Your Stories

When I turned 54, I dyed my hair fire-engine red, pierced my ears with a second set of holes, and obtained my motorcycle license. Friends and family chalked it up to a mid-life crisis; I looked upon it as throwing abandon to the wind.

We decided to give Myrtle Beach Bike Week a try when my friend suggested we visit her timeshare. We had read stories about how Myrtle Beach residents didnt want the “big bad bikers” and had instituted a number of laws to convince us to stay home or at least pick somewhere else to vacation. Undaunted by the bad press, we set out on a beautiful Thursday afternoon in early May to see if the press was making it out to be as bad as it truly was.

I am a flatbed truck driver. I ride a 2002 Harley-Davidson Road King that I bought from my brother and put 16,000 miles on in the first 13 months I had it. I have only been riding on my own for less than 2 years. Last November I fell from the top of a loaded flatbed, 7 feet in the air, head first. I shattered both my wrists, broke my nose and took 10 stitches in three places on my face. I had pins and external fixators on both my wrists for 10 weeks and lost all strength and flexibility on both.

It all began at the ripe age of 65 while vacationing in Pigeon Pass, Tennessee, during the spring when bikes were abounding everywhere. I decided that riding a motorcycle would be fun. I was so enraptured that I went to the Harley-Davidson dealer there and purchased a helmet. Upon arriving home in Florida, I signed up and took a riders safety course, which I failed by riding the bike off the course and going down. Undeterred

My name is Irina. I am Russian. I was born in the small but very beautiful country of Kyrgizstan, in Central Asia. The country is bordered with Mongolia, Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan. My family could not afford a car, so we bought a motorcycle instead. It was a Russian version of the WWII German BMW motorcycle, the Ural. Most Urals have a sidecar.

Two years ago, I was leading a motorcycle tour for my womens riding group, Dangerous Curves, to Lake Tahoe and one of the women asked me why I wasnt doing this as a business venture. The idea kind of took me aback however, I thought, why not? The end result birthed NorthStar Moto Tours. This is the story about our last tour of 2008 and the wonderful experiences and camaraderie gained through motor touring.

It probably started when as a young girl; I clipped a baseball card with a clothespin to my bicycle spokes so it would make that “motorcycle noise.” At 12 years old I got a minibike that made me the envy of the neighborhood boys. At 16 I went to the DMV and got my motorcycle learners permit. With no money for a motorcycle, the dream went on the back burner until I was 34 years old.

In 2000 I was transferred from California to Florida to work at the Kennedy Space Center on the space shuttle program. I was an avionics technician and crawled inside and out of the space shuttles. I was very dedicated to my work as well as dedicated to riding my motorcycle. I decided I wanted to ride my own motorcycle so I took the safety class.