Led Me Astray with Andy Strapz

This entry is part 15 of 18 in the series Adventure Rider Issue #52

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Old advice is still good advice.

How things have changed.

Last issue I ran off at the keyboard and included a reference to an adventure of earlier days involving a WLA Harley and a ride through the front bar of a pub.

I included that reference to give my stepfather and great mate a bit of joy during the last days of his life. Unfortunately, the magazine arrived a few days late.

Bugger!

Chillax, dear reader. No cards or flowers are required. It was his time, he woke up dead and circumvented a few months of ugly. He wins.

‘What does that have to do with adventure riding?’ I can hear you ask.

Okay. Slow down. I’m getting to it.

Many years ago, he gave me $20 to buy a new pair of gloves (for my 21st). I bought a pair of lairy orange-and-black mitts.

While I was at it, I tried my luck with the sales guy. “Can I take that Ducati for a test ride mate?” I ventured. He responded by throwing the keys at me and replying, “No worries.”

Gasping with the 1970’s equivalent of OMG, I breathlessly told my stepfather of the glorious yellow beast that night at dinner.

By then, however, I’d talked myself out of such an ‘irresponsible purchase’.

“Yer a f’k’n idiot!” he suggested(that was nothing new. I was young). “Go for it. I’ll go guarantor for the loan.

“Get it out of your system,” he added.

Andy Strapz

Within a fortnight I had a Ducati 750 Sport, cementing a lifelong adventure on two wheels. I never did ‘get it out of my system’, quite the contrary. Mario (what else would you christen an Italian bike?) still holds pride of place in my shed.

After a trip around Tassie on Mario a few years ago I decided I was no longer going on a serious bike trip without being comfortable sneaking down 30km of dirt road to see what was there. At the time many of the really interesting roads had 10 or 20 klicks of dirt in the middle, which kept both the revenue raisers and numpties away.When a Kato 890R Rally seemed to fall from the skies into my lap last year and I started talking myself out of it, I heard those words ringing in my ear. “Yer a f’k’n idiot. Go for it.”

Getting back to the story of the ‘Walla”, it actually happened. After sufficient idiot juice and a dare from equally primed mates, he took the bet that he wouldn’t ride the recently acquired (ex-US Army, wink, wink, off the back of a truck) Harley through the front bar.

He duly toured the front bar and emerged onto the verandah to see the Old Bill arriving. Ambition and red mist fogged out his better judgement and, in the tradition of the day, he ‘did a runner’.

Our hero was making good ground on the local copper until he lost both the front and rear wheel at the same moment on a fast-sweeping dirt bend. Luckily the bike slid one way as he tumbled another at considerable pace up an embankment, hitting a barbed-wire fence. He described the fence as stretching, creaking, then breaking with a musical twang and gently seating him on the ground.

For a few moments he sat pondering the rows of holes in his ex-army greatcoat that were oozing body claret. The copper near wet his pants laughing, before cuffing him under the ear and sending him home with warnings about large, heavy books being thrown at him should he continue to be a dickhead.

After a number of wild, country-boy adventures, the bike was sold to buy a car to chase a bride. His motorcycling career came to an end at the (well, some way away from) controls of a peaky, nasty little 250cc two-banger. His right elbow ended up liberally scarred and held together with mixed hardware. As a result, he never went too close to a bike again but lived many of my adventures vicariously.

I’m sure he’ll be riding a Pan America in Heaven, but would have enough sense to avoid a burnout in the front bar of the Pearly Gates Arms.

Then again….more beer…stand back, Pete!

The Ducati 750 Sport cemented a lifelong adventure on two wheels.