May is officially motorcycle awareness month; this is something that we should be doing all year. We should be making people aware that motorcycles are there in all weather and times. I don’t mean we should be loud, noisy, or a bully you get the idea, instead we should remind the cage drivers that we are hard to see and the head light that they see down the road is closer than they think. That we are normal people that raise families and have jobs in the community go to church and we are not different than they are other than the sport we love, riding motorcycles.

On the other hand we need to ride like the cars, trucks don’t see us. There are a lot of accidents in the spring because people forget that we are there and we think we have the skills that were there when we put the bike away. The reality is that with as little as a month off of the bike the skill level goes down some. Take four months off and you need to start like a new rider. Now I know I that a bunch of you just started laughing at me for that statement but you need to think about what I am saying. It takes 500 miles to be comfortable on a bike and the way it handles, put it away for a few months and you and the bike are different than it was a few months ago. Things change you have been riding around in a cage safe and sound not paying attention like you did when you were on the motorcycle.

It takes skill to ride a motorcycle and when we take time off the skill we need time to be sharpened and honed like it once was. Take it from a guy that rides lots of different bikes, I know I can ride them all as well as the owner in some cases but I never think that I can ride it as well as I can my own. In fact when I ride one of the two bikes I own for a time then get on the other one I have to get used to the other one because they ride different.

So let us all take Motorcycle Awareness Month as a month to inform the public and all drivers that we are there, but to be aware that we have a responsibility to insure that the motorcycle and the skill of the rider is up to the task.