Marshall Brain's Blog

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Motorcycles

My family and I spent a weekend in Myrtle Beach, SC on May 10/11. That happened to be "Bike Week" at Myrtle Beach -- an annual thing where hundreds of thousands of Harley-Davidson motorcycles and their riders descend on the town.

My history with motorcycles is that I have owned two. My first was a Honda 450. Then I got a Honda Magna, which was a nice bike -- 1,100 cc, water cooled, shaft drive. Very smooth, very fast (at least compared to a 450). My longest ride on it was from Raleigh, NC to Kitty Hawk, NC to Elizabeth City, NC and back to Raleigh in a day. That's a little over 400 miles. The Magna was a great bike for trips like that.

Then I got married. Then we got pregnant. Sometime during the week we got pregnant it became obvious that my motorcycle days were over. But I still have my hemet, and there's still a motorcycle endorsement on my driver's license.



Reasons #1 and #2 for selling the Magna


Reasons #3 and #4

One cool thing about Bike Week is that vendors rent out all the big parking lots along the "main drag" (US 17) and display stuff. The custom bikes, and the Harley aftermarket in general, are amazing. There were custom bikes heading up toward $100,000. There were motorcycles built around Chevy V-8 engines. And so on. It's nuts.

I got home and did a little research, it has been fascinating. The Harley aftermarket produces engines, transmissions, frames, forks, wheels, brakes, handlebars... You can literally build your own Harley clone from scratch with off the shelf parts. I'm probably not ready to do that... so for people like me there are complete kits!