Why do you ride?….
Everyone that rides will give you a different answer. For some it’s for their wellbeing, for some it’s to get a rush and some their chill time. One thing’s for sure is that once you ride your life begins to revolve around the next ride and the special something that it gives you.
In our new series Why I Ride we’ve asked some of the riders that inspire us most the big question - Why do you ride?
In our second article of the series we hear from London moto legend Charlotte Barnes aka @hardtailchop about her experiences from following her easy Rider dreams by riding from LA to New Orleans on a chopper she bought when she landed to finding her community in her home town.
Big thanks to Charlotte for sharing her amazing story and if you didn’t check out the first in the series CLICK HERE!
I was about fourteen when I first saw Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper in Easy Rider and I remember thinking right back then that motorcycles were just about the coolest thing in the entire world and that as soon as I was old enough, I would have one. I learned to ride at eighteen and bought myself a little dirt bike to get around on. Back in the early nineties, it was quite unusual to see a woman on a bike and it was really hard to get riding gear made for girls.
Since I got that first little 100cc Kawasaki, I've always had motorcycles in my life. Shit little ones at first; mopeds, dirt bikes, rat bikes, whatever I could afford. I commuted by bike, toured all over the place, went to rallies and found a lot of friends and good times through biking. I realised that what I really liked were the sorts of machines that women just weren't expected to ride. I bought bikes like my great big old GPZ1100 and a lovely BMW K1100, just because they felt so good to muscle around. I'm lucky that I'm tall and can ride pretty much anything I fancy.
When I went to university in my late twenties to study Mechanical Engineering, I even did a year working for Triumph up at their Hinkley factory as part of my degree. I was one of the team who helped put the brand new Bonneville into production and by the time I left, I knew that bike back to front, having built them up and stripped them down again more times than I can remember. I also discovered a lifelong love of Triumph motorcycles.
It might sound trite, but for me, riding a bike is about freedom. No matter how bad it gets, if I have a working bike in the garage and enough money to buy a few tanks of petrol, I know I can always ride away for as long as it takes to clear my mind and become me again. Sometimes that's an evening blast to the pub and sometimes it's weeks on the road with a tent and absolutely no idea where you're headed next. Even if it was just fighting the tedium of sitting in an office all day - feeling those keys in my pocket and knowing that at half past five, I'm going to be starting up my engine and opening the throttle whilst everyone else sits in their cars or on the train – that's what made me different.
“No matter how bad it gets, if I have a working bike in the garage and enough money to buy a few tanks of petrol, I know I can always ride away for as long as it takes to clear my mind and become me again”
Everything changes for a while when you become a parent, though. In 2014, my partner and I had a daughter. For a couple of years, it was the only time in my adult life that I didn't have a bike. I'm not going to lie, it was deeply weird. Not that I had much time to over analyse it, I was way too busy for that. But once my daughter was a couple of years old and finally sleeping through the night, I realised that there was a huge thing missing in my life. Pretty soon after that, I went out and bought myself another bike – a lovely big Triumph Explorer 1200 that I still own today.
Then a really unexpected thing happened. I went out looking for other women who rode and I found something that I'd never had before; a community. In the couple of years that I'd been off the bike, loads of stuff had changed. In 2015, Dutch and Vikki opened The Bike Shed in Shoreditch. Round about the same time, Babes Ride Out in the USA were making waves with their camp in California and in 2016, VC London hosted the first women only motorcycle camp in the UK. Suddenly, women who rode had places to go and events to call their own. I met them hanging out at the Bike Shed in 2017 and went along to my first all-women event, Camp VC in 2018. Within a year, I was helping organise rideouts and welcoming other women into this amazing collective of riders.
Also in 2018, I decided that I needed some time on the road myself. Being someone's mum isn't always easy, but it helps when you have an incredible partner like mine. Together, we discussed how it might work if I went away for the best part of a month to go and ride the route of Easy Rider, from LA to New Orleans. Much planning followed and I ended up flying to Seattle, buying a 1978 XS650 chopper and riding all the way down the West Coast and across country to Louisiana. I had one of the most amazing adventures of my life, geeking out about the film that inspired me all those years ago, visiting all the locations and riding those incredible American roads. That chopper is now in my garage because I couldn't bear to part with it after all the good times we had together.
For me, riding also is about going and doing new things, seeing new places and hanging out with some of the most awesome people you could ever want to meet. Thanks in part to wanting to encourage new women riders not to worry too much about the bike they were on, I ended up buying one of the cheapest bikes on the market – a Chinese copy of the old '70s Honda Dax monkey bike. I used it a few times to lead rideouts in London and realised that much as I love my big bikes, 125cc is all you actually need to have a hell of a load of fun. My friend Claire bought one as well and we started talking about just how far you could ride on such a small machine. Could you get to the south of France? What about Germany? Italy?
“There's an awesome community of women on bikes out there right now and unlike when I first started to ride, it only takes a few clicks to find us”
One thing led to another and we ended up convincing each other that it would be a good idea to try to ride them to another continent. Which is how our utterly madcap adventure to Istanbul was conceived. In just short of four weeks, we rode those little bikes through France, Belgium, Luxembourg, Germany, Switzerland, Italy, Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia, Montenegro, Albania, Macedonia, Greece and into Turkey. They broke down constantly and we ended up fixing them at the side of the road on so many occasions that I lost count. Sometimes, when we couldn't fix them, we found help from people on our way and this led to so many wonderful connections and friendships with people we'd never have otherwise met.
As we Instagrammed our way through Europe, we made contacts with women riders everywhere and visited some truly special places. Social media has been a fantastic force for good, helping meet other riders. By the time we were nearing our destination, we even got offered local accommodation by the incredible TKMK (Turkish women’s motorcycle club) and we arrived in time to take part in the national day parade with them through the centre of the city. It was a journey I don't think I'd have imagined myself doing even a few years ago, but like a lot of travelling, it's left me wanting more.
Riding motorcycles has been one of the defining parts of who I am throughout my life. I'm 47 now and I can tell you that bikes have led me to experience things that there's just no other way to find. But what really matters are the friends I've made along the way – many of whom have only been in the last few years. There's an awesome community of women on bikes out there right now and unlike when I first started to ride, it only takes a few clicks to find us.
Charlotte is on Instagram @hardtailchop and her website is at www.hardtailchop.com
