#FirstMotorcycle

Remember the day you took your first long ride on your very first motorcycle? The weather was TV-commercial sunny as you rolled down the two-lane highway away from home. The wind flowing past your body was filled with excitement as the engine sang beneath your seat. You had the world by the handlebars, and you knew this was the beginning of Great Things, that many Good Times were about to be had – all because you had chosen to take your first steps towards becoming a motorcyclist. For many of us, it was this moment that set the hook, leading to a lifetime of motorcycling, and was less a decision and more of a calling than just about any experience before it. At least that’s how it was for me, and this is the memory I had during the first hour riding the 2021 Moto Guzzi V7. 

What’s the best first bike?

You probably don’t know Ray and Roy Behner or their friends Jim Carlton and Fred Hoffman – but you should. Because more than 30 years ago, they recreated Gottlieb Daimler’s 1885 Reitwagen, widely considered the world’s first motorcycle (or the world’s first gasoline-powered motorcycle, anyway). Mind you, this was before the age of Google, internet forums, or anything of the like. How did they do it? They simply replicated a small photograph of the Reitwagen. No blueprints. No schematics. Nothing. It’s a very interesting story, and one told in greater detail by Ray Behner, as told to the American Motorcyclist Association, whose story we’ve reproduced below. 

Your friendly Motorcycle.com staff has been there. Really. We all remember that moment when we decided we wanted to become motorcyclists. We will also never forget the day we threw a leg over our first street motorcycle. No moment in life – with the possible exception of parenthood – has so many hopes and fears associated with it.

I remember the cats. They were everywhere I looked, hidden away under bushes, huddled together in small groups on the stoops of the houses, prowling through the tall dry grass of fields, and emerging from the darkened edge of the forest where they paused for just a moment to check traffic before dashing wildly across the road. Perhaps they had always been there, I couldn’t be sure, but it was their presence, in combination with the new sensation of cool air sweeping over my body and sheer giddiness at all that had transpired, that defines my first day as a motorcyclist.