You see a lot of “learn how to start motorcycling” stories online these days. “How to buy your first motorcycle.” Or, “How to buy your first helmet.” Spending money is a constant theme, not that such information isn’t useful. I use the Internet as a source of info for when I spend my moto-funds, and I expect most of you do too.

But one of the most useful pieces of information you could ever get is absent from these primers. Almost nobody ever talks about how, when you’re starting out riding, you should be looking for friends who ride. Good friends.

A good friend, or a collection of good friends, is possibly the single largest improvement to your motorcycle life that you’ll ever have. New farkles, new gear, even new motorcycles will come and go, but a good friend who you can count on? That’s a lifelong benefit, and well worth the investment—but you can’t buy a good friend., which is why so many publications never tell you how important it is.

How do you make good moto-friends? The same way you make any other kind of friend, I guess, and that’s a question that goes far beyond the blatherings of this column. I will say that there’s an increasing push to get motorcyclists on apps that “connect them to other riders,” and maybe this does work help you meet other similar-minded people, but I cynically wonder if this is just app designers figuring out how to monetize people’s desire for social interaction. I will say that a lot of the motorcycle friends I’ve made are people I met at rallies over the years. If you find someone else who’s willing to put up with whatever difficulty the rally offers, then chances are, you’ll connect at some level.

A good friend will help you find the motivation to push through unpleasant circumstances for the moto-fun that sits beyond that rainstorm, or hours of superslab, or whatever else stands in your way. Photo: AntonSIM/Shutterstock.com

But while I can’t give you a Dale Carnegie primer on how to win motorcycle friends and influence people, I can give you a quick list below, of what a good friend looks like:

A good moto friend…

• Will help you work on your bike. You shouldn’t rely on other people for help, or even for tools, but a good friend will lend a hand or a tool as needed.
• Will put off other fun and responsibilities specifically to go riding with you. This should be obvious, but I know riders who won’t take time off to go out with their friends. Why?
• Will drop their plans to help you out in a jam. Broke down on the road, a half-day away? A full day’s drive away? A good friend comes and gets you.
• Will share what they’ve got. This can be anything from letting you borrow their bike, to passing on some gear they don’t need, whatever.
• Will help you through a jam when you’re on a trip, whether it’s real mechanical trouble, or just mind-induced difficulty. I’ve heard wild stories of riders abandoning other motorcyclists on trips; I hope I never have the misfortune of such selfish riding partners myself.
• Will give and take with the route planning. A riding buddy who insists it’s their way, or no-go, can suck the fun out of a trip pretty quickly, especially if that route gets younger, inexperienced riders over their head.
• Will ride at your pace. Either they’ll pick up the speed, or slow down, without complaining.
• Will call you out or at least give you a polite poke over unsafe or stupid behavior. Sometimes we need a reminder that we’re in moose country, or that radar-packing cops are on the loose, or whatever.

You could go on at length here, but notice that I didn’t put anything in about age, or voting preference, or alcohol tolerance. That’s of lesser importance when you’re looking for someone to ride the river with, in the parlance of the Wild West. And I will say that I am very fortunate to have a few very good riding friends; I think it helps that most of them are friends in the real world, outside motorcycling. Most of the guys I ride with, I’ve also gone on hunting or fishing trips with over the years. And now, as I’m middle-aged, a lot of the time the fun of a trip is just as much based on spending time with these guys as it is the actual fun of exploration.

A collection of my friend’s bikes at a long-ago Sunday afternoon meeting (that’s my Kawasaki on the far left). I am fortunate enough to have kept almost all the friends from those decades-ago days, and that old CB550’s owner is still the guy I ride with the most. Photo: Zac Kurylyk

If this sounds like something you’d like to have for yourself, I guess I do have one Carnegie-esque piece of advice: The ADVrider rally list is a really good bet to find good riding buddies. It’s where I’d start… We even have the dEATh vALLey nOObs rALLy, if you’re really starting from absolute scratch.

Trail Break runs on the first Monday of every month, unless Zac forgets about it, or gets worked up about something in the days in-between scheduled columns.