My daughter was asked, “So what have motorbikes got to do with trousers?”
Her very sensible reply was, “They’re just doing it because my dad wants to ride his bike with a bunch of people on cool bikes.”
I was chuffed to bits when Gary, the editor of Sideburn magazine, asked HebTroCo to help them organise a motorcycle gathering and ride out in Yorkshire.
We live in a great place with twisty roads heading out through the hills into a varied landscape. It’s the perfect place to enjoy the freedom of two wheels. The famously non conformist town of Hebden Bridge sits in a web of steep sided valleys in the Pennines, with gritstone crags lining the hill tops. There is a mix of sweeping open roads and narrow, twisty lanes and within an hour on a motorbike you can leave the sandstone and enter the Yorkshire Dales. White dry stone walls, built from the local limestone, mark out ribbons of Tarmac that push into big valleys and over mighty hills.
Yorkshire is famous for being sunny, warm and dry, like its people, and the motherland didn’t disappoint us on the day of our ride. Riders wore sunglasses, tinted goggles and there was not one balaclava in sight. One rider even got comedy tan lines on the exposed gap of skin between her gloves and jacket sleeves. She wore them proudly like sunshine friendship bracelets and being from Yorkshire herself she appreciated that they were free.
“It’s not what you ride, it’s how you ride” is a line I’m sure I’ve read more than once in Sideburn. This “everyone welcome” vibe makes a refreshing change to the old motorcycle culture where riders separated off into cliques based on their style of bike. Riding bikes and having fun is what it should be all about. Everyone enjoyed seeing a wild array of stock and custom machines and matching riders turn up. Super minimal choppers, state of the art sports bikes, tricked out street trackers, scooters, cafe racers and genres of bike as yet unclassified all gleamed, roared, spat fire and scattered gravel together.
We like to meet people and it was an absolute pleasure to chat with everyone, and enjoy checking out the bikes that people put so much love, attention and hard earned money into.
Same time next year?
Cheers, Ed (Trouserman)
Thanks to the New Delight Inn for hosting us
#outolunch for serving up delicious food
The Bean Rover for the coffee stop
Dr Craig for bringing the decks
And most of all to the people who came to ride and talk shit.
