Armene: Hey, I'm Armanee Piper.

Travis: I'm Robin Dean. I'm Tim Clark. And I'm Travis Burleson.

Robin: This is the TRO podcast, I'm sorry, the, the Riding Obsession podcast.

Travis: TheRidingObsession.com slash TRO.bike. The, the, the. TheRidingObsession.com.

Tim: Your source for misinformed opinions, half-baked ideas, about motorcycles.

Armene: I heard that you took an awesome ride.

Robin: Yeah, so that's very interactive of you to ask. That's not scripted or pre-discussed at all in a natural way.

Armene: I want to hear about it in its depth and entirety.

Travis: I don't know, I have some disgust, but.

Robin: I will allot the tell about the thing for you and the words will happen from my face. This is a fun episode because it's with, our interview is with Murray Haynes. Murray Haynes is a quality assurance MSF coach. That's, that's the boring stuff we usually talk about. He is also a racer retired. He raced Superbike, it was ARMA. He welcomed me to New Mexico the first time we got here. He helped me start coaching here. And it's just going to be a really great interview. He and his significant other, Mabel, literally Murray and Mabel, Eminem. They used to do sidecar racing together. She was the monkey, he was the driver. And they talk in depth with Maggie Neen about that.

Travis: So Murray, Mabel and Maggie were?

Robin: Eminem and Em. Eminem and Eminem.

Travis: But they did like eight mile races, right?

Robin: I see what you did there with your sense of humor and it was very creative. So we have this New Mexico tour that isn't really just a New Mexico tour. It's actually New Mexico and Arizona. And the heart of this route, it goes through Hillsboro, New Mexico. That's the core of the matter. That is the central.

Travis: Hillsboro.

Robin: Unfortunately, the road that we use through that area is closed down because there was a mudslide. And an entire section of the road is now in the base of the valley. The other side of this route is, I've told you guys about it, 5259. Which is terrifying. It's an awesome ride, but I don't know how you make.

Travis: Is it like canyon or mountain or just?

Robin: It's mountain. You start in the flats and you are approaching mountains. And then you go up into those mountains and then you don't come down for a minute. It gets chilly. You remember how we had nothing but decreasing radius curves coming back through the Ohio route, the advanced route of day one on sevens?

Travis: Yeah, every corner tightened up.

Robin: Every corner tightened up, no matter which direction we're going. Physics, who knew? But that ride. First off, remove all of society. Your destination is a dirty intersection. And then randomly scatter gravel in the center of the lanes. Remove sections of road unexpectedly in a blind curve and then add elk. So that's day one of our New Mexico tour. Because I figure we'll go nice and slow. Nobody's going to prove anything. We're just going to go nice and slow and explore the terrain and make sure everybody's comfortable and get them ready for something that's way easier and a lot more fun, which is the one that goes through Hillsborough, which again is closed down. So I got to ride some roads I've never ridden before. Only because the extension road for that tour can only be accessed by way of, I think it's 27. Let me check my ride with GPS here. Let me go to ridewithgps.com. And it's totally not a plug. You guys want me to share screen? Yes. Please do. I have no imagination. Here is the magic section of the tour. All right, you see this, yeah?

Travis: It is a very squiggly, squiggly, wiggly. Through Emory Pass. And there's a cemetery right there.

Robin: Which, yeah, just in case, that is not the super awesome that this over here is. This is 666. Oh, okay.

Travis: Yeah, so that's like in a canyon.

Robin: Getting there, you've got this majestic, beautiful awesomeness that goes through here and through Kingston. And it eventually does all these things through Emory Pass and takes you to Silver City, right? You just jump across. Now, since that's closed, I had to do an extra 90 miles. This was just a beautiful, beautiful intermission. Just a good time.

Travis: Well, you can see it's like a very smooth altitude gradient on the bypass.

Robin: Yeah, that's going to become part of the story. I hope I can keep this entertaining for y'all because this was- And very straight. There's a town, I think it's called Rearden. Here we are. So I make my left according to my instructions. I start heading due west. And I arrive in some small town and I notice some train rails. And I'm like, hey, this is kind of cool. We've got four active train lines. That's like good sleeping, really. At night, that stuff puts me to sleep. I'm like, whatever's going on here. I stop for tacos and then I start my ride. This entire mountain, wherever it is, I don't know if I can really see it here. I'm on a four-laner. It's like a highway. Speed limit is 15 miles an hour. For miles. What? 15 miles an hour.

Travis: Is it that steep?

Robin: No. I look and I say, okay, now I've got a chain link fence with boulder catchers. And I don't quite understand what's going on. There's a road on the other side that's really well paved and polished. I'm like, they making a new road? Then I see a super cat go by and I'm approaching a mine. Oh. So I go up this hill and then the whole planet just opens wide up. You're on the edge of a cliff. The speed limit is like 15 here, 20 miles there, but it's posted. It feels like you're on an expressway. And I look down. I can't see the bottom of this mine. It's just like you're looking into the 666 is right. That's the right name for this road. So I'm looking down. Nice. And it's right there. This is terrifying. And then I look up and I can see clouds touching the top of this mine. So it's this entire mountain that they're stripping cat vehicles everywhere. And I'm on this bike just to get up to the top of the hill. There's a bridge tunnel and it just says, uh, just says slow. Okay, fine. So rude.

Tim: I am not.

Robin: Are you calling me slow? So I ride through this thing and over top, you know, I see the, one of the super cats go by and the whole, like the whole earth shaking after that, it becomes sort of a, a free for all. It's like a roller coaster ride through the mind, you know, Indiana Jones, I think all the way to the top. And I am now entering Apache. I ride into the gates of Apache National Forest and Piper in Colorado. I'm sure you get some dramatic storms.

Armene: Oh, it's happening right now.

Robin: Yeah. Like purple clouds on one side, yellow clouds on the other. They're all talking. It's usually like really green, really angry looking like the mountains charge up the rain at all. Like, do they create, do you happen to know if they create any atmospheric effect where there's more rain at the top of a mountain just because of proximity or something like that?

Armene: Um, I'm sure, but I failed out of meteorology school.

Robin: Good check. So I'm like, all right, I'm, I'm starting this, uh, now I'm in it and it was green and exactly what you would expect. I'm heading to Alpine, Arizona. The destination for this part of this leg of the New Mexico tour is actually Alpine, Arizona. It becomes exactly what you'd expect from a name like that. All the trees are well, pine.

Travis: White vines.

Robin: Yeah. And it's getting more and more remote. Super rural. I'm seeing less and less side roads. And the road is just a constant onslaught of awesome technical with every version of road service you can imagine in terms of if we can turn this into a form of pavement, we'll use it. So there was a lot of extreme division in what the road was made up of. I enjoyed the absolute, it was just awesome. So what started to happen, there began to be this pattern where I'd be riding directly towards one of those storms, a deep blue bruise in the sky that you can see is just dumping buckets and buckets of rain. And I'm like, okay, do I need to stop putting on my gear? And it was getting colder. So I started at 91 degrees at the mine, 91 degrees by the top. It was about 73. And then when I started getting closer and closer to these storms, 55. Every time I got right up to the storm, the road would turn and I'd ride into the light. I'm not religious, by the way. I just kept on catching a break. Halfway into all of this, there is no way out.

Travis: Oh, yeah. Yeah. There's one road.

Robin: Right about here is where I got hit. The clouds are touching the land around me. It's almost like a fog. The lightning is being generated next to me and firing down into the valley. Either I go 50 miles back or I go 50 miles forward. Either way, I have to ride in this. So I stopped and took pictures for y'all.

Travis: Yeah, there we go.

Robin: So you saw the pictures on FaceBalls, right? Yeah. No. You didn't see? Yeah, you did. You gave the little heart icon happy.

Travis: No, Piper locked herself out of her account. We already went over this.

Armene: Well, you were just in it today. Well, I only look at Facebook for you guys. I loathe Facebook.

Tim: As you should. Good answer. Right answer.

Armene: I did see these pictures and I was like, oh, that's beautiful. I guess I just didn't realize that that was now. I thought that was like old pictures of some beautiful place you visited. That doesn't look like Arizona at all to me.

Robin: Pine mountaintops that are in the sky next to the moon. Yes, that's gorgeous.

Travis: Turns out Arizona is really big.

Armene: They're like a whole state. And not as dry looking as I thought it would look.

Travis: She said.

Robin: 50 miles in, I stop, I take pictures, and then I frantically pull out my rain gear. I've got that freaking gimp suit, body condom built crap that I even advertised and did a whole video about because it's great until I get this. And I'm like stretching it like an angry plastic bag, just tearing holes and like, you're just hating this thing onto myself. The thing about this is that when you're that in a hurry to get it on because it's already raining, I mean, I'm already soaked, but it's cold. It'll warm you up because it seals you in. And you're already soaked so you can just pee. And I did. Of course. It kept me warm. I pull this thing out. The thing about doing that is if it's like that, it will adjust all of the textiles and gear on your person into extremely awkward and uncomfortable positions.

Travis: Of course. Oh yeah. Because once your gear is wet, it's like super sticky. Yeah.

Robin: This thing's made of vinyl. So my jacket's now on backwards and I think my pants were my jacket was supposed to go in the jacket was like on my right foot, but I've got the gear on and I'm riding and I'm, I still was just smiling. It was awesome. Murray, the guy that we did the interview with on this told me. This part of the tour should be North bound only. And I get it because you are consistently raising elevation. You've got all the control in the world, in the wet, in the dry. It's just start to finish an uphill climb. The bike handles better and there's no frying your brake pads all the way down the hill because it is all uphill on 666, as we shall say all the way to Alpine. Wow. I want to give a shout out to Murray about this. Thank you so much for the tip about the due North bit. Yeah. 180 here is far less technical, but absolutely gorgeous. And we're going to ride that back to the other one that we don't talk about that will then go through the beautiful mountains. We'll go up to the cliff dwellings and then we return all the way back to beautiful truth of consequences for the hot springs and the Buttes. This was a roughly 800 miles. It was like just shy 800 miles in two days, which I hadn't done in a while. And it's all like that. And then I got home and did a zoom meeting with, I must've sounded drunk. I wasn't, I wasn't, I wasn't drinking. I was trying to reason with MSF instructors. I sounded as bad as they did. How does your butt feel? I have the right bike. And after this amazing interview with the person who told me to only go North on this, on this particular route, we're going to discuss butts and bikes and things and stuff. And the right bike. The right bike. Yeah. The right bike. That's no eighties allowed.

Armene: So I was also wondering if you took a picture and, or a video of you in the rain condom, because I care more about that than your pictures of Arizona.

Travis: There are some somewhere.

Armene: Did you take a picture of yourself in the rain condom?

Robin: No, I did not. But I do have a video of that on the TRO YouTube channel that I'll hit you too. So that's how I spent the past two days, which is why, you know, more socially dwarfed than usual.

Armene: That sounds awesome.

Travis: That sounds awesome. Yeah. I've ridden in moderate traffic to work a couple of times a week. Those last two months.

Armene: Yep.

Tim: Yeah.

Armene: Yeah. Same.

Robin: So I'm basically just an asshole in the bunch right now.

Tim: Kind of.

Robin: Yeah.

Tim: I managed to hit 61 miles an hour on a monkey.

Travis: How terrifying was that? That is impressive. Were you doing a Superman?

Tim: On flat ground? Just about. Yeah. That, that was belly down to the tank. Cause I've got that, uh, section around the South side of, uh, Lake Monona here where it's either side roads that take you a long ways out of the way, or I can take the on-ramp that becomes the off-ramp to John Nolan. And so I am technically on the highway and I should not be on that bike, but I do.

Travis: You never leave the ramp.

Tim: But I'm not actually merging into traffic with it. So I'm just like chin down, praying that nobody like runs me down.

Travis: Nice. Well, 61, that's the speed limit is 55. No one should be going faster than that.

Tim: No, no, no. And I don't ever see anyone go any faster than 80, five.

Travis: Yeah. A hundred. Unless, unless they're in the flex lane and the flex lanes closed.

Tim: Yes.

Travis: Yeah.

Tim: And I believe there is no limit there.

Travis: Yeah.

Tim: Is what they seem to say. Yeah. But yeah, no, it's been fun to ride that thing around. And yesterday I took the fast bike. That's my, my division now is slow bike, fast bike. Even though my fast bike is not terribly a fast, not a really, really fast bike. But by comparison, it feels like a rocket ship. It's quite an entertaining transition. When you realize that in the top of second gear, you're going faster than the other bike could actually go at all.

Travis: 62.

Robin: Yep. If you're going 55 on that bike, that feels slow. But if you're going 55 on a monkey, that feels like the whole world's going to explode.

Tim: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's you're, you're buzzing and it's good.

Travis: Harmony, what's it like going 55 on an RSV4?

Armene: You feel like you're crawling at like a snail's pace.

Travis: So you're halfway through first gear.

Armene: Not even close.

Robin: Seems like you would park the bike at that speed. Like you just pull into the garage and jump off and let it go around in circles at 55 until it's time to ride it again. Just about. Well, we're going to get back to that in a second here. With all that blather I just delivered, we are going to go meet the couple that gave me the advisory on the due North section of 666. Awesome people created so many opportunities for me here in New Mexico. Amazing story to tell. Murray and Mabel, take it away, Maggie.

Maggie: This will be a fun conversation because I didn't get to do any research on either of you. Usually I have some idea of what to ask you about. So we'll try to stumble our way through, but we are recording now. So welcome to the TRO podcast. We have Murray Haynes and Mabel Chin, both avid motorcyclists. Murray and Mabel, tell us a little bit about you.

Murrae: Go ahead. You go first. Oh, I go first. Okay. Well, I started a really long time ago and it's probably the most consistent thing I've done in my life. Been road racing, been teaching racing. I'm an MSF rider coach. I do quality assurance for MSF and for Harley Davidson. What else? I was a site coordinator. I will ride anytime I possibly can when I don't need a vehicle. So yeah, no, it's lifelong. So that's kind of a nutshell.

Mabel: And what about you, Mabel? I've been riding half my life. So I started riding 35 years ago and I like riding on vacations. Basically, I'm not a, you know, a daily commuter rider or any kind of rider like that. It's, I like to go on vacations. I like to go on long rides. Pretty much. I do a lot of other things. I'm athletic. Let's just put it that way. Been athletic my entire life. I was bicycling ever since I was little and never stopped.

Murrae: She does the five borough bike tour in New York every year with her brother. How many years in a row have you done that now?

Mabel: I can't remember. I think the first one was 2003. He did the third one, which was I think 1977.

Murrae: Right. She's also a rock climber. There's lots of things she does that are current, I guess. Current or in the recent past.

Mabel: Yeah. I have a black belt in Taekwondo and we, at the age of 60, I started studying Kung Fu, but there's no longer a school here. So we have transitioned to online Tai Chi.

Maggie: Online Tai Chi. Interesting.

Mabel: There is a guy in Bend, Oregon who does a couple of live classes a week and then everything else is on video and he's constantly upgrading. Yeah. He's very good. He's from China. Wow.

Murrae: Yes. It's part of the challenge to stay in shape as one ages.

Mabel: Right. So, you know, I do that. I do jazzercise. To be honest, I only bike once a year now. I just do the five borough bike tour.

Maggie: 40 miles?

Mabel: 40 miles over bridges, all the bridges in the five boroughs. Yeah.

Maggie: Do they close down traffic?

Mabel: They close down traffic. They have 32,000 riders. It's a lot of fun.

Maggie: Wow, that sounds amazing.

Mabel: It's a lot of fun. So I'm going in a couple of weeks. You should do it.

Maggie: It sounds like a lot of fun. And what I'm hearing from both of you is that you're both lifelong learners. You know, it sounds like you're trying new things. You're keeping active, which is both good for the body and the mind, right?

Murrae: Yes. Well, when you hit your 70s, your maintenance quota goes up. And so, you know, working out and doing Tai Chi and being active, I think, is the way to continue doing what we're doing. I mean, I'm planning on riding well into my 80s. And I have a couple of these who are still active riders. So it's all possible if you just pay attention, you know. So, yeah, we've done some active racing. There's a group called the American Historic Racing Motorcycle Association. It's pretty much vintage with some modern. And I raced when I was younger and then stopped because of having a family. And then went back to it, I guess, in what was it? 2007, something like that. 2009. No, that's when I went to ARMA. So, yeah, 2007, I went to a local AMA club and got recertified, relicensed, and then started racing with ARMA. And about a year in, I got invited to help with a race school with a guy who is a six-time national champion. And so did that and raced and did well. And then in 2017, we were traveling. It's coast-to-coast kind of racing.

Mabel: Well, this was 2016 when I... So I was considering racing at some point because I was always going with him to all the races and, you know, finding things around cities to do. And at some point, I thought, well, maybe I might do the little Le Mans, where you jump on the bike and run with it to get it started. And I thought about it for a little bit. And then in New Orleans at the track there in March of 2016, I ran into a champion sidecar monkey named Kat Collins at the banquet, the awards banquet. And she started talking to me about sidecars. And I thought, that might be something really fun for the two of us to do together. And it was a sort of on and off rainy weekend. And she said to me, you know, maybe I can get my guy to take you around the track. And I had already brought some gear and my helmet. So I think on that Saturday, they had canceled the races in the afternoon.

Murrae: Yeah, it was raining. Yeah.

Mabel: And so Tim Joyce offered to take people around the track in his sidecar. So I jumped in and I got on it. And I really loved it. And several other people came in afterwards. And there was still a little time. And I went on it for a second time. And I want to do this. So having been a rock climber, it's hanging off of something. It's not very foreign to me, except this one's a little bit lower to the ground and it's moving. So I thought this might be a lot of fun. So I told him about it.

Murrae: Yeah, she came in the second time. I have some video of it from my phone where she's getting off and she's just laughing because she had so much fun. So she told me about this. And like she said, we were thinking about a little Honda 160 and that kind of stuff. But then when she said this, I am not one to sit on my hands. So within a couple of weeks, a friend of ours, I think he's still there, was a sidecar racer and also the manager of Jay Leno's garage. So we've known each other for a while. And so I called and said, hey, how can I get started in this? And about a week later, I got a package in the mail with a bunch of photos and contacted this guy in Arizona and we bought a sidecar. He had been building. Yeah, and it's an interesting story because he originally had built a sidecar to sell to a museum. And so they backed out. So we had this sidecar there and he sold it to us. It was reasonably priced, but we found out and it's nothing against him. We found out later that it was literally built to be a showpiece and not to actually run. And so to run well, to run well. So we started our adventure with sidecar racing. And, you know, long story short, we ended up there's a friend up in Illinois who's a specialist at Rose Farm Motorcycles. His name is Jim. So we basically and I rebuilt the motor and the drivetrain and just basically made it an operational sidecar. But being vintage, the interesting thing as we ran in, it was lost era SC3, which is all sidecar three, which is also known as lost era sidecar. So it was built to be authentic to the era, which was 70s. So it was pretty interesting how it was put together. But there was always something to do. We were at. It broke down almost every race. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We'd get a couple of laps. There was one race where we were on the East Coast and it one of the coil brackets fell off. This was before we finished the first lap.

Mabel: It was just before finishing.

Murrae: The coil bracket broke off. And so we cruised off into the grass.

Mabel: And we were the only one racing that category that day.

Murrae: So did you go for the zip tie?

Mabel: So what happened was the track worker said, you know, so there was no way to put the coil back on. And the track worker said, you know, OK, this is Roebling and there are people that live on the other side of the track. And there were some people about, what was it, 30 yards away or something.

Murrae: Yeah, just on the other side.

Mabel: And they were watching from their garage. So he says, why don't you go over there and see if they have any zip ties? So I ran over, never took my helmet off. Everything just ran over with my gloves and everything. And I asked the woman, I said, do you have any zip ties? I really need zip ties. And she she asked her husband and she found them and she rummaged around. Ran back with these zip ties. And we had just enough time before the race was over to zip tie the coil on and finish that lap. So that we got credit for the credit for winning the race.

Maggie: Well, even though you were the only ones in that class and that you would have gone credit if we didn't finish the lap.

Murrae: You have to finish one full lap. The rules are you have to do a lap. But then when we were in California at Willow Springs, which is a great racetrack. I love the racetrack. We were doing actually doing really well. And what happened is something happened. The rear rotor got hot and expanded. It seized. And seized up the rear brake. And so we're off the side of the track. So we're good at pushing to the side of the track. So then some people from a modern class come by and they said, Oh, well, we'll help you get back.

Mabel: The race finished by this time.

Murrae: Right. So they pushed us back in. But then it was going around that they had run into us. They said, Oh, the modern crashed into the vintage. So they pushed us back into the pits and we finally got this thing apart. And then it was such an odd. It was such an odd part. There was no way to identify it. So again, I sent it to my friend at Jay Leno's garage and he basically turned us off a new one and sent it over. So it's a really interesting group because there are modern cars that are like Formula One cars with three wheels. They're very fast. And then there are vintage cars like ours, but we're all sidecar racers. So there's a lot of camaraderie and people helping each other out. You get on the racetrack and it's serious, but in the pits and everything, it's fun. So I sent Robin a picture that he should show you. I think it was us at Barber Motorsports. So yeah, so we actually spent almost 10 years traveling coast to coast to 10 different race tracks. We only spent two full years sidecar racing. Two full years sidecar racing. But 10 years with me racing. And it was really interesting because I was working for a Harley-Davidson dealer at the time doing motorcycle training. And the first guy I worked for, he offered us a job and I turned him down because I said we had the schedule that we wanted to keep. He said, well, show me. And so we showed him the schedule and he said, well, I don't have any problem with this. Take a cell phone as long as you do your job, I'm good. And so that kind of set a precedent. So for all these years, I had a full-time job as a manager operating a program, but I was gone 10 weekends a year with her to go racing. And we put the dog in and we had a truck camper, a sliding camper and a trailer and we would just take off and go. And it was just one of those great things. We've always been active. I think in 2010, no, 1999, 1999, I was working for an emissions company doing dyno tuning and we got a call from a guy who did, do you know Motor Discovery?

Mabel: I do not. You did Poncho Via Motor Tours before you got the job.

Murrae: Right. So it used to be Poncho Via Motor Tours, but then it became Motor Discovery.

Mabel: So anyway, he's a retired, so he decided to retire from full-time photography, which is what he was doing as a photojournalist. So anyway, long story short, because everything got, everything was changing with digital cameras and every year you'd have to buy a whole new set. Yeah.

Murrae: I like film. So we got a call from the guy who runs this company saying, can you help us with a tour into Mexico? Which I said, sure.

Mabel: Well, it started off with, I took his- I'll let her talk. I took the all women's tour, Poncho Via all women's motor tour to Mexico in 1991, the first and the second all women's tour that he led. And at some point we were in San Antonio and I called Skip and put Murray on the phone and they talked to each other. And then I think a couple of years later, he never met Murray, but he said, if I would be with Murray, then he was worth hiring. And that's how he got the job.

Murrae: Yeah. So anyway, long story short there, I went to Mexico on this tour and then we did, she and I did tours either together or I would do them separately almost twice a year for almost 10 years in Mexico, going to Copper Canyon and that whole area where we take a group of people and take off across the border and take them on a ride for two weeks. We did a few tours over the course of 10 years. Yeah. And then for her decade birthdays, one decade birthday, we went to New Zealand. Another decade, we went to Australia. This last one, we went to Arkansas. We went to Arkansas, which is a fabulous place to ride. But we also did an exchange. We had some folks from Germany come over and go on a tour with us. And then we went to Germany and went on a tour with them in Germany and Austria and Northern Italy. And so, you know, we've been in Spain. Spain was wonderful. So we basically got together and kind of have this same adventurous spirit. And so we've just I think the next thing we'll do is I turn 75 this December. So we're thinking now we'll go back to Australia because we have friends there. We'll go back there maybe in November, December, January and do two or three weeks of riding there. And yeah, so I met Robin on Tribe Talk and we became friends on Tribe Talk. So now we've taught together. So we'll be bugging you all the time.

Mabel: When Murray and I met, I was the only one who had a bike.

Murrae: Yes, I went through a divorce. Wait, what? She joined. There was a period of time.

Mabel: We met 25 years ago. I've been riding for 35 years and I started riding by myself. I taught myself, I got a little Honda 250 Rebel and I taught myself to use the brakes because I heard that most people crash their bike in the first 24 hours because they forget to use the brakes. So basically, I, you know, went from the first gear to the second gear and an early Sunday morning I was living in California and just taught myself how to ride.

Maggie: What brought you to riding? Why were you interested? What got you interested in riding?

Mabel: Okay, so I never really thought about it until I had a boyfriend that wanted to get a Harley and so I'm the one with credit. So we bought an 81 Sportster, I think it was. And we split up and it was still a loan on it and it was in my name. So I kept the bike. Smart. And at a certain point, I met this guy from Germany who said, well, you know, you should get a small bike and learn how to ride. And so I sold the Harley and I got the Rebel and, you know, this guy was on vacation. So, you know, he said at that point, 25% of the riders in Germany were women. And at that point in America, it was very small. This was 1987, right? So I just got the bike and learned how to ride. And then in 88, so my next bike was an 88 Sportster and this was in June. I didn't have a whole lot of bikes left. I called Bartels down in Los Angeles and I said, do you have a bike? He says, yes, but my salesman next to me is negotiating. And I said, well, let me give you a credit card. And I bought it sight unseen. And he said he had the great pleasure of going over to the other salesman and said, sorry, I sold the bike already. This was way before like calling up and buying bikes, you know, with credit cards. And then the following year I bought, I traded that in for a Heritage Softail Classic that was owned by the Khalifa of the Carnalists, a motorcycle gang in Oxnard, California. And it had like the ape hangers. And so I had that switched off and I had that bike for a long time. So that's the bike I had when I met Murray. Yeah.

Murrae: So it's sort of like eight years later, but I was riding that bike for quite a while. So it's sitting in a garage and I didn't let on for a while that I love motorcycles. We met in late October. Right. And then. So in March, he starts coming out. So I said, oh, let's look at that thing in the garage and see what's going on. And we kind of got started that way as a couple, which was was that 90, what, 90?

Mabel: Well, 97. Well, we were together like right from the start. It never. Right. Like 10 days. Yes, we were to get totally together.

Murrae: Yeah, well, it's a great story. The I did a lot of work as a photojournalist. I did a lot of work for tribes in New Mexico, and I've got some heritage going, some native heritage. And at that time, I had gotten a divorce. I was raising five teenagers by my five children by myself. Well, yeah. So, well, it was actually pretty cool. So it was interesting.

Mabel: I considered being with him with five kids.

Maggie: I was going to say, and whoa.

Murrae: It was a common friend we had who's a native jeweler from Zuni. We have known each other a long time. She was having a baby and then was moving to Germany and was having a party. And so she invited us to the party. So anyway, when I show up, she was concerned about me and having five children to raise and no woman in my life. And so it was pretty funny because I showed up and there was a Hispanic woman, two Native American women. There's a variety of females at this bowling party and me.

Mabel: So and then she walked in and I had bought her baby a gift and I needed to drop it off. But the baseball playoffs were on, so I was just going to go there for a second and drop it off and go home.

Murrae: Yeah. So pretty much I said, who's that? And she said, I don't bother. She broke up with a guy and just recently. So I walked up and introduced myself. I've never been very bashful. And the air got kind of thick and we talked for it was like there were molecules floating back and forth.

Mabel: It was that kind of chemical reaction. And so, OK, what's going on?

Murrae: We talked and then, you know, the day was over. And so then we went out, I think, the next Tuesday. And the next time we went out, you know, I said, look, I said, I got all this stuff on my plate. I don't have time to, you know, court and date and do this stuff. But here's here's, you know, I'll never cheat on you. I'll never hit you. My boots will be under your bed. I'll treat you with respect. And if you like all that kind of stuff, I think we should just get married. But that was that was like 10 days.

Mabel: But his friend told him that I rode a motorcycle.

Murrae: Right.

Mabel: That was in there, too, that he already knew that. Right. From the time that we met. So, you know, figure that one out. Well, OK, that's enough of that.

Murrae: Yeah. The the kind of the continuum of that when we got married, we went to Sturgis. Now, he looked at my bike and then he rebuilt it. Yeah, I rebuilt her bike. It's like, OK, that works. Then we rode it to Sturgis. And a friend of mine up there who's Lakota, I said to him that we wanted to get married. So the long story short is we got married in a sweat lodge on a eagle dancing area. That's a sacred area by a Haoka medicine. So that's how we got married.

Mabel: But that morning we were packing the bike and I a bungee cord let loose and hit me up here and I had two black circles under my eyes.

Murrae: She had two black eyes. So during the ceremony, he warned us about fighting fair when we were upset. So it's just we've had a really interesting time and it's all been around motorcycles and not all but well, mostly. Yeah. I mean, I I started writing when I think I was 11. My dad got me got a moped that I rode around the yard and then went through a series of British and Japanese bikes and got a Harley in a box and rebuilt that. And yeah, just it just had done that kind of stuff forever.

Mabel: I was not afraid of being on a motorcycle because I rode bicycle in New York City from the time I was like eight years old. So, you know, yeah.

Maggie: That traffic is just as dangerous as.

Mabel: Right. So you learn how to and this is before everyone was so protective over their kids that they wouldn't let them go out by themselves or ride on the street. So and this was during the time when the diesel fumes, the diesel black dust would come out of the buses while you were following them. Yeah.

Maggie: So probably also before bicycle lanes, you know, dedicated bicycle lanes were a thing.

Mabel: In fact, it really wasn't considered. Fashionable for a girl to ride a bicycle back then. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. We're talking the the late 50s and the 60s. And I mean, girls avoided gym in high school if they could. This is a whole different era. This is before being athletic was what everyone wanted to be.

Murrae: When she was five years old, she would get on the subway with her little brother and go 11 or 11. And she would go into the city on the subway, just the two of them. And I think you went to the World's Fair.

Mabel: 64, 65 World's Fair. You had to be 12 years old to go in by yourself. So my mom was working and she let me take my three year old brother into the World's Fair. Nobody said anything. You know, today you would be considered child abuse. You learn how to do things if you could do things on your own when you're a kid and you become much more independent. Yeah. And I would wander around the city by myself when I was 11. I lived in Queens, which is more suburban. I would go into Manhattan, walk around everywhere, take the subway back and bus back home. Now, you know, someone would grab you and say, you know, where's your mother? Right. Yeah.

Murrae: I mean, to say she's adventurous and that's kind of what I like is people who are adventurous and willing to wrap their heads and arms around new things and try new things.

Mabel: Well, that's something that my mom said, OK, you can go now because you're old enough. It was more like my brother, who is 11 months older than me, and I were taking the bus to go return something down in Main Street, Flushing, which Flushing was not the Chinese city it is now. And so I get on the bus and my brother stays back and says, goodbye, you're on your own. I said, OK, I'm going to do it. But so it's always you do something the first time by accident and now you have permission. It sounds like it served you well.

Murrae: Yeah, yeah. And I got into writing because my dad wrote and, you know, wrote all of his life. And at a certain point, when she mentioned that I did photojournalism, when it went to digital cameras, I decided to do something else. I'm one of those people that if I decide to stop doing something, I simply stop and go do something else.

Mabel: And he's the kind of person where people talk to him and, yeah, I think you can do this job. And they offer him a job.

Murrae: Yes. I went to work for a Harley dealer and work.

Mabel: He went to work for Clean Air to develop a testing room for them. And you have no degrees, just lifelong experience.

Murrae: I'm an engineer by osmosis. My father had three engineering, three engineering degrees and seven union cards. My grandfather had a mechanical engineering degree. It was a machine. I just grew up around all that stuff. So and when I was on our life story, that's OK. They'll edit. So when I was a private person, so when I was four, my grandfather bought me two short little stubby screwdrivers. One was a flat and one was a Phillips. And I was so attached to him. My mother had to sew pockets on the sheets of my bed. So when I went to bed, I could put the two screwdrivers in the pockets and not like let them get very far away. So I've been a motorhead forever.

Maggie: So while other kids had the security blankets or the teddy bear, you had a you had a screwdriver and a Phillips.

Murrae: Yep. Yes. Yep. I also had a lamb chop, which was I don't know if you know what that is. I do. Yeah, I had a lamb chop. I had a crush on I forget her name now, but. Sherry something. Sherry something who did the puppet lamb chop. Yeah.

Maggie: Are you two still both doing the sidecar racing or not? Not as much lately.

Mabel: No. When he got sick, we really and then we really couldn't do it. He went through chemo and stem cell transplant and bone marrow transplant. And then COVID hit. And so he was immunocompromised. So we couldn't do that. And it's all OK now. It's OK now. But the sidecar is pretty much toast. We'd have to do a lot of work on it. And then we sold the trailer that we were using to take it to the races. And now we have a toy hauler and we really don't have room for the sidecar. And there's other things we want to do.

Murrae: Yeah. We had two years of racing and we got two national number of first place number one plates. And I'm thinking about going back. I have a 50 year old Ducati 350 GP bike that I've been racing going back to racing it just because it's fun.

Mabel: Otherwise, I mean, he's picked up other things since retirement, which is doing quality assurance visits for Harley. And they want him to do a lot this year. And we don't really have the time.

Murrae: Yeah.

Mabel: But the quality assurance visits allow us to ride places and get paid.

Murrae: Yeah. Pays for our traveling. You know, it's like what you guys do is perfect. You know, having an RV and some bikes and traveling around and doing stuff online and the newsletter that you do and the podcast and all that's perfect. It's like perfect for now. Robin really enjoys it. And so, yeah. And so we're kind of in that same mode. You know, what can we do? How do we how do we want to spend the rest of our time?

Maggie: Yeah.

Murrae: You know, now we're retired. And, you know, and quite frankly, when you get some kind of serious illness that you recover from, it changes your perspective on how you want to spend time.

Maggie: Absolutely. I was listening to a podcast and she went through a thought experiment where she was talking about, OK, if I knew that I only had one year left to live for whatever reason, what would I start doing more of or what would I stop doing more of? And like she had like five questions. She kind of went through all based around if you only had one year left to live. I thought that was an interesting thought experiment. It sounds like you kind of came to that in a more realistic way.

Murrae: You know, it's one of those things where, you know, you say, well, what can I do here? I just have to, you know, go through this and see what happens. But early on, we made we talked about it. We made the decision that if it went south really quick, we were just going to sell everything and spend the rest of whatever time we had together doing exactly what we wanted to do, which is probably going anywhere in the world we could and riding motorcycles and having experiences.

Mabel: Well, he more or less has more of a bucket list than I do. I've never really had a bucket list. I've always just fallen into something. It's kind of like I started rock climbing because a girlfriend said, hey, let's go try this. Or someone else says, hey, let's go try that. And I just fall into things. Kind of the same here. Yeah, I mean, so so not having a bucket list, you know, if something happened tomorrow, I'm fine.

Murrae: Same here. I told my kids, I tell my friends, I said, you know, don't wait to chase your bucket list. I said, I started on mine when I was like 40, and I've been working on it consistently ever since. And, you know, I don't come from money or anything. I've just been really had these incredible opportunities presented to me where I've said, OK, sure. Yeah, I'll go do that. I'll get that a shot, see what happens. And, you know, years later, I can say, geez, what a great life. And the interesting thing is it's all so much of it, so much of the joy and the fun came out of motorcycling in general, the people you meet and the places you go and it's like we would ride to Mexico and we'd ride into a little town and the kids would just swarm around the bikes. And I carried a Polaroid camera and pictures of kids on the bike and give them Polaroids and stuff and, you know, just that kind of stuff. It's like, how do you how can you convince people to, you know, put down what they're doing and go have those kinds of experiences? Because they enrich you so much.

Mabel: Oh, back in 1991, going into Mexico as with an all women's tour, they were astounded. They are Mexicans. They were astounded. All of a sudden, it's like, oh, my God, it's women. Motorcycles.

Maggie: How many riders were in the group?

Mabel: I think the first one was 15. The second one might have been 12. But there were these these two ladies from, I think it was Wisconsin, and they were on these Honda Rebel 450s, which was the smallest bike. All the other women had big bikes and they literally rode the shocks off the bikes. We got across the border. The shock had fallen off. We were having so much fun. It was great. It was a lot of fun riding with all these women.

Maggie: That sounds amazing. These were like two weeks long, these trips into Mexico?

Mabel: They really weren't that long because Skip thought we couldn't handle it. Right, at first. At first, it was like six days. And I think the second one was like nine days.

Murrae: We kind of ran him into the ground.

Mabel: Well, the second trip, he had this Marine as a follow. He led both tours and they had this Marine as a follow. And he gets on sabotaging little things on the bike so that he could help us. But no, all these women rode down to the tour. They didn't trailer there. They rode. And they were from all over the country. Yeah, on the second tour coming home, I hit rain all the way. And then from Socorro back, I hit rain. And then coming into Santa Fe, I hit snow. And the next morning, it was that much. What was that? About a foot of snow. Yeah, a foot and a half of snow on my seat. It was cold. I didn't have really good gear then. Basically, Harley was only selling gear that they had rebranded from Hein Gerica. There was no specific, specific women's gear. I had gone to Germany and I had a custom leather.

Murrae: She was like a ninja. She had this leather suit and then wore a scarf and a mask so you could just see her eyes. But you couldn't find women's gear.

Mabel: You could not find women's gear. Yeah.

Murrae: It's gotten better in the last five years, I think.

Mabel: Oh, it's gotten better in the last 10 or 15.

Maggie: It's gotten better. Some might argue that the colors that you'll see are always like turquoise or pink. Even when I go into a store, I've been looking for gauntlet gloves and I have to order them. I can never find them just in a store.

Mabel: Oh, yeah, you have to order them. Well, there was no ordering online back then.

Maggie: Yeah.

Mabel: Well, I was living in Oxnard, so Weider was making electrics back then. I went into Ojai and I got seconds from Weider. I got gloves and I got a vest. I mean, they were still made for men, but my hands are a women's glove size large, so I was able to fit into a men's glove. The only problem is the palm area because that's too big. But I found some inexpensive gauntlet gloves, which I don't think I should name brands here, but I could tell you later, online that fit really well. Yeah. Which I use for the sidecar because I need to have something that I could really grip because you're hanging on all the time. So you want to make sure that you have good gloves.

Murrae: Yeah, there's a reason they call the passenger the monkey, because when you're the driver, you're basically steering and accelerating and braking because it's not like a regular motorcycle where you can move all over the place. You're just kind of planted and you're operating this thing.

Mabel: Right, so I'm really draped over the back or hanging off the side.

Murrae: Yeah, her job was to keep the car on the ground because parts of it raise up when you turn and because it's, you know, it's a triangle. And so she was all over the place. She would just scramble up to the front and over the back and hang off the side.

Mabel: That's why it suited me because being athletic and being able to hang off things to not being, not having no fear. It made it like, yeah, I can be a sidecar monkey.

Murrae: That sounds like so much fun. Yeah. Well, we're like you guys, you both ride. And so, you know, that's, you know, when Robin and I taught together last week, we had a great time, you know, just that, just that attitude of being happy and being somewhere and doing something you enjoy and being alive, you know, passing on something to someone else and sharing some information and some knowledge. Just, it's just such a great thing.

Mabel: He's the one who pulled me into teaching as well because he was running women.

Murrae: Yeah. I said, I need some women, women instructors. It's a bunch of old guys, right? We need some women because we're writing. And so we need instructors that they can relate to.

Mabel: You know, so when they see this old Chinese woman teaching them, I was like, okay, I can write too if she can. And I've never been disrespected actually. On the range when I'm teaching, not at all. Well, I think the younger people are more inclined to accept women and older women teaching them how to ride.

Murrae: Well, she won't admit it, but she's better than a majority of the male riders that I know. That's just his opinion. You know, well, I think women in general are safer. There's a higher sense of self-preservation. The guy, as guys, we have the hold my beer and watch this gene. And women generally don't have that that I know of. And so it's most women, but it's interesting to see her on the range because we teach together a lot and it's always this really incredible balance of communication and stuff. And the stuff that she focuses on and picks up on with students that I may not, I'm focusing on something else. And so the students really get a lot out of it. Well, I understand you teach as well.

Maggie: I do. And I do enjoy having, I think the students benefit from having the two coaches for the very reason, you know, that you mentioned is you have two different personalities. Usually one picks up on some gaps that the other one doesn't see, but then the other one notices things. And, you know, sure. A solo coach can handle eight students, but it's just a nice, I think it's a really nice balance and experience overall when you have two people there, if it's possible. If you have a woman and a man. Yeah. I think that's also a great balance. I know that there's always a shortage of coaches and there's always a call, especially for some more female coaches. And I think we also need younger coaches.

Mabel: We need younger coaches here in New Mexico. I think everywhere. They've retired now, but it was a husband and wife team up in Taos and he was the medical director at the hospital and he taught. Oh, wow. Motorcycle riding. Yeah. So it's a good thing. Yeah.

Murrae: Yeah. It's just interesting to think about the things that I and how motorcycling has been the most consistent thing over the entirety of my life. Besides raising children. Yeah. Besides raising children, but.

Maggie: Do your children ride?

Murrae: Let's see. One, two. Three. Three of them are active riders. Four have motorcycle licenses. Four have motorcycle licenses.

Mabel: Well, yeah, but Alicia never rode. Yeah. She ended up having a baby.

Murrae: Yeah. So, yeah. And now the oldest daughter is three boys and two girls. Now the oldest daughter of the two girls, her kids are going to go to dirt bike school. Fun. She likes motorcycles and thinks it would be good for her kids.

Maggie: That's great. I'm always curious when people have children or kids that do ride or don't ride. I'm always curious about why some do, some don't. We have a number of friends whose kids don't ride. So I'm always curious about that.

Mabel: I think kids need to be riding bicycles everywhere. Yeah. On their own.

Murrae: Well, in New Mexico, we live near, we call them arroyos. And a lot of places are called washes. But we were like a half a block from an arroyo, which is an open kind of area. And I picked up a Yamaha 80 dirt bike that all of the kids learned how to ride on in the arroyo. And they, you know, rode motocross style in the arroyo. And then when they outgrew that, I gave it to another family. So this motorcycle got passed around to three or four families where the kids learned how to ride.

Mabel: I mean, that gives me a thought. Why, you know, kids are doing soccer, they're doing, you know, t-ball, they're doing all that stuff. Why not do a group of kids doing bicycle riding?

Murrae: Yeah. Yeah. Or motorcycles.

Mabel: Four or five kids together instead of, you know, do groups of team, you know, bicycle riding. Yeah. Get them on the streets. Why not? With an adult and just following and learning how to ride safely on the street. It's a start from there. You start from there. And then when they get older, you can put them on a motorcycle.

Maggie: Your first bicycle ride, that's your first sort of experience of freedom, you know, where you can get a little speed under you and get a distance and you start to explore. And I grew up riding bicycles and we rode around neighborhoods unchaperoned, you know, and no helmets, nothing. When I lived in California, none of that.

Mabel: Yeah. Right. But then, you know, you like teams, you create friends in a team, you create friends with bicycles. It used to be everybody in the neighborhood of bicycles. So, you know, they'd call everybody, let's go for a ride.

Tim: Yeah.

Mabel: But now everything's so spread out or, you know, where the kids are. So you need to form a group in order to ride. But that would help them, you know, with camaraderie and everything else.

Murrae: And the motorcycle thing was early because I know in the 50s, we all took clothespins and put playing cards on the front fork of the motorcycle. So the spokes would turn and make a motor noise. And the faster you went, the faster the motor noise went. We were already on motorcycles when we were eight, nine years old.

Mabel: You know, it just sort of reminds me, my parents would not buy me a bicycle because they felt that wasn't a girly thing to do. So I would ride my brother's bicycle all the time.

Maggie: They let you ride his bicycle or they didn't know you were riding his bicycle?

Mabel: They let me ride his bicycle, but they would not get me a bicycle for myself. For yourself. Yeah.

Maggie: Wow. That's so interesting. One of our recent newsletters, it was, you know, it was Women's Month and I wrote about, I was like, okay, so how did, I was just kind of looking around for topics. And that's when I learned about how the suffrage movement was kind of linked to women first starting to ride bicycles. But, you know, so it kind of became linked together and how women had to really fight to do it. But it was the first time they could be independent and they got some freedom. And then, but those, you know, they wore the clothes that they wore back then was horrendous. And so some women were smart about it. They started ditching the skirts and just wearing those petticoats, which was totally unsightly and unseemly. So people would throw stuff at them. But, you know, just the things that we take for granted now that women were fighting just to even ride a bicycle is, that's interesting.

Mabel: If you even take that a little further back, women only rode side saddle for a specific reason. Not a bicycle, which is really totally, you know, yeah.

Maggie: So the values. What is between that woman's legs? Tell me a little bit more about some of these other trips. So you've gone to Australia, New Zealand, you've ridden Mexico, you would. What are some of the more memorable, like long distance tours you've done together?

Mabel: In the US and Canada, we went from. So there's a group, we used to have Buell motorcycles and there was a Buell group from Colorado and some from New Mexico. But these are a few four or five people. Yeah, a handful, a handful and also one that came over from England. And so they planned a trip and we followed along. It's like, this will be fun. And we went from New Mexico up through Utah, through Idaho, Idaho, Oregon, Washington, and then the Olympic Peninsula took the ferry over to Vancouver Island, up Vancouver Island from the tip of Vancouver Island. We took the longer ferry through the inside passage up to Prince Rupert, across Prince Rupert and right in the middle of that British Columbia area. I found a Chinese guy that rode Harleys that spoke my dialect. It was just really. Wow. He ran a hotel and a restaurant in the middle of all lumber. It was all lumbering there. I thought that was really crazy. And then we went across to Jasper, down to Banff, to Glacier, to Yellowstone and then back to New Mexico in 17 days, 5,100 miles. Wow. With some days we didn't. And it was so beautiful. We went up the tram, I can't remember what the mountain was, but to the top and you could hike even further. But I was wearing flip flops and there was snow in sections. I said, I'm all the way up here. I'm going to go in flip flops because I've been to Vietnam and that's what they wear all everywhere. Hiked up to the top in my flip flops. And that was that was such a beautiful trip. I mean, we couldn't. Oh, we went to Glacier and Yellowstone, but we couldn't do the going to the Sun Highways because it wasn't open yet. This was in mid-June. But we did the clockwise route and we didn't have any rain except for a couple of hours. And I looked at the weather. If we had done counterclockwise, we would have hit rain along the entire trip. So that was a lucky trip. It was beautiful. It was so much fun. And in Canada, they tell about the crisis.

Murrae: Oh, yeah. In Canada, we we see all these people in Canada, they cut the roads back because of the wildlife. So it's cut back, you know, 100 feet or 200 feet. And we saw people stop by a pull off and we pull off and get off. We look and hear down this this little hill and out just a little bit. There's a grizzly bear taking a nap and people are taking pictures and making noise and. Not really making noise.

Mabel: Well, a little bit.

Murrae: Our friend Bob decided to go over there. And so our friend Bob goes over. He's a big guy and he yells. He goes like this and slaps his tummy two or five times. Now that grizzly could have come up in like two seconds. Right. And so, yeah, the grizzly puts its head up and looks at us. And I said, OK, guys, time to leave or we're going to end up. Somebody's going to be a leather chew toy here. And, you know, off we went. No, he woke up. Squirrels started running. And then he took off.

Mabel: He took off after the squirrels. So the squirrel saved us.

Murrae: Yeah.

Mabel: Oh, wow.

Murrae: It's crazy in this. We've had some adventures. When we went to, I was just, oh, when we went to New Zealand. It's great. We decided to go to New Zealand. I was a service manager at a shop, a motorcycle shop. And she said, we have to figure this out. There's not a whole lot on the Internet. And so I'm there one morning at 730. And the owner calls me and he says, there's some guy on the phone calling you from New Zealand. Don't know. Before this, you had met the uncle. Oh, yeah. His uncle walked in. He wanted a motorcycle license plates because that's how he chronicled the trips that he took around the world as you collect license plates. So we start to talk. And yeah, this is 2002. He has a nephew who rides motorcycles. So we got I get a phone number and email. We email back and forth. He puts me in touch with the guy who rents motorcycles. And I kept trying to track this guy down because I wanted to rent some bikes and get deposits and stuff. And so 730 in the morning, the boss yells back and he goes, it's a guy from New Zealand on the phone wants to talk to you. I said, OK. So I picked up the phone and it was a motocrosser from France. And now he's from Switzerland. Switzerland lived on the South Island and he was in the North Island. Forty five minutes south of Auckland.

Mabel: Yeah.

Murrae: And he calls up and he goes, well, are you guys coming? And I said, yeah, I've been trying to figure out here for weeks. You want a credit card or pay you a credit card? What do you want? He knows. Are you coming for sure? And I said, yeah, we have our tickets. We're ready to go. He goes, bring cash. I'll meet you at the airport. He goes, we don't believe in banks, so we just want cash.

Mabel: He's from Switzerland.

Murrae: He was from Switzerland, the motocross. So he met us at the airport.

Mabel: He had a guy meet us at the airport and drove us 45 minutes down to where he's at.

Murrae: So we stash our stuff, we get our bikes and we do our trip and we come back and we turn everything in.

Mabel: And we didn't we sort of had what I did was I looked up a tour and I said, OK, this kind of route would be good. So we did our own self-guiding. We didn't have any reservations. And yeah, we just except for the first night at the beach.

Murrae: So we go to turn the motorcycles in and he goes, are you guys are from New Mexico? And I said, yeah, we're from Santa Fe. And he gets his box and he hands Mabel this box. And he said, I have a brother who lives in Santa Fe. Would you take this and give this to him? And so there was this whole kind of interesting connection.

Mabel: And a few years ago, pre-COVID, he came to visit his brother. Yeah. And we all met up. Yeah. This is like. Oh, that's so awesome. Like 15 years after. Right. We had been to New Zealand.

Murrae: He remembered us. When I had a former brother-in-law that lived on the Coromandel, which is the northern part of the North Island of New Zealand, I guess you can see that sort of well, you can see the Great Barrier Reef from there. And so we rode some I forget how many miles it was on gravel to get there, go out and see him and through a stream, which I'd never there was a stream that we had to ride through and she'd never done before. And I said, well, just don't stop. Hold the throttle.

Mabel: Well, there was a cattle. There was a grating down there.

Murrae: Yeah. So I said, don't stop.

Mabel: Keep going. Going in. I hit the grating coming back out. I missed the grating and I just just kept going.

Murrae: So we got up there and they have they raise.

Mabel: They learned how to farm oysters.

Murrae: Farm oysters.

Mabel: We had fresh oysters.

Murrae: They were doing olives and stuff like that.

Mabel: They were avocados.

Murrae: Avocados.

Mabel: And we had brought some bottled salsa.

Murrae: Right from New Mexico, New Mexico. So they were just they were just so that the next morning we get up and there's a windstorm and we're trying to get out of there and literally blowing everything. The chickens were being blown across the yard. They were rolling down the yard.

Maggie: Oh, my gosh.

Mabel: It was funny. Now, we've had a lot of really it's travel. That's why I said I just want to travel and do vacations. The experience on a motorcycle is fantastic. There's nothing like it. And you're so open. People want to come talk to you, especially if you're a couple. Yeah. I did travel once with another woman and then nobody wanted to talk to us. This was what was what year was this?

Murrae: When? Who was it?

Mabel: Carol. Oh, OK. So this is probably in the middle 90s. And so I think people sort of found that strange. The only person that this is amazing. We were in a gas station in Salt Lake City. And this guy of Indian Indian from India descent comes in, drives in us if we need help. But that was fantastic. I said, oh, no, thank you so much. But that was the only person that really kind of talked to us. And I think they found two women strange. Maybe they thought they were whatever. I did go. We did go to Great Salt Lake. And I started walking in along the edge of the crust. Looked like it was solid. I started sinking in up to my knees. Oh, oh, yeah. So I remembered my physics. So it's kind of like spread the weight. So I crawled out. I was able to pull out, pull myself out of the sort of quicksand.

Murrae: Yeah, and just going somewhere and getting lost and finding something. Yeah, it's always fun. That's so much fun.

Mabel: And the people, other motorcycle riders. Um, just yesterday we were talking to one that we went out to the Taliscord Bridge with my brother and sister-in-law, just driving. It was a guy there that had Merrill in place. And we started talking to him. Yeah, it's it's it's such an easy introduction that is non-threatening, which is what I like being on the motorcycle.

Murrae: There's a universality to it where it's sort of it sort of doesn't make any difference who you are, what you do. If you're on a motorcycle and you're traveling, there's that camaraderie that exists. And even though you might only know each other for a couple of hours or a couple of days, it's like all those things that might make a difference back in the quote unquote real world just don't count.

Mabel: I mean, most car people don't do that. When when have you driven a, you know, a sedan and parked next to a sedan and people start talking? Yeah.

Maggie: I don't see that at all in the car culture, except for the people that like to race on the street racing that circuit. Murray, that was a gem what you just said about how nice it is and how open it is and how that sort of it levels the field, even if it's just for a few hours to, you know, for people to talk to each other.

Murrae: Sure. Well, Eric Buell, we've known him for a long time, and he's the guy that did the motorcycles. And he said to me once, he goes, you know, he goes, if everybody would just ride motorcycles, the world would be a totally better place. And it's that it's based on that same thought. Yeah, because, you know, wearing an armor. Right. Yeah. And it's like going to the races and racing. It's like we're real competitive. But when the racing is done, it's time to drink beer, tell stories, work on your bikes, help each other out. And it's just a whole different approach to things, I think. Yeah.

Maggie: This has been so much fun hearing about all of your adventures. I want to ask each of you one last question, and it's the same question. What is your riding obsession?

Murrae: Oh, geez. It's mostly travel and the racing, even doing the racing. That was also travel because it was coast to coast. And so we met new people and had these. I think it's traveling together. Yeah. We don't do groups. Or we have small groups of friends, people that we've known a long time. But most of the time when she and I travel, we are by ourselves and we'll pick a place and do the research. And like when we went to Spain, we went with a couple of friends. But it was a self-guided tour where they set the hotels and how we got to and from. And everything was totally up to us. And so we had all these adventures together.

Mabel: We've enjoyed the tours, though. We've enjoyed the tours.

Murrae: When we led the tours, yeah.

Mabel: I think people enjoy tours, motorcycle tours, but they don't know because they make friends. But at this stage, well, it also has to do with money. It's a lot cheaper to do your own tour.

Murrae: Yeah. We led a tour with some Brits.

Mabel: And you led a tour with Brits.

Murrae: And then they decided to come back to Sturgis because they liked you so much. Yeah, they came back. We had such a good time. They decided to come back. And she and I took them to Sturgis and around and just stuff like that. It's just, you know, I found a soulmate and somebody who is I think it's important in marriage that to truly have a partner in terms of somebody that you can share with, that you can share with and depend on and have these experiences with. Because the other thing, which is.

Mabel: There's a lot of guys out there would feel really lucky if their wife would ride with them.

Murrae: Yeah.

Mabel: Whether on the back or on their own bike.

Murrae: Yeah. Yeah. When in the medical stuff that I went through, the treatment and the bone marrow transplant, she essentially was my advocate the whole time. And it really is as responsible for my recovery as any of the medical people, you know, and that's a quality that's rare to find that there's that kind of commitment, that kind of love.

Mabel: Do you find people that recover sooner, faster have an advocate?

Murrae: Yeah.

Mabel: I mean, having been in the hospitals and seeing people that are lying there on their own, as opposed to people who are there all day, every day, makes a huge difference.

Murrae: I think if I have an obsession, it's her.

Maggie: The best answer so far. I ask that question to every podcast guest. Murray, you just you just topped everyone.

Murrae: What better time can you have than exploring the world, doing something you love with someone you love so much? Understanding this life on this planet, it doesn't get much better.

Robin: Awesome. Yeah. He and Mabel, sidecar, legit racing. Arma, I believe. She's the monkey. Like, talk about a romance.

Armene: It'd be a little bit more romantic if he were in the sidecar.

Travis: Or if there was a rain condom.

Robin: I'm going to find that video for you right now.

Travis: Do they make those for two? Ooh, like a two person sleeping bag? Human, Caterpillar, sidecar, rain gear. Tim, you're unwell.

Robin: Video, or it didn't happen. So now you get to see our long time ad of the rainwear, which I probably should have edited for the better, but I did my best. Where'd you put it? It's on Facebook later. Put it in the Zoom chat. Why do you want me to put it in the Zoom? We're going to watch an advertisement from TRO while we do a podcast.

Travis: Well, whatever.

Robin: Stick around after these messages, folks. 20 minutes of beers and filth, rain suits.

Travis: All right. Anyway, so we have a list of questions.

Robin: We have a list of questions, if I can find it. It's about seats.

Tim: Yeah, he has a Concourse 14.

Robin: Oh, you guys have it?

Travis: I just remember it because you sent it earlier. Read it. Yeah, I have it in front of me. Someone was asking about seats for a Concourse 14.

Robin: That's not... No, we need this, we need this. Concourse seats.

Tim: I think I can find this.

Travis: And it looks like there's basically three off the shelf options. Sergeant, Saddleman, and Corbin. Yeah. Corbin, you can customize them. Either way, you look in at like five to six hundred dollars.

Robin: And that's kind of what I told him that he should be weary of, is going with a pre-manufactured, quote, custom seat.

Tim: Yeah, I do like the Corbin seats. I had one on the Vstrom 1000. That was really comfortable. That was the first time I ever had one.

Travis: Yeah, they're kind of ugly.

Robin: But they are hard.

Travis: Yeah.

Robin: Why not have them just go to somebody who can actually tailor a seat?

Travis: Well, that's the other option, right? I don't know, it didn't say where he lived. But, you know, you can go to an upholsterer or get on a form and see if you live near a bigger city and see if someone's willing to do a custom seat for you. Yes. But I mean, just bear in mind...

Tim: I have not had good luck with that route.

Travis: If you go... Well, you have to find someone that does motorcycle seats.

Armene: Like, you can't... I have a dude...

Travis: Yes.

Armene: Yeah? I have a dude. Oh, yeah, you guys want to look him up?

Robin: Yeah, what's his name? What's his URL? Connect the dots here. This is great.

Armene: Sure. His name is Steve Gowing. And he's in Fort Collins, Colorado. He has been doing... It's Gowing Tailored Motorcycle Creations. And he has been in business for a really long time. And what's really cool about Steve is that you can bring your motorcycle to his house. He will have you sit on it. And then he'll kind of custom build a seat around your booty.

Tim: Nice.

Armene: Yeah. He just actually shaved off a couple of inches on my... A couple of my T-dub seats for my shorter riders. And it was... I think I got two seats done for 200 bucks. It was... I mean, it was like...

Tim: Oh, that is crazy.

Armene: It was ridiculous. It was so cheap. And he turned it around in three days. He's awesome. I have seen some of the coolest seats ever. He did this white custom, tons of stitching, beautiful thing on my friend's Harley. He's amazing.

Robin: I remember the specifics of the question he was talking about. His thing was that he would adjust himself. It's a problem when your junk gets all tied in the wrong spot. So he would...

Tim: For sure.

Robin: If he stood up, sat back down, everything would be like... He didn't like how things were nestled. He would run into the tank. It was all just uncomfortable.

Travis: It was like pushing him forward too much.

Robin: Yeah. He was sliding forward at an angle too much. And I think that... I think Piper just nailed it. Basically, find the guy that does the custom job and build off of that. So grounds covered.

Tim: Yeah. He's got really good looking work on here.

Armene: It's great. He's amazing.

Robin: How do you spell his name again?

Armene: Steve Gowing. G-O-W-I-N-G. Steve Gowing. His website is stevegowing.com.

Robin: Perfect. We should find out if he can do like Zoom meetings. Do Zoom meeting tailoring. They can send the seat pan and just be like...

Tim: He's got some of these on here that remind me of the Russell Daylong seat with the butt wings. You ever seen those? They're just horribly ugly, but I've heard they're comfortable.

Travis: Yeah, they have like butt wings.

Tim: Yeah.

Travis: There we go. I ride a 2013 stock Kawasaki C14. 424 miles. County aftermarket seat that does not angle my lower extremities toward the tank. I'm an adjusted flat angle.

Armene: I'm impressed that he's sitting forward in his seat enough to squish his junk.

Travis: Yeah, well, he's saying the seat pushes him forward.

Robin: Yeah, nuts on the tank is not necessarily a good thing. It's the attack position. I like to have sticky at the front, sticky at the back, and then have something that lets me use body English on the bike where I'm actually seated.

Travis: I'm not sure about the off the shelf. So definitely Corbin's tend to kind of lock you in more toward the back. It's hard to tell looking at the Sergeant and the Settlement. They look like they would be flatter, but you'd have to get maybe on a forum and see what the reviews are like. Or then obviously a custom job would be whatever you want it to be. He also had a question. The fly shield is too short for me.

Robin: That's you all day. You know the answer to that one. Dirty air is the worst, but I don't know if he's getting dirty air. I think he feels like he's supposed to be in a completely turbulent free environment, and that's just not how it works.

Travis: Yeah, I mean, there's all sorts of I mean, I'm sure. Yeah. Fuge, Puig, however you say it, makes a tall screen. National Cycle, GV, go on RevZilla.

Tim: Yeah, and you can also get the little windshield extensions.

Travis: Oh yeah, like the Laminar.

Tim: Little clip on guys.

Travis: Yep. And some guys have good luck with those.

Robin: Or get a smaller windscreen that's splayed. So it's got a center seam that's sort of like a split window. That creates less turbulence because the air is going around you instead of trying to get it up and over you. Travis has suffered through that for years. Tim, you had it too at one point, I think, with a bike.

Tim: Yes, I got rid of a motorcycle because of that. Yeah.

Travis: I just want clean air on my helmet, and my helmet cuts through the air fine. So that always works better for me. But there is so, you know, just go on RevZilla. Like I said, there's a couple of brands.

Tim: Yeah, there's also the V-Stream.

Travis: What did I have on the BMW? A Cerebellum. That thing was eight feet tall. Yeah, but it was great. It was a Cerebellum. I don't have to make one for the Connie, but it was like one of the only people who made windscreens for that weird-ass bike. Parabellum, that was it. Parabellum windscreens. Well, they make stuff for all sorts of things. That's why I don't see the Connie on there.

Tim: The company National Cycle has got their own proprietary style of windshield. They call it the V-Stream, and they're supposed to do some vortex generating, which I've heard good things of, but have no first-hand experience with it. It's a little expendy. It's $225 for the Concourse.

Robin: Yeah, C14. That's cool. All right. Well, this has been fun. Do you want to wrap this up? Anybody else got anything else they want to throw in the mix? Piper's still just buying motorcycles.

Travis: Yeah, she still doesn't know what she wants. You're just going to get a scrambler, aren't you?

Robin: No, I don't know. Scramble your current bike. Get yourself an upright posture sport bike with less displacement.

Tim: Yeah.

Robin: It's just advice. It's not...

Tim: Yeah, I got a question. Have you guys ever considered joining a motorcycle club?

Travis: I went to a Madison Motorcycle Club thing, and I found this to be very boring, and I don't have the time for it.

Armene: I went to one Litas motorcycle Christmas party, and I made the mistake of thinking that it was an actual Christmas party, so I wore a Christmas sweater with lots of colors and pretty things, and when I showed up, it was like I had gone to an Estee Lauder conference, and everyone was wearing just like black button-down and long cheeky things, and all these women were sort of like, I don't ride my bike. I just basically take it out of my garage, and I park it in front of a beautiful mural, and I take all these sexy pictures of half-naked stuff happening, and then I push it back into my garage, and that's what I do. And one of the ladies there was like, oh, my God, you bought a brand-new bike. I don't buy brand-new bikes. I date bikes. I was like, I got to get the fuck out of here, and that was the last time I tried to join a motorcycle group.

Tim: That sounds like a horrible thing. That sounds like the Harley groups around here.

Armene: It was pretty bad. So there's, at least in Colorado, as far as I know, there are some pretty hardcore like Wind Sister, right, where they all have really long, grayish-looking hair, and everyone's a grandmother. Or then there's the Estee Lauder group, and then if not that, it's then the Harley chicks who are smoking four cigarettes at the same time, and they got their beer in their... Maybe you should delete this. Anyways, their beer and their cup holders. I just don't fit in any of those groups.

Robin: Well, you're already a member of the super-slick, ultra-badass motorcycle megaboss team, Incredible Power.

Armene: What more do you want? I want to ride together every single weekend.

Robin: I actually really want the four of us to, like, when we get to... I hope we can get Travis in. I hope we can get Travis to come to Colorado. I know it's a long shot. We want to try. I sure hope it can happen. I'm going to be there. I will be in Gunnison. We got a spot, and Tim's already got the plan, and Piper's going to be there. Heck, we're going to meet up with Piper and Fam. I hope we're still invited to the Verbo thing. You are. Go see the ocean and hang out, and then you can backhand me in the face for anything I say that's been misconstrued. Clearly, misconstrued. It's going to be fun. Tim, I'm curious to know what raised that question.

Tim: Yesterday was a Madison Motorcycle Club meeting, and it was just, like... It always feels so funny how, like, a lot of my motorcycle friends are, like, balkanized in different groups, and none of them tend to interact that much, or there's a little bit of overlap, but yeah, so just kind of...

Robin: It's one of your characteristics. We all have a lot of throughput in different directions, and one of your characteristics is that your throughput tends to be, that Tim guy is one of the kindest people in the world. Let's get him over here. Little do they know.

Tim: And I seem to be the guy who's really easy to be dragged into doing planning.

Robin: Yeah, how fun is that, huh?

Travis: They're like, hey, Tim, you design circuit boards. You're patient, right?

Tim: Uh, yeah, well, you know, tech, you want to do something for us on a website? I'm like... That's different.

Travis: You know, that's not kind of... All IT is the same.

Robin: Yes. Tim does computers. Web developer Robin does computers.

Tim: I got a problem with my computer. Have you tried turning it off and walking away?

Robin: Pour soda on the keyboard. It fixes it every time.

Travis: Never ending soda.

Robin: Yeah. And with that, this has been another episode of the The Riding Obsession podcast here on a bike. I am pretty sure I'm Robin Dean.

Travis: I'm Travis Burleson.

Armene: I've heard my name was Tim. I might be Armin. Wait, I might be Armin A. Piper.

Robin: Thanks for joining us. Safe travels, everyone.

Travis: So we're sending out the mics.

Tim: This is not to be recorded.