So a little over 14 years has gone by since I posted this. The baby was Sarah. She's now in 8th grade, has been to countless bike nights, her first when she was exactly one week old. She was at the first Pie Run in Hico 14 years ago at only 6 weeks old.
About to leave the hospital
How I worked on Two Wheeled Texans late into MANY nights...
The very first Pie Run in Hico, Jan 2005
Sporting her TWT swag early on!
At one of our Hodges Gardens rides we used to do before the park closed down
Here first trip to Colorado, 7 months old.
The water was a tad cold for her liking!
Making new friends outside of Poker Alice's Cafe in Lake City
Enjoying the view from the top of Engineer Pass
Tuckered out from a week of high country adventure...
Here she is later in the year, checking out the bike she would later learn to ride on six years later.
I BRIEFLY toyed with the idea of getting a Ural...
Here she is during one of our maintenance days, about 2-1/2 years old, and she already has a "thing" for motorcycles
Making sure my KLR passes inspection before I leave for Mexico with Richard "Trailboss"
Here she's learning about all the parts of a motorcycle... and generally getting in the way
In a parking lot full of bikes, this is the one she wants to pose with... Making daddy proud!
She gets her first big bike around five years old. I tell her that when she can ride without training wheels, we'll start shopping for a motorcycle...
It takes her a while to learn to ride without them, over a year in fact. It was not until a visit from Steve "Desmo" Tanner to our home where he teased her about her younger brother being able to ride without training wheels that she demanded I remove them right then! A day later she was having a blast and doing great!
A few months later, we bought a house outside of town. Right after that, I came into a sweet deal on a KTM 530 EXC. When I arrived to pick it up, I spotted a mint CRF50F in the corner of his garage. It belonged to his daughter, but she agreed to sell it to us. We did the deal right there on the spot and got a mint bike for half the price of a new one. The kids were ecstatic!
Anxious to try it out!
Test sitting my KTM while she was at it
The helmet we had didn't fit well... so off to the bike shop in Conroe... She wore it all the way home!
By now, she has a fearless younger brother that is WAY more anxious to get on the bike than her! But he has to wait...
Before I turned them loose, I would ride around on the back of the bike and let them steer and brake, or do the gas while I steered and braked. Basically, I wanted to be sure they could handle the basic controls and not run into everything in the yard. It did not take them long to master the basics.
Her brother was like a fish taking to water when I removed the training wheels. She took a little more time to adjust, but once it clicked, she did great!
It soon became obvious one bike for the kids would not be enough to go around. I fell into another sweet deal on a TTR50E,
My folks have 7 acres of woods and we cut trails for the bikes. They live a few miles away so we'd try to ride whenever we could.
A trip to Outlaw Trax - Sarah soon discovers she is not a fan of riding in deep sand.
I drilled them on swerving, braking, stopping, standing up, etc,...
I had a chance for Sarah and Daniel to get private lessons (the other kids all bailed at the last moment!)
They had a blast
At 8-1/2 years old, her feet finally reached the passenger foot pegs and she got to do her first ride with me!
Out of the blue I was contacted one day by another TWT user that wanted to know if I would like to have a FREE XR80R? I wondered what the catch might be, but it turns out his grandkids just don't ride it anymore and he'd seen the pics and vids of my kids riding and thought they would like to have it! So we eventually picked up and Sarah started trying to ride it, her first time with a clutch...
It was a tad tall for her, but she seemed to be doing great
She did great the first few days, but then when trying to stop one day, she accidentally grabbed a fist full of throttle while trying to use the front brake. The reach to the lever was just a bit far for her. She took off across the yard wide open and eventually went straight into the chain link fence, which turned out to be a blessing because it acted like a giant net and slowed her before she fell over. After that, she was afraid of the clutch. She was too big to stay on the 50's, so I started shopping around and settled on a CRF110. The CRF110 is slightly smaller in height than the XR80R and there is no clutch.
My KTM 530 EXC, the XR80R, the CRF110, the CRF50 (now Rachel's bike) and the TTR50E (Daniel's)
Shortly after getting the new CRF110, we attended a TWT Family gathering at a small MX park near Caldwell. Sarah's first serious rides on the new bike turn out to be mostly in the rain and mud, but she didn't seem to mind at all.
Giving Rachel some pointers about avoiding fences no doubt
(that fence had recently been crushed by a tree knocked down in a storm).
We had another family weekend at a local riding park... and she had to deal with her nemesis! She fell a few times, but eventually got it down and was able to get through it numerous times without falling. She was very proud of herself, as was I!
Here she is, eleven years old now, riding with me on the GS to enjoy the Spring flowers near Anderson, Tx.
In the fall of 2016, while she was still eleven, I took her on a big adventure ride with three other riding buddies. She was the only kid. We were two up on my GS and the other guys were all on big KTMs. We made a big loop from Farmington, NM., across Southern Utah, then up toward Salt Lake City, back across to Colorado, and then down the West side of Colorado, eventually coming down through Pagosa Springs and back to Farmington. We did a LOT of dirt roads high up in the mountains and she loved every bit of it!
So it has been 14 years, the blink of an eye. We don't get to ride as much as I'd like, nothing new. Hopefully, in 2019 we will be able to do more rides on the GS and on the dirt bikes.