured what the hell, it’s only about an hour up the road, may as well check it out. And if you can’t trust a tattooed poet who races vintage Italian bikes, who can you trust?

“The Horsepower War Rages On!” That headline from a recent issue of Car and Driver magazine certainly snapped into focus. Motorcyclists who have been around for a while are used to the horsepower wars, or at least to the horsepower siege, a seemingly permanent struggle amongst the manufacturers to outdo each other in performance. Dual overhead cams were old hat to us long before the (domestic) car guys thought they might be important, and of course motorcycle acceleration is still completely out of reach of any road-going four-wheeler.

Name: Rolf Janssen
Age: 43
Home: Atlanta, GA
Occupation: Engineer

IRVINE, Calif., April 3, 2012 – The Motorcycle Safety Foundation® has released a new safety video highlighting the importance of motorcycle riders and their passengers wearing personal protective gear. "Fool’s Gear, Cool Gear," based on the MSF’s popular safety poster of the same name, communicates a serious message in an entertaining manner.

Rider: Jerry Wood
Then: Founder, Penguin Racing School
Now: Owner, J. Wood and Company Auctioneers

Money or not, it was Smalldaughter’s turn for an adventure. Wordlessly, Pretty Wife threw down the gauntlet.

"Super clean runs great bought it from a friend that needed money about three months ago still in the garage needed room newborn on the way.”

“Take it to the track.” I’ve said that dozens of times here, but it bears repeating. There are scores of schools and track-day providers operating in America for your riding enjoyment and improvement. They are operating at roughly 40 tracks throughout the USA—one of them is close to you.

Putting all of the many components of a motorcycle together in the small volume that’s available, and then making it all work efficiently while looking good, is surely more art than science.

DILLIGAF? Frankly, no it doesn’t. Let’s back up for clarity’s sake: That eight-letter acronym is sometimes seen as a patch sewn onto a leather jacket or vest. It’s often surrounded by other, equally compensational patches such as, “The last guy who touched my bike, etc.” You will also see it on the occasional T-shirt or bumper sticker.

NAME: Adam Wentling
AGE: 33
HOME: Jonestown, PA
OCCUPATION: Instructor at Roger Lyle’s Motorcycle Xcitement racing school

“They serve the food in these little toilets,” she says, “and it’s styled to look like poo!” This intriguing tidbit comes from the woman seated next to me on my flight to Taiwan. “You sit on real toilets while you eat it,” giggles her partner, describing Taipei’s Modern Toilet restaurant, whose motto is “A good place to let yourself go.”

Twenty-twelve marks Motorcyclist’s 100th anniversary. A century of continuous publishing in the magazine business is an astounding feat, the likes of which we may never see again. There’s another streak, though—one going strangely unheralded amid all this centennial hoopla: my 43rd year of reading Motorcyclist.

John Lennon once said, “There’s nowhere you can be that isn’t where you’re meant to be.” Following a two-week trip to Taiwan, I’m inclined to say he was right—and that Lennon likely cribbed the saying from Buddha! Going to Taiwan was a purposeful mission: to ride with the Grand Riders. Many know of these venerable motorcyclists through the TC Bank commercial that went viral on YouTube last year (search "TC Bank Dream Rangers" on YouTube to see it yourself). It’s in Chinese with English sub-titles, but it’s eminently understandable and emotionally potent regardless of language. The short film shows a group of geriatric, dis-contented men who decide to turn their lives around and relive a defining moment of their youth: a motorcycle ride around the island of Taiwan.The theme is about having a dream and a purpose for living out your years productively, and after watching the video I was left with a gargantuan lump in my throat and far-from-dry eyes. To give you some perspective as to why I was so taken with the accomplishments of these aging riders, it helps to know that I am 69 years old (with 53 years of motorcycling under my belt) and a 7-year cancer survivor. Possessing a motorcyclist’s attitude and vinegar regarding my diagnosis, I chose the road less traveled with my treatment, much as I have done with my motorcycle film-making career.

RIDER: Neil Peart
THEN: Grieving widower contemplating life without music
NOW: Remarried husband and new father, still rocking with Rush

When Italian entrepreneur Gerry Lisi launched Métisse a few years back, he started simple, with a reproduction of the Rickman brothers' most iconic model. Dubbed the McQueen Métisse, this was an exact replica of the mid-’60s Triumph TR6-powered Mark III desert sled that actor Steve McQueen once called his “favorite bike.” This gorgeous reproduction captured lots of attention and put the Métisse name back on the map—110 examples of this $23,000 motorcycle have been delivered to date. But Lisi’s intention has always been to manufacture modern versions powered by an all-new, proprietary engine. Now the time has come for that project to go live with the Métisse Mark 5 Street Scrambler and Café Racer models, officially launched at last fall’s NEC Motorcycle Show in Birmingham, England.

Each time we catch the movie on late-night TV, we think the same thing: “Surely he’ll make it this time!” U.S. Air Force Captain Virgil Hilts, gunning his stolen Triumph motorcycle along the barb wire-lined Swiss/German border, finally spots a gap in the fence and makes his move. “Go, Virgil, go! Jump it!” we shout at the TV, and he does—only to have everything end in tears as he crashes upon landing and is captured and returned to the same dreadful POW camp from which he’d just escaped.

Way back in 1997, my sister Laurie e-mailed me one of those questionnaires that later became popular on Myspace. I dutifully filled it out, sent it back to her and apparently saved it, because I found it recently while purging files on my laptop. One of the lines read: “Name a person you would like to meet.” My reply: Neil Peart.

Talk about a wet dream: When I looked down at my Manx Norton after our 100-mile ride, it was so covered in castor oil that a nearby match would have set it ablaze. But that’s what you can expect from the only known motorcycle to include a valve-train sponge as factory equipment. And so my first try at the swanky Quail Motorcycle Tour & Gathering proved to be a fantasy experience all right—a really oily one!