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  • Brow-furrowing article from advrider. Apparently most American bikers are obnoxious shitheads! What does the panel think? I've spent a couple of years travelling around the US, and it's certainly jam-packed with cretins...are the bikers any worse than the rest? I eavesdropped on a bunch of them on the Blue Ridge Parkway, and the stupidity was priceless. And I went to a biker meetup in Miami, which was so soul-destroying I wanted to burn everything in sight. But it's the same at the Ace Cafe or the Hog's Back.


    "I pulled into the parking lot of a restaurant that sits at the very end of one the best riding roads within 300 miles of my home. I entered the restaurant and waited for a server to seat me. The restaurant was empty. I waited a very long time. Eventually, a man walked up to greet me. It was not the greeting I expected. He looked at me and then at my helmet that I’d rested on a nearby table. “Restrooms are for customers,” he said tersely. I told him I was looking for lunch. His look turned to one of surprise. “Oh, yes, of course,” he said, “sit anywhere you like.”

    The man returned to the kitchen and a woman surfaced to take my order. She, too, looked at me oddly, in the way bartenders in westerns look at men whose faces are plastered on WANTED posters nailed to the outside of the saloon. I imagined myself the man in the Johnny Cash song, the one who shot a man in Reno just to watch him die. I began to feel like a badass, which was entirely undeserved, as all I’d done was order an egg sandwich on rye.

    After lunch, after I squared-up with the server, the man approached the table. I learned he was the owner and cook, and he apologized for his initial gruffness. He’d bought the restaurant, he said, because he was a motorcyclist who’d often ridden the region, and he envisioned he could fashion a motorcyclist mecca, like California’s Alice’s Restaurant or The Rock Store. I asked how it was going. “It’s been a disaster,” he said. “Motorcyclists, and it pains me to say this, are my worst customers. They’ve nearly destroyed this business.”

    I didn’t know what to say, and that’s not usually an ailment that strikes me. The man went on to list a litany of grievances he had with motorcyclists. Firstly, he said, they used restrooms reserved for customers. But that was just the beginning. They’d also patronize a nearly food truck then use his outdoor seating. And because they couldn’t use his restrooms, motorcyclists began to urinate on the side of the restaurant. To stop them, he built a fence. And then motorcyclists circled around to the other side of the restaurant and began to urinate on the side of his house out back. Up went another fence. But that wasn’t the end of it.

    The man walked me outside to my bike. Again, he gave me an odd look. I’d parked against the façade of the building, backed in, rear tire against the curb, next to the steps. “No other motorcyclists park like that,” he said. “They usually just stop in the middle of the lot and block access for cars.” And then the most shocking admission of all: “I had the pavement in the parking lot torn up and the coarse gravel put down to keep motorcyclists away,” he said. “If I could stick a ‘No Motorcycles’ sign out front and get away with it, I’d do it.”

    On my ride home, I couldn’t get this man or his story out of my head. And don’t be tempted to think his clientele is an endless stream of outlaw bikers. The roads that lead from his restaurant are a mecca for sport and adventure tourers—off road trails abound. The riders this man spoke of disparagingly are the people we see every day in the mirror as we brush our teeth. I began to wonder if I, too, have been the kind of man who took advantage of my hallowed status as a motorcyclist. Yes, hallowed.

    There was a time, as recently as the mid-’90s, when motorcyclists were thought of as bad news. On a trip with a friend down into the Ohio Valley, the three or four times we rode through small towns and met police cruisers we were trailed to the edge of town. And lest you think we looked like biker trash, my friend had a beautifully restored—and stock—BSA and I had my dad’s old Triumph. And we were both clean shaven.

    We were refused accommodation at some motels, and, as a precaution, I took to parking out on the road and approaching motel offices without my helmet or leather jacket. At one motel, after a very long, wet day on the road, a woman told us she was sorry, but that they had a no-motorcycle policy. My traveling companion was a quirky man who was perpetually chilled—if the sun went behind a cloud on an 80-degree day, he began to shiver—and who was on the verge of hypothermia. The woman, who wasn’t without compassion, offered a compromise. If we squeezed our bikes behind the dumpster and covered them with a tarp, we could stay. I was beyond thankful. How times have changed.

    Today, motorcyclists are seen as an economic driver for regional development. Local governments try to outdo each other to lure us to their roads or trails. A dozen straight-piped Harleys can rattle the windows of small-town middle America as policemen wave and moteliers plump pillows in gleeful anticipation. But which version is true? Is the tale of the man who ripped up his parking lot to discourage motorcyclists the real story? Or are motorcyclists stocking small-town coffers?

    It depends, isn’t a satisfying answer, but it’s an honest one. I spoke to a woman in a tourist town on the US east coast that hosts an annual bike rally. She runs a store that sells beach umbrellas and ice cream and t-shirts and snow globes. When the rally was first announced, she was thrilled. Town officials had convinced local businesses that an influx of 3,000 motorcyclists was all upside and no downside. The reality, she told me, was far less appealing.

    It killed her weekend business, she said. “Unless you serve beer or sell gas or rent hotel rooms, motorcyclists are a liability.” The town’s sidewalks were so jammed real customers couldn’t get in her store, she said. Now, on the rally weekend, she closes up shop. As do many other businesses in the town. The experience has left her with a bitter aftertaste. “In the northeast we only have a limited number of summer weekends to make money. To lose an entire weekend is a huge blow.”

    The problem, perhaps, is the mentality that can overtake us when we’re in a group. I rarely ride with others, and when I do, it’s unusual for our number to exceed two or three. But this summer I was at a coffee haunt and a group of a dozen or so rode in on cruisers. Portly middle-aged folks who proceeded to park as if they all had diarrhea and that if they didn’t make it inside, this instant, they’d explode. They parked in traffic lanes, in permit-only handicapped-parking, and one brave soul even blocked in a Hummer. Has the time come for us to release the ratchet strap on our entitlement? Has the time come for us to just simply behave?

  • Brow-furrowing article from advrider. Apparently most American bikers are obnoxious shitheads! What does the panel think? I've spent a couple of years travelling around the US, and it's certainly jam-packed with cretins...are the bikers any worse than the rest? I eavesdropped on a bunch of them on the Blue Ridge Parkway, and the stupidity was priceless. And I went to a biker meetup in Miami, which was so soul-destroying I wanted to burn everything in sight. But it's the same at the Ace Cafe or the Hog's Back.

    That’s pretty much the opinion I get when I look on any American motorbike forum.
    They seem to be a rather odd, tribal bunch across the pond.
    As you say though, nights at The Ace are just as bad, at least they were last time I went there about 15 years back.

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