100 Miles

One hundred miles sounds far, doesn’t it? If you had to walk it or even ride a bicycle that far you would have a full day ahead of you…or in my case several days ahead of me. But we ride motorcycles and one hundred miles may take a couple of hours if you find the right road. You see, as bikers it’s not about how fast you get there, it’s about the quality of the ride. It can actually be a “longer is better” mentality. Do we do that in our car? If you drive a classic Mustang convertible or a Jeep Wrangler with the top off you might feel this way. But the Chevette isn’t the “long way” approach of getting there.

That’s the difference of enjoying the ride or plain transportation. The motorcycle can pull double duty combining the commute with the long way home and that is often the case for the motorcyclist. For those of us that ride we might even take the long way home while driving our car because we know the mental benefits of doing so. But I might add that if you don’t ride a motorcycle and you find yourself taking the long way home-you are a biker in the making. You just don’t know it yet.

So this one hundred mile theory works just the opposite for bikers. We WANT the ride to take a couple of days if not literally, then figuratively. We NEED the ride to last longer than a mile a minute, so we take the long way. If it was all about getting there in a hurry we could drive-maybe not in the Chevette, but you know what I mean. We want one hundred miles to feel like three hundred.

I can’t change time and distance from the seat of my Road King, but I can change the speed it which I travel. I can change my attitude and the direction I go. So in a sense, I have a little bit of control over how late I will be when I get there! If you ever find yourself tired with your commute, that same old road you travel every day, think about taking the road less traveled. Motorcycle or not, you control how you get there. If you’re in a hurry, you might have to ask yourself “why.” Don’t we spend enough of our day in a blur? Slow down, go the extra few miles, and appreciate the scenery. You might be surprised how good the “long way” really feels!