We began planning the trip in December 1999, and the very first thing we had to obtain, and then built our trip around, were our ferry tickets.  You can fly to the small airport on the island, but we considered this a scouting trip for a return with big bikes, which currently must be rented in London and ridden to the coast.  Half the fun is getting there.

By December and January, many places were already booked for the time we were going to be there, practice week for the Manx GP.  The GP is lower key than the TT (in June) and more vintage and amateur-oriented.  During the TT, the population of the IOM, 70,000, almost doubles, and most are on bikes.  By the time we began planning our trip, finding rooms and ferry passage for the TT would have been almost impossible.  We chose the GP practice to get a feel for the place without the huge crowds.

Once we had passage to and from the island, we found a B&B.  All hotels and B&Bs are bike friendly, which was refreshing.  We made arrangements via email with the owners of the Cornerhouse in Peel, which is outside the TT course.  Peel is on the west coast and is called the sunset city: very small, nice promenade, quiet, and great pubs within walking distance.  The Manx make their own beer on the island, called Okells, and we developed a taste for it and for the local lager.

The largest town on the island is Douglas, and the start/finish line, paddock, ferry terminal, and many hotels and shops are there, and at least one tattoo parlor.  Avoid a certain American themed café, please.

We flew into Manchester, took a train to Morcambe for the night, and took a taxi to Heysham the next day to get on our ferry.  We had a great dinner at a Spanish/Italian restaurant in Morcambe, and stayed up late with some new friends we met at the hotel bar, two great men from Northern Ireland.  Strangely enough, the younger of the two, about 45 or so, seemed to think that the band Boston was America’s greatest contribution to music.  He was funny and nice, and they enjoyed buying us beer and Irish coffees.  He told us the bartender wasn’t making the coffees correctly, and to order some in Ireland.  We did; he was right.  Yeah, I know, Irish Coffee was invented in the US, but Irish whiskey wasn’t!

The ferry ride was slow, about 3 hours, but comfortable, and you can ride in the lounge/bar or the rows of seats, which are way better than our plane seats were.  It was fun to watch the bikes line up and ride into the ferry.  We saw modern bikes, a R1200C included, and less modern bikes, like a Scott Flying Squirrel.  At that moment we wished very badly that we had bikes.  The bikes snorted their way into the hold of the ferry, and the bikers slowly filtered up into the lounge.  During this part of practice for the GP, bikers were still a minority.  During the TT fortnight, the boat is filled to capacity with bikes and riders.

We landed in Douglas and were met at the terminal by my friend Tony from the Internet, who had volunteered to meet us and take us the 12 miles to Peel.  We landed at 5:30 p.m., during practice, so the TT course was closed to normal traffic.  Tony knew the back way, outside the TT course, and got us to our B&B, eventually.  We stopped at Bray Hill, using his sister’s house as a shortcut to get to the course, and watched the first bikes to leave the start/finish line fly by as we stood on the sidewalk.  Bray Hill is on a normal, narrow street with stone walls, phone boxes and other FHOs (fixed hazardous obstacles). We gawped at the bikes screaming by as we stood behind a couple of red and white sawhorses linked with a 1 x 4.  I had watched the TT races on Speedvision, and even had seen a video, but it sure is different in person.

We left there, cutting thru Tony’s sister’s house again, “Hi Sis,” and drove to the pub at Quarterbridge, and sampled the local brew and stood on the patio and watched the racers brake hard for the tight right-hander.  The weather was perfect, and stayed that way the entire 4 days we were on the IOM.  I was happy.

Tony took us to Peel, where we checked into our B&B, and I thanked Tony and gave him a ROK shirt (he rides a K-75).  We got dinner nearby and crashed. 

Since I began planning the trip, I schemed to somehow get a bike, or two, to ride a lap on the TT course.  To not do so would be like going to Amsterdam and...never mind.  No one rents bikes on the island. A few people on the internet had tried to help, but nothing panned out.  One Manxman told me before we left that if all else failed, we could borrow his KH125.  Bob, the bike’s owner, was in France, so he had his father pick me up and take me to the garage where the bike was and give me the keys.  A KH125 is a 125 cc two-stroke street single, and not too old.  It ran perfectly, and it was a motorcycle (smelled good too).

Kim and I rode the TT course two-up, and the little Kawasaki performed admirably.  To imagine the speeds the racers reached on the same little roads we were riding on is pretty amazing.  Racers and tourists are killed every year, and the major racing sanctioning bodies no longer recognize the TT as a points-paying event.  But the fans keep coming, from all over Europe, and a different breed of racer still competes on the 37.75-mile course.

The TT course runs clockwise around a rough perimeter of the island.  We traveled along on our little 125, being passed over and over by bikers out enjoying the amazing weather and speed-limit free roads.  They are even so polite as to tell you, via a white circular sign with a black slash, that you have left the town and it’s time to haul ass.  We couldn’t, of course.  Sport bikes, sport tourers and cool vintage bikes made up the vast majority of the bikes, most with plates from England, Ireland and Germany.

At the top of the course, on “the mountain”, you can turn around and look across fields of purple heather at the town of Ramsay and the sea.  We sat and watched the bikes wind up the hill, passing cars at will, and then scream down toward the sharp turn at the famous Creg Ny Baa pub.  History, famous exotic-sounding Gaelic place names and motorcycling mementos are everywhere on the course. On the mountain also is the TT museum, a wonderfully un-slick time capsule filled with yellowing newspaper clippings and the most exotic and scary collection of TT race motorcycles.

We finished one lap of the course, and I still can’t get my head around the fact that the fast guys can do one 37.75-mile lap in 19 minutes.

To do everything we’d like to have done would have taken two weeks, and we didn’t have that much time.  We sampled the local cuisine, saw some race action from the grandstands in Douglas, helped out a nice German couple when their Ducati 350 (with a Sportster tank, even) lost all its amps.  I gave Uwe-Michael a ride on the 125 back to where he was staying so he could get his box van.  He thanked me with a tasty Czech pilsner beer.  When he found out I was from Tennessee, he said, “Oh, I should have given you whiskey!”  Later he and his girlfriend, on their GS, rode up to the Creek pub where we were sitting outside and proceeded to thank us more.He said they come to the GP, instead of the TT, because the Germans they know, who are repressed and controlled in Germany, go too wild during TT week.

Everyone we met, from the bartender and drunken Irish engineering students at the Creek, to our hosts at the Cornerhouse, to the staff at the Creg Ny Baa, were as nice and friendly as I could have wanted. Only Americans wear collarless T-shirts. Kippers are salty as hell, and we burped them up all day, but fish and chips was always a good bet.  The lack of corporate/chain/retail dreck is wonderful. There are castles; heck, there’s Castletown!  Lugging a duffel bag full of helmets and leathers in and out of cabs, trains and airports sucks.  But I’d do it tomorrow.

I returned the 125 to Bob’s dad and left Bob a fresh bottle of Shell two-stroke oil. We had a great dinner on our last night, and watched the sun slip into the sea from the restaurant.  Most people would be thrilled to go to Ireland, but we were sad to be leaving the Isle of Man.  My brother and I closed the local pub in Peel after playing some odd pool game with two Irish college students.  The next morning we said goodbye to our host, bought some Manx kippers and Manx cheese as souvenirs, and took the taxi to Douglas to meet the ferry.  Just to get to ride the course was enough, and we did a lot more.  I still can’t believe we did it.

We plan to return, and do the entire bike rental trip, during GP race week.  I don’t think we’d ever get to ride much during TT week, due to the enormous number of bikes on the road.

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