Growing up in the country, I was riding a 50cc at the age of 14 and motorcycles since I was 16.
I also got my motorcycle driving license before my car license and so I went to college on a Triumph trident.
Man I loved that bike , especially the sound of the engine taking in air through open air filters and the unbaffled sound of the Marving 3 into 1 exhaust pipe.
You could hear me coming for miles.smiley
But then it got so cold in the winter days that the nails of my hands turned black and so it was time to buy a car.
Motorcycles were purely a form of a hobby with my father and I putting them together in our garage and storing them , so at a certain time we had 7 ducati’s and 1 triumph in the garage of my parent’s house.
The ducati’s were all single cilinder bike which my dad and I loved at that time.
From a 250cc twin plug factory racer to a 450cc scrambler.
But as time went by interest decreased and so all the bikes eventually were sold off.
All but 1 : a 350 cc silver Desmo which even went on display at the museum in Assen located near the track.
Eventually that bike was also sold when I decided to buy a bike for my own transport to work and for the weekends.
So I bought a Suzuki GSX and years later traded it in for a Yamaha TDM 850.
With the purchase of a house the bike had to go and many years without motorcycles followed.
But then I became the coordinator of motorcycle education for the whole North eastern part of the Netherlands and every shop who had a student on their payroll was visited by me on a regular base.
This of course kept my knowledge of present day bikes up to date and increased my knowledge of all sorts of problems that occurred by all the different makes.
I was on a roll !