If any of you get bored this winter...and yearn for the feel and smell of the ride, then I might recommend that you read, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Pirsig. Written in 1974, it'a about a 17 day trip across the states with a father, his son and for 9 days, with a couple. Here's a quote:
[blockquote]

"The road winds on and on -- we stop for rests and lunch, exchange small talk, and settle down to the long ride. The beginning fatigue of afternoon balances the excitement of the first day and we move steadily, not fast, not slow.
We have picked up a southwest side wind, and the cycle cants into the gusts, seemingly by itself, to counter their effect. Lately there's been a sense of something peculiar about this road, apprehension about something, as if we were being watched or followed. But there is not a car anywhere ahead and in the mirror are only John and Sylvia way behind.
We are not in the Dakotas yet, but the broad fields show we are getting nearer. Some of them are blue with flax blossoms moving in long waves like the surface of the ocean. The sweep of the hills is greater than before and they now dominate everything else, except the sky, which seems wider. Farmhouses in the distance are so small we can hardly see them. The land is beginning to open up.
There is no one place or sharp line where the Central Plains end and the Great Plains begin. It's a gradual change like this that catches you unawares, as if you were sailing out from a choppy coastal harbor, noticed that the waves had taken on a deep swell, and turned back to see that you were out of sight of land. There are fewer trees here and suddenly I am aware they are no longer native. They have been brought here and planted around houses and between fields in rows to break up the wind. But where they haven't been planted there is no underbrush, no second-growth saplings...only grass, sometimes with wildflowers and weeds, but mostly grass. This is grassland now. We are on the prairie.
I have a feeling none of us fully understands what four days on this prairie in July will be like. Memories of car trips across them are always of flatness and great emptiness as far as you can see, extreme monotony and boredom as you drive for hour after hour, getting nowhere, wondering how long this is going to last without a turn in the road, without a change in the land going on and on to the horizon."
- Chapter 3, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

[/blockquote]I'm only on chapter 6.

 

I tried to make it through that book. You'll find as you get further along that it becomes a lot less about motorcycles and a lot more about zen bhuddism. It will definitely stretch your mind, which I am normally a fan of. But eventually it came to the point where it felt like a chore to pick up the book instead of pleasure so I moved to greener pastures.
I picked up a copy of Michael Perry's Truck: A Love Story which I think everyone should read. The book he wrote prior to that was called Population:485 Meeting Your Neighbors One Siren At A Time. If you are a volunteer fireman or EMT, or contain at least 10% redneck, you should really like those books.
ok, I stayed on topic for at least half of that post, so that should disqualify it from threadjacking.

 

You guys read...?

 

Great book!

 

I read it around 1985, and immediately upon finishing it rode from Dallas to LA and back, for no particular reason.

 

Not surprised a Greek likes it. As I recall there's a lot about Socrates and the stoics, and maybe Phaedras? I read it over 25 years ago (yep, I'm old), and really liked it. I should check it out again to see if the middle-aged me thinks it's as good as the high school kid me did.

 

They got that in Cliffsnotes?