Thoughts and Observations on Motorcycling

Even the best-written travel books are a dim reflection of the actual experience, and so I'm afraid this journal is also inadequate.  The experience of traveling by motorcycle is much more profound than that of traveling by car.  You don't simply see the weather change, you feel it change.  Often you feel it before you see it.  I can feel the cold of the rain on my knees before I can actually see droplets accumulating on my visor.  I can feel the temperature drop as I slide beneath the shadow of a cloud, and feel it rise again when emerging from the canopy of a forrest into the sunlight.  All this happens in a few seconds, or less.  You're constantly bombarded with changing sensations as the wind shifts, sometimes gently pressing against you, sometimes shoving you violently halfway across the lane, and always carrying with it a different scent.  You can smell the thick mixture of fresh foliage and decaying vegetation in the forrest, you can smell the seaweed baking on the beach and the mud and weeds growing in the coastal ponds and estuaries.  You can smell the snow in the mountains.  You can smell the poppies growing along the highway and the dry, golden grass blanketing the hills.  You can smell the cows and the sheep and the wild dill and the eucalyptus trees.

Sometimes my mind wanders.  Sometimes it seems like the world is rushing at me so fast that my mind can barely keep up.  Sometimes I'm overwhelmed by the beauty of the moment.  Not only the landscape, but the moment itself, with all the wind and the noise and the roughness of the pavement and the struggle between motorcycle and physics.  It's in those moments when I'm winning the battle against gravity and inertia that I'm compelled to seek out the next crest, the next apex, the next vista.  Those moments can't be captured in any photograph or relived through any journal, and so each arrival inevitably prompts the search for a new destination.