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Had a Briggs & Stratton powered mini-bike when I was like 7. Graduated to a Trail 70 shortly after...then on to an XL 100 dirt bike. Had so many accidents...and no serious protective gear. It's a wonder I lived through that phase.
Shortly after that I learned to drive....this would be when I was about 11 or 12. The first thing I ever drove was my dad's truck with a manual tranny. I drove it up and down this old farm road. To a kid this was as good as it go, man. Just when I thought it couldn't get any better....he let me drive solo.
Had a Briggs & Stratton powered mini-bike when I was like 7. Graduated to a Trail 70 shortly after...then on to an XL 100 dirt bike. Had so many accidents...and no serious protective gear. It's a wonder I lived through that phase.
Ha! You reminded me of another childhood memory, this one of my little brother, who had a Yamaha 125. He wasn't allowed to ride it unsupervised, but what Dad doesn't know won't hurt, right? One day however he took it out to the hills near our home, wiped out and split his knee open, and walked that bike all the way back to the house with his kneecap split in half. He was so scared that he wrapped his knee in duct tape and tried to hide it from our dad. That very same night at dinner Dad looked down and saw my brother's pant leg, soaked with bright red blood. The truth eventually came out and my brother was rushed to the ER for a LOT of stitches.
Dad merely chuckled and complimented my brother on his amazing tolerance of pain. We still laugh over that one today.
^My throttle cable broke on my mini-bike. It had an inherrent design flaw and the cable seemed to wear out at the handle. Well...for some reason....when it broke it had a tendency to hang wide open. My next door neighbor was riding it and brought it back to me to tell me it was behaving funny. I thought he didn't know what the hell he was talking about so I hoped on it and gave it full gas....and it snapped.....and I couldn't think fast enough to hit the kill switch. I hit that ditch going full bore and went right over the handlebars....landed on my stomach but my legs caught the bars on my way over. I had some very nasty bruises.
What did I say to my dad after this event you ask?
"Hey, dad. The throttle cable broke. Can you fix it?"
And here's another ... Dad taught me how to ride that same Yamaha 125 and was so proud of me tooling up and down the street. I was riding it one day when my grandparents were over and a few kids from the 'hood were outside watching. I came cruising up like I was Jeremy McGrath ... and popped the clutch, flew off the back, and the bike somehow lodged itself underneath our small motorhome. Dad had to get the floorjack out and lift the back of the rv to get the bike out. I experienced utter humiliation in front of all my neighborhood friends, including the boy who would one day become my husband. Oh, the humanity!
Had a Briggs & Stratton powered mini-bike when I was like 7. Graduated to a Trail 70 shortly after...then on to an XL 100 dirt bike. Had so many accidents...and no serious protective gear. It's a wonder I lived through that phase.
We have a 50cc mini bike and are trying to graduate the kids up to a bigger one. Our oldest is for sure ready to skip up to a decent sized bike if he can get the coordination down (the 50 just has brake and throttle and no shifting, where the larger ones require more coordination). I'm actually surprised my husband has not bought a bigger one yet.
We will incorporate helmets and protective clothing when they move up to the bigger ones and start going to the dirt bike arenas and trails - I do want mine to live through it LOL.
My husband gets paid to jump out of airplanes so I can't really expect less from him towards our kids than a lot of encouragement to go out and live it up and get dirty and scratched up.
LOL...hillarious. The thing was by the time I graduated to the XL100 I'd already had so many crashes (learning experiences) that I was able to ride without incident.
The worst one I had was when I was trying to do something spectacular (aka stupid) on the Trail 70. There was this big mound at the end of a turn row. The feild road went over the top of it and so you could turn off the feild road and ride down the mound. Well it got driven over so many times that it kinda created another hump at the top of the mound....well...I got the bright Idea that I could jump it "just like they do on the motocross on TV". Well I got a run at it and somehow lost controll and went right into a tree stump on the OTHER side of the field road. I went right over the bars and sailed probably 15 ft before I hit the ground. I was lucky I didn't seriously hurt myself but I cracked the headlight beezle. I picked up every piece and epoxied it back together before dad got back. LOL
I wouldn't let my kids do half of what I did as a kid. I grew up in Florida and we'd go swimming in the canals that had big gators and water moccasins. My neighbor shot a 5 foot diamondback rattler in the bamboo by the creek we played in all the time.
We'd play "kill the carrier" all the time. We jumped off high bridges over the intercoastal. Orange and grapefruit fights all the time and when they weren't ripe and still green, those where the ones you wanted, they were as hard as a rock. We'd pull or t-shirts out and use it as a sack, fill them up and have at it.
Construction sites back in those days weren't fenced off either, they were always a good source of fun. We would find the highest, steepest pile of dirt or limestone and take our bikes, usually riderless, down the hill getting bruised and bloody in the process.
How about Roman Candle wars? We did it like a duel - start back to back light the fuses, take 10 steps then turn and shoot them towards each other! Woo-Hoo!! Same with bottle rocket battles!
A very tall bridge over the river which separated our town from the local city line. Sunday mornings a few of us would go fishing there. One day while crossing, we noticed some kids below using "our" fishing spot. We started dropping M-80's in the water and onto them. Soon, we saw police cars waiting at the city end of the bridge, and a few minutes later saw town police cars at the other end. We decided to head to the town side as we knew the policemen there. We each got a ride home where the officer gave us a good talking to (or rather a yelling at) in front of our parents.
When I was 8, I'd walk a mile to the mill gate (alone) at midnight to meet my dad coming out. Mom had no problem with it and I never ran into any trouble.
Ah, those were the days!
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