Bikers, the route to Thailand starts here.

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To go with my memoires, background.  I had an urge to drop out of the system at an early age and never fought it.  Just followed my heart at 15, left school, bought a bike, managed to avoid getting pulled before my 16th birthday and we were off.  Not yet looked back.

Bikers Under lying everything since I left School in 1977 are my biker mates, most of who own bikes that bigger, faster and more expensive than anything we could have imagined back in 1977.  Those first few years it was on on FS 1Es AP 50s, Gilerras,  then later 250cc Superdreams, X7's YD250's and my one bike which served me well for 2 yeas and did over 25,000 MILES... my old KH250.  We were just all loners or one or two mates for the first 3 years, biking mainly for high speed thrills....  on a Suzuki AP50!

Where it all started to get serious, was the Highland Laddie Public House in Ripon, North Yorkshire.  Back in 1980 then a few mates of mine from school turned up outside this pub one evening as I was having a beer.  We went on a night ride to a a nightspot 20 miles away where they played "our \music" and had groups on etc.   From that day on, we never looked back... we biked built bikes, repaired bikes, chopped bikes, squatted, fought, drank, raced, crashed, married, divorced, lived basically all the while in our bike group.

People came and went, we lost some great friends along the way, Fat Dave tragically and ironically in a car crash.  I notice happily with facebook that he gets his share of mentions still and in many ways he is still part of us.   We lost a few to alcohol and drugs, but none to prison or serious crime.  None of the backbone of the group anyway.

That year, we managed to get a few of us together to drive to Lands End and back.  Riotous drunking binge lasting two weeks and getting boozier as we hit Dorset (my birthplace) and Cornwall where we discovered scrupy cider.  Riding just got harder.

On the first night of the first holiday, which this was, an event happend that set the course for the next 35 years.  A horse ate the side of my tent, almost ruining it and leaving us to bodge as we went.  From then on we always slept in bus shelters, woods, bandstands, multi storey car-parks, train stations squats etc.  I'll do a chapter on them with pics later.

KH250 1980 near Plymouth

We travelled a lot all our adult lives and especially when we were young (18 - lats 20's) our weekend drinking binges we held in various parts of the UK with occasional excursions into Europe.  For some reason there was always a barn dance somewhere between Thirsk and Scarborough on a Friday night and our meeting up point was usually Helmsley or Sutton Bank.. if you are familiar.

Bizarre range of bands we saw back then, ranging from Shaq Attack, Matchbox (without the 20), Edison lighthouse, Motorhead, Thin Lizzy etc.  Then it was on to Scarborough where there was once a Punk Rock nightclub called the Taboo on Huntriss row.  Great weekends often sleeping rough or just drinking through the night.

We are all still mates to this day and I watch their bike building exploits on facebook and am happy that some of them have good businesses doing the things we loved doing.  Canal Road Motorcycles been just one of them, still very active on the scene

Regarding bikes, there was a definite split down the years, with some of us moving onto faster and sportier bikes (Streetfighters types as below)

and some moving onto Harley Davidson's and extreme custom bikes and low riders.  Still all hung out together it's just that we arrived at our destinations differently.. some looking cool and some looking thrilled and pouring out tales of missed cars and tractors, tank slappers (severe front wheel wobbles) gravel and oil patches in the road, wheelies and hitting 180MPH (allegedly) down some B road that had the bike airborne for half the ride.

How exciting that was in 1982, to be loose in Europe with all that cheap booze and few, if any, regulations.
Few pics back then as only had cheap film cameras and any spare cash we had went on drink and "enlightening" ourselves!!

I managed to date this one to 1998 as we had gone the the Isle of Man TT that year to see the return of Norton to racing.  Trevor Nation and Joey Dunlop on board from what I remember.