I enjoyed this article by Robert Johnson when I read it last December. It's subtitled: "The 50-plus crowd is having a belated romance with motorcycles." Ironically, the month before I had bought a used 163 cc Kymco motor scooter off of Craig's list. I went through the process of being licensed and even took a motorcycle safety course at our local community college.
How great it is to ride a two-wheeler! Some time ago I saw a t-shirt saying,
"Four wheels move your body; two wheels move your soul."
And another:
“A beautiful highway . . . is a terrible thing to waste on a car.”
There's more truth in those sayings than a non-rider might suspect. Go to the article and see the video of Rabbi Zig Zag on his Harley. I wish I could reproduce it on the blog but I can't. Here's the article:
James Robinson, 66 years old, recently felt an urge to take to the open road in a way he never had. So, at an age when many choose the house-on-wheels comfort of a recreational vehicle, Mr. Robinson enrolled in a motorcycle school for novices.
"I'm not trying to be cool or anything like that," says Mr. Robinson, a real-estate agent in Woodstock, N.Y. The two-day course, in which some of his classmates were teenagers, introduced Mr. Robinson to a new world, he says. "Motorcycles give you a really good feeling similar to downhill skiing, effortlessly moving through the fresh air."
Now he's browsing at the local Harley-Davidson dealership, among other motorcycle emporiums.
Mr. Robinson's belated romance with motorcycles puts him in a growing group of graying riders who are new to this mode of transport. Brooke Lefkow, owner of the Motorcycle Driving School in Naples, Fla., says that students who are at least 50 years old now make up 35% of his students, and 40% of them have no previous experience driving motorized two-wheelers.
Sonja Goulbourn, manager of Motorcycle Safety School Inc., Brooklyn, N.Y., lends further confirmation to the trend. She says her school, too, has seen more older beginners in recent years, "including some in their 70s and 80s."
Mr. Lefkow says of his students, "A lot of them say they were just too busy with careers and kids until now, and they've reached a point in life where they want to try something different." Keep reading...