The Publishing Heretic

I generally really enjoy Charles Krauthammer's columns but as someone who was utterly fascinated by the Apollo program as it happened, this one really hits home.

Charles Krauthammer

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Scott Stantis

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If you ever want a clock for your motorcycle (or bike I suppose) you can't do better than ordering from Ross and Linda Harjes at clocks4bikes.com

Sometimes a company goes beyond anything one would expect. It was just a simple thing and may not have cost them much but I wouldn't have ever expected it.

I ordered a clock for my wife's motorcycle from an ebay listing. The Harjes sent me exactly what I ordered and it wasn't their fault that I misinterpreted sizes and got one too big for the Honda Rebel handlebars. I wrapped some electrical tape around the handlebars and made it work. It wasn't as tight as I would like but it was okay. Several months later, they sent me an email noting some special offers and I decided to reply to this email asking if they had a mount to fit the Rebel that I could buy. I had opened up the package and used the device for months, I certainly didn't expect to exchange it but figured I could buy the right piece if they had it. Instead of trying to sell me a new piece, they sent a replacement mount with a prepaid return for the old one. I'm sure they're a mom and pop organization and I just thought that was an extremely nice touch. And, in each order, they include a handwritten note thanking you for your business.

The sell clocks and thermometers for motorcycles with all kinds of mounts and styles.

Okay, that being said, it makes perfect sense to me to add a clock to your handlebars. It's not so easy getting to your watch, pda or cell phone when riding. But I admit I am somewhat puzzled why anyone sitting outside on a motorcycle wants a thermometer. Can't you open your helmet to find out what the temperature is??? Seems like weather prediction on a motorcycle is the the rock weather station which is invariably accurate. If the rock is wet, its raining, if its hot, the temperature is hot, if the rock is cold, the temperature is low... you get the idea. Course, with all the cool gadgets some of my Goldwinger friends have, I suppose some people want everything on their bike a cager might have in a luxury car except, perhaps, the sunroof.

wck

Labels: Motorcycling

(Note, this was also written in November, rather than December) While I’m fearful of what I think will be leftist policies, I have to give credit where credit is due. Obama’s campaign was great, rarely delved to the desperate nastiness of McCain’s, I believe him to be a man of principals even if I disagree with many of those principals. He, has, so far, been impressive as a symbol, has maintained a calm, cool demeanor that is highly comforting. Maybe there is more pragmatism there than I believe. I certainly hope so.

On being the first “black” president, well, I’m like all the conservatives and liberals alike. It is great that this barrier is finally broken. In recent years, we have seen lots of talented people in high roles in government and business. Powell, Rice, Thomas come to mind as well as several in the Clinton administration. I see a lot of hope in that race seems to matter almost nothing to my kids. Its just not a factor in their thinking and their friends' thinking and that’s the way it should be.

I grew up in a very racist home, in a community in the throes of integration. Being taught to be more liberal in school, we gave lip service to the ideal that race didn’t matter but deep inside of us, we were either fighting back deep dark beliefs we pretended we didn’t believe or trying to overcompensate. Over many years, I have found myself moving away from pretending it didn’t matter to finally really understanding and believing that race per se doesn’t matter. For my kids, I think, it really doesn’t.

One fact that is little noted by pundits in Obama’s victory, however, is the almost complete invisibility of black “leadership”. Rev. Wright and Rev. Sharpton are conspicuous by their absence.

While I imagine that if Jesse Jackson ever gets an invitation to the White House, they won’t let him near any sharp instruments, he too has bee strangely silent.

The black community in the US has long been badly served by its self-proclaimed and media-annointed leaders.

But the mantle seems to be moving away from race-baiters to competent, self-assured people who don't give a damn what people think of their race. I’m not sure all of these people want to be in the same sentence together but Barack Obama, Condoleezza Rice, Clarence Thomas, Thomas Sowell, Colin Powell and many others represent a changing face of black leadership as people for whom their race may be a factor but not even close to being a deciding factor in their lives and career. And this is the way it really should be.

Yes, I do believe that in many ways. that many blacks have a harder row to hoe in life because of conscious or unconsious racism but no amount of white liberal condescension, no amount of government interference is going to make a positive difference. Such things they can make the situation much worse. Witness the horrors created by the well-intentioned “Great Society” programs of te 60’s and 70’s--a massive slowdown of (statistical not individual) black progress and the destruction of the traditional black family among a large part of the black population to name just two.

If these new prominent blacks are ushering in a new mentality that blacks no longer ask the country, the government, the society, whites, or the liberals for what they want or need because they are black but simply earn or demand it because they are men and women then we are going to see a huge leap forward in race relations in this country.

Just a random thought:

Why is Obama our first “black” president. Isn’t being our first “mixed-race” president just as much of an accomplishment and even more indicative of how multi-racial we’ve become as a country? Its also weird that Tiger Woods is the first big “black” golfer because their aren’t a lot of blacks in professional golf. Aren’t their more blacks in pro golf than asians? Stupid, silly, meaningless categorizations.

It’s a testament to how long it has been since I last blogged that one of my prior blogs I was thinking about was how John McCain had won the presidential race the day he picked Gov. Palin as a running mate. This was after her convention performance and before her Katy Couric interviews.

But this is not necessarily a blog about how bad my political instincts are.

As a conservative, but a heretic among conservatives, I can’t say I’m particularly surprised by the election results and as an American, one can’t be but proud of our country overcoming one huge barrier.
But I do have some thoughts on these results.

McCain had a steep hill to climb given the incompetence of the current White House occupants. It is hard to vote for Republican fiscal conservatism when both the budget and the debt have balloonned so horribly over the last few years. It is a sad reflection on you when Democrats look like the fiscal conservatives.
It is hard to vote for the Republican concept of proper use of military force, and repudiation of “nation-building” with the Iraq mess still going on.

It seems to me that the Republicans and McCain in particular, kept giving away all their advantages. Obama is inexperienced and something of a blank slate with very little paper trail behind him. What paper trail their is leads me to think he is a liberal and a progressive but he maintains enough plausible deniability to keep those approbations from sticking. (That ought to get at least one person to respond to this entry :-) )
.
So bring in Palin????

Obama has a long history of association with Rev. Wright and black liberation philosophy so forbid attacks on that front and hammer attacks about Ayers????

I like McCain, I think some of the ways he was pulling the GOP were good, particularly towards a better appreciation of environmental issues and towards a more realisitic approach to immigration. (I’m not so fond of his campaign finance reform). Being from the Libertarian side of the conservative movement rather than the religious right side, I appreciated a lot of his positions but man, did his campaign stink of nastiness and lack of direction. I was originally pretty much for McCain, but his campaign and choice of Palin pushed me into the undecided column for a long time and frankly, I could have gone either way up until I really thought about what a very liberal president will do to this country out of pure goodwill and ignorance. Even then, it was apparent that McCain had lost and my vote could only add to or reduce Obama’s mandate.

(Addendum: Added a month later, this comment really written in Dec 08. I continue to be surprised and impress by the man. Yeah, he comes from stinky Chicago politics but apparently he had the guts to turn Blago down. He seems to be going against some of his more progressive promises by naming many moderates to his cabinet, keepting Gates and seeming to back off from most of his most dangerous ideas. I still disagree with his political instinct, especially all these “bailouts” but it’s not like the Republicans are putting up any kind of principled fight against this stupidity. So if one judges by “presidential” temperament, so far, he still seems the better choice.)

Haven’t posted for a while. I’ve got a lot of topics, just not enough time and, perhaps, discipline.

So, reaching back into my list of topics I want to talk about, lets go with an audio book today. Even better, this audio book has everything to do with motorcycle riding, the frequent topic of my most recent posts and had to do with the Mongols, a biker gang that was recently in the news as the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms recently made a huge bust after inflltrating the gang.

What the news reports I’ve seen don’t mention is that the ATF once infiltrated this same gang before and the book, Under and Alone, by William Queen, is the story of this undercover operation.

Billy Queen ran with the mongols for close to a year and the description of the how the gang worked and thought are fascinating, funny and scary at the same time. From the sounds of it, Queen infiltrated one of the smaller, less organized chapters but got himself evenually elected treasurer (yes, they actually have to run like businesses because they are, in effect, criminal businesses).
But what is equally as interesting is the struggle Queen had separating his life as an ATM agent from his life as a fully patched Mongol.

In order to do what he did, he had to befriend, tough, violent thugs who also became friends and a sort of family to him.

Do I believe everything in the book--no. I’m betting Queen overstated some thing and played down others but it has an overall ring of truth to me and was utterly fascinating. It was a great book to listen to in the car, I can imagine it would be a tremendous book to listen to through your hemlet speakers.

Buy this book on Audible.com

Long time, no write...

I've actually been composing blog entries in my head for the last few weeks but they haven't somehow made it down to my electronic paper. So let me catch ya'll up with a few riding highlights so I can get on to writing about some other subjects soon.

First, I mentioned in nearly my last blog about falling down in the rain. Still don't know what happened but I suspect I was applying too much back brake on one of those big white turn arrows in the middle of the road. The interesting thing was how I felt riding the next day or so. It was like being set back a year in my skills. For a day or so, I was afraid to lean, afraid to keep up speed, trying to stop very slowly. After a couple of days riding, things returned to normal until the next day I got caught riding out in the rain. And this time, instead of just being a good steady rain, this was more of a cats and dogs downpour. When I finally got off the bike again, I was soaked to the skin through jacket and through pants. (Rain gear is on order and should arrive today). It took a lot of willpower to keep going and not call my wife to come pick me up but I was gonna be damned if I was gonna let this cow me. The good news is I was able to ride, I believe, as safely as possible in a downpour (sans rain gear, anyway), I didn't fall and I think I restored my confidence a bit.

Ultimately, it is probably a good thing to be reminded every once in a while on how vulnerable you are on a bike so you keep from doing the really stupid things.

Speaking of the wife (whom I wasn't calling), I didn't think she would even finish the MSF class, though I hoped, but she's surprised me as she often does and has started riding her bike to work when she can. It took her a while to be able to push the throttle over 25 and she's still not leaning as well as she should but she's doing a great job of going further and further and keeping up to at least the speed limit. Okay, so gone are the dreams of the girl riding behind me, arms tightly wrapped around me and long hair flying in the wind (I always wanted a wife with long hair and she always wanted a guy with lots of chest hair, it's a "Gift of the Magi" type thing for us.) but my wife is not so much into either romantic things or my male fantasies and it is a lot of fun to be able to take the short trips with her now and maybe some longer ones in the future.

An interesting thing happened to my riding in July. I still enjoy it, I still think this motorcycle is the coolest thing I've ever owned but an interesting shift happened somewhere in that cavernous hole I call my head. Somehow, biking turned into something I did and lost that extra edge of excitement of being something new and special. Its hard to describe. I'm riding down the road to work or on a trip and it used to be the thought cross the dork part of my mind like "Oh, wee, I'm riding a motorcycle! I always wanted to do this, wheeeeee." Now, I'm doing the same ride and the thought goes more like "Wow, what a great morning, I'm having fun and riding my motorcycle." I still love it, I am still having fun riding and still want to ride when I can but those italics on the word motorcycle have toned down and it has become a normal, if fun, part of my life rather than something new and overly exciting.

And last is a quick mention of a great ride me and daughter #2 took. If you're in Ohio, make sure to take a sidetrip to the Amish and Mennonite Heritage Center in Berlin, OH (pronounced here as rhyming with Merlin). In there is an impressive Cyclorama that took a Canadian artist someting like 12 years to paint. It is a painting 10' hight and nearly the length of a football field (curved into a cylinder) that tells the history of the Anabaptist movement in striking and colorful and sometimes shocking detail. The story of how this man, who was not a member of either sect, came to paint this masterwork is an interesting story in itself. They present you with a video on Mennonite and Amish life and make some explanations of why they choose to live the way they do and shun the "modern" world. You can get a tour of the painting given by a New Order Amish man and have the chance to ask him questions on the history or on Amish life. It is both a way they can communicate with the tourists to the area without the tourists gawking and taking pictures of their horse and buggies and asking inappropriate questions and a way for them to educate their own on their supposed religious history. Don't get me wrong, I'm not ready to convert, but this center and particularly this striking painting, give visitors a window into a lifestyle we can barely imagine. Viewing the painting, I was struck by how much of a martyr-based sect they are, revelling in the stories of people who died for their beliefs in what was to the mainstream church, a terrible heresy. (The heresy, in a nutshell, was that baptism happened after the age of consent and reason, not at birth ans was an act of accepting the religion personally rather than being a rite of the church necessary imposed for your own good from outside.)

I guess I learned, or thought I learned, a couple of things that surprised me.

• I always thought that their shunning of modern technology (cars and electricity) was somehow biblically-based but learned that while they are fundamentalists, their 19th century lifestyle is more a conscious choice to keep apart than based on some obsure biblical passages.
• I always thought it was a much more patriarchical man king, woman servant type of lifestyle than it appears to be. Yes, they have traditional roles for men and women, but at least according to their telling, it is much more democratic and egalitarian than I thought, especially in the less restrictive orders.

Anyway, visiting the painting "Behalt" is a fascinating experience by bike or car and well worth leaving the beaten path to see. Click here for details

Okay, I've mentioned my first fall from Grace (I like that, I think I'll name my bike "Grace") a few times already and I guess it's time to post the description. It's a good enough story to warrant its own post.

So this is back a year ago. I took the MSF class, which was the first time I had actually ever been on a motorcycle. I passed the test which meant I got my M endorsement but as they're giving me the result, Rick, the head instructor looks at me and says, boy, you must be a really good test taker. (It's true, I always have been). The next day, when passing out the certificates, I got the "Most Improved" honors for the class 'cuz of just how bad I was when we started.

I knew I had a long way to go and I knew I wanted to take is slowly. I bought a helmet, jacket and gloves and some friends lent me a beat-up old Honda Rebel 250 to practice on. Fortunately, I wouldn't be the first person to drop this bike.

So, by nature, I'm a cautious guy. Even at the beginning, I understood the concept of not riding around your envelope. I spent what must have been a week riding around the cul de sacs in our neighborhood. There was a nice figure-8 I could do. I hit the terrifying speed of 25 miles an hour, according to the speedometer. (I remain convinced that this speedometer was wrong and read 10-15 miles to slow.) I've ridden a bicycle at 25 mph and this sure seemed way faster but now there is no way to tell.

Round and round I went for three or four evenings, then I graduated to crossing the big street outside our development and going to another with a big mile or so circle road. Round and round again for another few days. I was determined to be safe and ready for my first venture out into traffic.

Finally the big day comes. I'm going to ride in the "real" world. Its a beautiful day, I'm nervous and excited and I go out onto the feeder roads. I hit the exhilarating speed of 35 mph. Man, it feels good, I'm flying. OMG, what a change from riding around cul de sacs.

Understand, this is a revelatory moment for me. My first time ever riding the bike was the MSF course a few weeks ago. I went into the course singing "Born to Run" under my breath but up til this moment, it was all imagination. I thought it might be like this but until now, I never actually knew it would be like this.

To make it even more cool, as I'm flying down this feeder road I pass another cyclist and he does that low wave at me and I wave back, probably dorkily, but I am a member of the fraternity, I am a biker. This is sooooo cool.

I go what must be another two or three miles, flying over the top of the world. I may have even hit 40 mph! something I want to do. Still, after five or ten miles, what that's enough excitement for one day. I'm white knuckling all the way, remember. I'm looking for a place to turn around and figure turning into this little new development I see, I could go around the cul de sac (remember, I am already a cul de sac expert), turn around and go home.

I don't know what I was thinking.

I've ridden a bicycle for 30 years and I'd never try this on a bicycle. The front tires on a rebel aren't a whole lot wider that a mountain bike. At the turn-in on this development is about a two-inch lip and instead of going over this at 90-degrees, the way I would of on a bike, somehow I think the motorcycle going 20 mph is going to take this lip as quickly and easily as a car.

I don't really remember the fall so much as I remember the slide. I went down on my right arm and slide what feels like 5 feet. The arm of my brand new biking jacket has some nice holes in it but my arm has just a light abrasion. My knee was sore and bleeding and my jeans are shredded. I remember sliding on my arm and the knee damage was peripheral but I get a good object lesson on how much better protection riding gear is than denim.

I got up immediately, waved off the offer of help from the guy behind me. This beat up old bike had another ding (I eventually had to duct tape one of the turn signals back on so it matched the other one ) but wasn't apparently much worse for the wear. I had small arm abrasion and some nice, very painful road rash on my leg which took forever to heal. Without the jacket, I'm sure I would have been in the hospital.

Bill Engvall, one of my favorite comedians, talks about always being 15% off cool. He says he has never been truly cool, just when he's doing something cool, Dork Bill shows up and ruins it. This was most definitely my Dork Bill moment. It certainly makes a reasonably good story. In just a few alternating moments, I learned the joy of motorcycling and got what is a relatively painless lesson in how quickly things can turn serious.

Labels: Extreme Newbie Riding Moments, Motorcycling

This now makes five unplanned dismounts in my less than one year of riding a motorcycle. Two of which, including yesterday's had the potential to be serious. Three were low speed bobble which gently laid the bike on its side.

But this is the first one where I don't know exactly what I did wrong--other than riding in a moderate rainstorm trying to get home. I know rain is slick and was trying to be as careful as possible. I wasn't speeding, I wasn't even going the speed limit. I wasn't riding in the first half hour since the rain started. I was watching for anything that might be surprisingly slippery: tar snakes, oil puddles, painted turn arrows on the road.

Heck, I don't even remember turning or countersteering though I guess I must have been doing a slight lean within the lane while starting my stop for the stop sign. But one moment, I'm upright and in apparent control and in another moment, I feel the bike just sliding out from under me and in another moment, I am sliding across the pavement.

Neither myself nor the bike were seriously injured. I was up and trying to get the bike out of the road within a few seconds. The nice lady in the car behind me was trying to see if I was alright. I pulled off the road, checked the bike and tried to gather my ragged wits about me. It took a couple of tries but the bike started again and I was able to ride home verrrry slowly. After the fall, I didnt trust any road surface I was on.

I'm a little sore in the shoulder I landed on and have a slightly sore foot but that's it. Bike has a nice scrape in the chrome of the pipes and a broken front turn signal and a footrest bent in a little bit.

Lessons learned? I don't know about riding lessons to learn but will have to consult with my riding gurus for more advice. There was definitely enough rain for the water to be running on the roadway right where I fell so I suppose I must have hydroplaned. I didn't see anything else there but wasn't in the right mindset, standing out there in the steady rain, to be looking real closely either. It wasn't deep running water, I was smart enough to know not to try that even before I fell but the rain was pretty steady so I guess it was beading up on the roadway and this was something of a lowpoint and it may have collected.

Another lesson learned, relearned anyway, is always, always were the gear. I didn't hit my head but was probably stopped just a few inches from the curb. A small change in position and I might have had the chance to test out this expensive new helmet. I was wearing an armored riding jacket. Without that, I would have left several layers of skin and probably some muscle and tendon in that rain soaked road and might have had to go back to work, not to program but to have peices of me sewn back together.

I was wearing riding gloves and riding boots, which I find make riding much more comfortable in general. Instead of a slightly sore foot, I might have had some major issues there too. And this time, unlike the first time I did a major fall as a complete novice rider, I had on chaps and instead of the road ripping through the jeans and leaving some attractive scars on my knee, I was fine there. This slide was almost exactly like my first, possible a little longer because I was going faster and because it was lubricated by the wet road. I know thight and knee scraped ground like the first fall but the chaps barely seem any worse for the wear.

So if you are, like I endeavor to be, ATGATT (All the gear, all the time), don't get bothered if the guys in shorts and muscle shirts and bandanas laugh at you. You'll have the last laugh. If you're not ATGATT, take a lesson from me, o son or daughter, riding is one of the most fun things you can do but it takes less than a second for the whole thing to change. As they say, dress for the fall, not the weather.

Labels: Extreme Newbie Riding Moments, Motorcycling

New thing learned about riding. When I bought my first helmet last year, I heard several times that making sure you get a helmet that fits was key to enjoying the ride and making sure you continue wearing the protection you need. So I researched the whole helmet thing. My motorcycling mentor who is otherwise a pretty smart guy is a big anti-helmet person. (From the “I would rather be dead than paralyzed.” school) Just a little research and reading convinced me I would rather have the protection for most of the crashes I’m likely to be in. I researched the pro and anti-Snell standards and don’t know where I stand on this one. (The anti-Snell people say the extra hardness required to pass the Snell tests actually makes the helmet less effective at protecting to you in lesser impacts.) I’ve got a big head and round face with fat cheeks so I choose a helmet that I thought fit well with the agreement of the salesman. I didn’t actually know until last night, when I got a new helmet, just how bad getting the XL instead of the L I should have been wearing all along was. Although the new helmet is pretty snug. (They all are before they get broken in) it is amazing how much more I see with the right sized helmet--I can see the stoplight when I’m first in line at the light, I can look back and effectively see into my mirror's blind spots. And best of all, the too big helmet was pushing my glasses down on the bridge of my nose and moving them all around when I turned my head so that I kept having to open my face mask and readjust my glasses which is both annoying and dangerous.

The lesson, I guess, is that when you are first buying gear, you don’t always know what to get and the salemen may, or may not know what they are talking about. If you find one who does, really listen 'cuz it gets really expensive when you find yourself re-outfitting yourself a year later (old helmet $350 last year, not re-sellable (bumped my head several times on the bikes hanging from our garage ceiling and cracked the shell--used helmets not a good idea anyway), new helmet $400 this year but well worth the price if it keeps me alive in an emergency and keeps me comfortable and safe outside that emergency.)

Labels: Motorcycling

Boy, this is really small!

That’s what I kept thinking as I rode my wife’s new bike home from Ohio Motorcycle. When I was first learning to ride, some friends of ours were kind enough to lend me an old beater Honda Rebel 250 to practice on in the time between finishing the MSF class and buying my VStar. (See Extreme Newbie Riding Moment #1 which is yet to be written). But even though I rode one for a month or two, I don’t remember it feeling that small.

But it was moderately fun for me and was very fun for my wife who is discovering that she, too, may really like riding.

<== Lisa, the motorcycle mama.

It’s fun watching her ride around in slow circles with a big, silly grin, much like I must have looked about a year ago.

I’ve wanted to ride for a very long time, ever since my 20’s. My wife, who has been a big bicycle rider, has also talked about it for a while. On a vacation a few years ago, we stopped to talk with a biker and we informally agreed to do it someday. A couple years ago, we even went so far as to buy the “motorcycle packets” which, in Ohio, is a packet of information which you must learn and take a test on before getting a motorcycle learner’s permit.

But it never happened. I wanted to do it but money concerns and time concerns always got in the way, especially for my wife who is nothing if not extremely practical. Finally, last year, I got tired of waiting to do it together. I had a little extra money from sale of my car and I had a co-worker who loves to ride who encouraged me and mentored me so I went ahead and scheduled the class and later bought the bike.

I’ve always hoped this was something we could do together in some form or another but since I’ve been confident enough to take riders, it has mostly been something I’ve done with my kids rather than my workaholic wife. She’s ridden pillion with me a few times and termed it “okay.” A few of her other friends rode with me and got off the bike saying “Oh my God, that was so much fun” and “It felt like we were flying.” but my wife says it’s just okay. The truth is that my wife is not only practical but hates to rely on someone else for anything. She’s thinking to herself “why should I ride pillion when I should be riding my own bike.”

Sigh, I guess it’s not something we’ll do together...

But seeing me having so much fun with this new sport/hobby/obsession and seeing that our kids also love travelling, I guess she figured she better bite the bullet and at least give it a try.

I was somewhat (pleasantly) shocked when I came home a few weeks ago and she said she went and passed the test to get her learner’s permit.

So we signed her up for the class (last week of June) and went seriously looking for bikes that could fit her. She’s 4’11” on her Tipp toes so everything felt too big to her. And I didn’t realize just how nervous she was until recently. Her fear before riding was that she’d sit down, turn the throttle and the bike would take off without her being in control. (My fear before I started was that riding a bike would be like constantly riding a roller coaster with that scary, empty feel in the pit of the stomach always keeping me at high adrenaline.)

Anyway, I have ridden the Rebel a couple of times to the parking lot for her while she’s getting used to the controls. It’s really funny to me just how small it feels. It is pretty peppy at slower speeds but there is a distinct lack of ooomph in the engine compared even to my modest VStar 650 Classic. It’s funny because in those first few weeks not quite a year ago now when I was first learning, I remember being slightly terrified of the tremendous speed that thing reached going around our cul-de-sacs. For those first few weeks, at least, it was way big enough.

Addendum: It is still interesting watching my wife learn and seeing her completely different reactions than my own particularly since she is not coming in with the desire to ride that I did. She has graduated from parking lot to the cul-de-sacs in our development but she scared herself in the parking lot, not by falling down but by hitting a moment where she was thinking so hard about what she was doing that she forgot which hand did what and felt the bike starting to run away from her. I had a few moments like that myself at the beginning (trying to clutch with the left foot and shift with the right hand) and my first reaction was boy, I need more practice. For my wife, however, it was a stopping point to consider whether she really wants to do this after all. After we got home from her moment, she ended up sitting in the car for five or ten minutes wondering if she made a mistake in trying this at all. So she had decided to go through with the class and make her decision after that. Worst case scenario is that we sell the Rebel in a few weeks for what we paid for it and my wife decides that she’s not so much in need of control that she can’t ride pillion.

Addendum 2: It is Wednesday as I write this and she starts the class Thursday and she is still planning on going. I’ve taken her out to the parking lot a few times and she’s been riding on her own to familiarize herself with the controls but is still having a love/hate relationship with the idea. It’s fun when things are going well but when cars are behind her tailgating her because she doesn’t yet go much above 25mph, she finds it nerve-wracking.