what do you like most about riding

[deathlucky]

just thought i would start a post asking people what do they like most about riding

personaly i loving laying my bike right down around a bend and flying through rush hour traffic to work see if i can brake my personal record

[Turd Ferguson]

You're gonna die dude.  Take the bike to a friggin track for God's sake.

I enjoy the occasional twisty back road, but I enjoy getting my GS out in the middle of nowhere and enjoying the scenery.  I'm much more fascinated with nature than a peice of steel and aluminum.

-Turd.

[bubba zanetti]

The fact that I can & the fact that I do.

[deathlucky]

oh but its so much fun

[galahs]

well after today I will definately say, staying upright has its pluses!


And deathlucky, slow down son, because its so easy to come unstuck for no fault of your own.

[deathlucky]

oh well shaZam! happends stay on topic

[vtlion]

better parking 

[will123]

The thing that i like most is the pure adrenaline rush of riding a bike---but i hate when your bout 100 feet from a car then they pull out in front of you

[Cal Price]

The feeling of freedom 

[Egaeus]

You're gonna die dude.  Take the bike to a friggin track for God's sake.

You're wasting your breath...err...energy. 

[silver_rider]

I love the feeling of being so close to the environment you are in, being able to smell the air you are riding in, being able to hear and feel the machine you are on.

[wever411]

It's great for waking you up on the morning commute to work. No coffee necessary.

[natedawg120]

the feeling of being free and out in the open on a nice windy back road.  Just to enjoy the ride.

[MrDan]

being able to smell the air you are riding in

+1  Especially once I get out in the countryside.  Manure even smells better than smog on a nice ride.

Also being able to park most anywhere.  I tend to go for the striped areas between 4 handicap spots - noone can hit me and right out front.

[Grainbelt]

Smells are good. Automatic excuse to see the countryside/other parts of town is great. Accelerating out of a corner is pure adrenaline.

But above all, the joy of riding is finding the elusive moments where man and machine become one, responding in unison to the challenges of the road. 

[Libido]

I found this a few years ago:

Season of the Bike by Dave Karlotski

There is cold, and there is cold on a motorcycle. Cold on a motorcycle is like being beaten with cold hammers while being kicked with cold boots, a bone bruising cold. The wind's big hands squeeze the heat out of my body and whisk it away; caught in a cold October rain, the drops don't even feel like water. They feel like shards of bone fallen from the skies of Hell to pock my face. I expect to arrive with my cheeks and forehead streaked with blood, but that's just an illusion, just the misery of nerves not designed for highway speeds. Despite this, it's hard to give up my motorcycle in the fall and I rush to get it on the road again in the spring; lapses of sanity like this are common among motorcyclists. When you let a motorcycle into your life you're changed forever. The letters "MC" are stamped on your driver's license right next to your sex and height as if "motorcycle" was just another of your physical characteristics, or maybe a mental condition. But when warm weather finally does come around all those cold snaps and rainstorms are paid in full because a motorcycle summer is worth any price. A motorcycle is not just a two-wheeled car; the difference between driving a car and climbing onto a motorcycle is the difference between watching TV and actually living your life. We spend all our time sealed in boxes and cars are just the rolling boxes that shuffle us languidly from home-box to work-box to store-box and back, the whole time entombed in stale air, temperature regulated, sound insulated, and smelling of carpets. On a motorcycle I know I'm alive. When I ride, even the familiar seems strange and glorious. The air has weight and substance as I push through it and its touch is as intimate as water to a swimmer. I feel the cool wells of air that pool under trees and the warm spokes of sunlight that fall through them. I can see everything in a sweeping 360 degrees, up, down and around, wider than PanaVision and higher than IMAX and unrestricted by ceiling or dashboard. Sometimes I even hear music. It's like hearing phantom telephones in the shower or false doorbells when vacuuming; the pattern-loving brain, seeking signals in the noise, raises acoustic ghosts out of the wind's roar. But on a motorcycle I hear whole songs: rock 'n roll, dark orchestras, women's voices, all hidden in the air and released by speed. At 30 miles an hour and up, smells become uncannily vivid. All the individual tree-smells and flower-smells and grass-smells flit by like chemical notes in a great plant symphony. Sometimes the smells evoke memories so strongly that it's as though the past hangs invisible in the air around me, wanting only the most casual of rumbling time machines to unlock it. A ride on a summer afternoon can border on the rapturous. The sheer volume and variety of stimuli is like a bath for my nervous system, an electrical massage for my brain, a systems check for my soul. It tears smiles out of me: a minute ago I was dour, depressed, apathetic, numb, but now, on two wheels, big, ragged, windy smiles flap against the side of my face, billowing out of me like air from a decompressing plane. Transportation is only a secondary function. A motorcycle is a joy machine. It's a machine of wonders, a metal bird, a motorized prosthetic. It's light and dark and shiny and dirty and warm and cold lapping over each other; it's a conduit of grace, it's a catalyst for bonding the gritty and the holy. I still think of myself as a motorcycle amateur, but by now I've had a handful of bikes over a half dozen years and slept under my share of bridges. I wouldn't trade one second of either the good times or the misery. Learning to ride was one of the best things I've done. Cars lie to us and tell us we're safe, powerful, and in control. The air-conditioning fans murmur empty assurances and whisper, "Sleep, sleep." Motorcycles tell us a more useful truth: we are small and exposed, and probably moving too fast for our own good, but that's no reason not to enjoy every minute of the ride.

[ducati_nolan]

I love the feeling of going through nice twisty roads, the rythm of rocking left to right.
The smell changing constantly, pine tree, cow manure, sea breze, sage brush, you can smell everything immediately.
The temperature changes, the feeling of the temp dropping by 5 or 10 degrees as you dip into a valley, and then raising again as you climb out of it.
Even when on long straight booring roads, the solitude allows you to think about all the things you never would have time to tink about othervise.
You can sing as loud as you want and nobody can hear you.

And of course there are plenty of practical reasons as well. Free and easy to find parking, carpool lanes, 55mpg, never needing to worry about overloaded feries, as well as being first on and first off of them.

[RVertigo]

I love:

cruising through a valley or up a mountain, going fast, passing cars on the freeway,taking hard corners, riding in the carpool lane, surviving a mistake, the way my wife squeezes my leg to tell me it's alright when I f%$k up a corner and the way she hides behind me to get out of the wind on the freeway, being small on the road, being big on the sidewalk, parking anywhere, finding shortcuts that are almost legal, riding where cars can't go, waving at my motorcycle buddies, cursing the people that don't wave back, talking to any motorcycle rider anywhere at any time about their bike or some cool ride, trying to ignore the moto-groupies and wannabes that ask "How fast does it go," going nowhere just for the sake of riding, turning around to ride a corner again, riding in the front of a pack, riding in the back of a pack, riding with random riders I see on the freeway, racing away from lights and making car drivers feel inferior, the look that people give me when I'm riding in the rain or cold, the look that other riders give me when we're both riding in pouring rain, catching someone checking out my bike, how the cool wind feels after being stuck in traffic, calling the GS my MotoScoot, wearing my moto gear, the smell of my leather jacket, being stupid on the road, being smart on the road, laughing about almost being killed by that drunk driver, shaking my finger at squids, practicing wheelies in a parking lot, standing up while I ride over rough terrain, when people think I'm crazy for riding, that it pisses off my mother, the sound of the engine, working through the gears, talking about the ride even if it was a short one, being so tired and sore that it's physically impossible to ride any more and still wanting to, and that little girl I met last weekend who's first sentence was "I want motorcycle fast!"

[dadsafrantic]

I like the way I lean it over just to stay upright through the crosswinds during my 30 minute commute.  I also like the 53 +/- mpg.  I like the riding gear i wear when it's 106 outside.  I like the huge pieces of retread the big trucks toss in the air.  I like the fact that my wife likes the bike. (does she have a new insurance policy???)

[Chilly Willy]

I love riding on empty back roads during a cool night.  The blackness pierced only by the cone of light from my headlight makes me feel as if I'm actually flying.  It's as close as I have ever gotten to those wonderful dreams I used to have as a kid--where I could just step off the ground and simply fly.

I love the freedom of riding and the ability my bike gives me to explore all of the nooks and crannies of our little island.

El Noobo