Your Second Motorcycle Matters More Than Your First

On the bike you buy to ask the question, and the thirteen others trying to answer it.

My first motorcycle was a 1996 BMW R850R, and it was more bike than I could handle at first. Too tall, too heavy, bought over a sensible Honda I should have gotten instead. It came home on a trailer because I was not ready for it. For a year it taught me anyway, one nervous parking-lot lap at a time, and then I sold it for exactly what I paid and went looking for the next one.

Everyone will tell you the second bike is the important one. That part is true. The reason they give for it is not.

Mine was a Suzuki DL650. A V-Strom. The sensible do-everything middleweight, the bike the moto magazines recommend when they want to sound like adults. I bought it convinced it would settle something. I had learned to ride on the BMW, I knew what I was doing now, and this was going to be the machine that told me what kind of rider I was going to be.

It settled nothing. It opened the whole thing up. I sold the V-Strom two years later to a Maltese friend who rode it all the way to Ushuaia.

Suzuki DL650 V-Strom, jack of all trades, master of none

Because after the V-Strom came a BMW R1150GS Adventure, which is a very large motorcycle to buy if the lesson was supposed to be restraint. Then a Royal Enfield Himalayan when the BMW proved to be too much for off roading. After the move to Korea a Honda Little Cub came home, small enough to park in a closet. It came home INSIDE my car. Then a Harley Sportster because it was cheap. Then an old Daelim. Then a Honda Benly scooter. Then another Himalayan a second time, because apparently I had not finished with it the first time around. A Guzzi Breva. A Classic 500. A Cub clone, then a real Super Cub. Another Daelim. A BMW F650GS Dakar that I haven’t ridden yet. I have gone from cruiser to Cub to adventure bike to whatever caught me that season, and for long stretches I have kept several of them at once, lined up under the carport like a paddock of animals that get along better than you would expect.

You could say I have motorcycle ADD. In my defense all the bikes I have owned at one single time are worth less than whatever car I also owned at that time, and I always buy cheap cars… But enough about me.

So here is what the second motorcycle actually teaches you, if you are honest about it. It does not point you toward the rider you are becoming. It tells you there is no single rider you are becoming. The first bike answers one question, which is whether you can do this at all. If you don’t either kill yourself or scare yourself silly at first the second bike asks a much larger question, then refuses to answer it: What do you want? And the truth, the part nobody prints in a buyer’s guide, is that the answer never stops moving.

He is as confused as I am. This image is AI generated.

For a while I thought that was a flaw in me. A real rider, I assumed, found his bike and kept it, the way you are expected to find a person and stay. But the bikes were never auditioning to be the one. And here is the wonderful thing: there is no monogamy in motorcycle ownership.

Each of them was a mood. The Cub is a slow ride on a farm road and a coffee’s worth of fuel in an afternoon, no hurry at all, and it happens to be the most produced motor vehicle in human history, over a hundred million built since 1958 [1], which is a lot of company for such a humble thing. The Guzzi is a night ride with the city emptied out and a big v-twin thumping under me like a fast heartbeat. The GS is the idea of somewhere far away, crossing continents, whether or not I ever get there. They were not competing to be THE motorcycle. They were different rooms in the same house.

Moto Guzzi Breva 1100, too much bike for Korea. I enjoyed it, then let it go.

The tidy version of this essay would tell you to buy something complementary, to resist the temptation of too much power, to understand that moving up does not have to mean moving bigger. All of that is decent advice, and I have ignored most of it, cheerfully, for years. I moved up and down and sideways.

I bought too much bike and too little and then both again. If there is a lesson anywhere in the wandering, it is only this. Up was never the only direction on offer. Why move like an elevator when being a helicopter is more fun? Today a Super Cub, tomorrow a Hayabusa, perhaps. That is the real gift the second bike hands you, and most of us spend a good deal of money finding it out slowly.

These days, when it is time to ride, I stand under the carport and pick the one that suits the ride. Sometimes the big one. Sometimes the dangerous one. More often the small one. The BMW that started all of this is long gone. The rest of them are still here, waiting in a row, each one privately certain it is the answer, none of them right, all of them worth the trip.

What I really need is another V-Strom…

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References

[1] Most-produced motor vehicle. Honda calls the Super Cub “the most popular motor vehicle of all time,” with over 100 million built since 1958. Source: Honda News, 2024 Super Cub C125. https://hondanews.com/en-US/powersports/releases/release-e888887b6471c0aba407829ba7089f92-2024-honda-super-cub-c125-features-benefits

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