This story is not ab0ut motorcycles.

Last weekend I embarked on my first off-road motorcycle course, here in South Africa. There was a chap in my group who didn't seem that comfortable on his bike (same as mine, a BMW 800GSA) but he stuck it out.

At the end of the day we went on a very slow outride. The same chap that had struggled all day lost control in some mud & zoomed straight into a lake right in front of me. No one else noticed. I immediately stopped to help.

His bike was fully submerged & he was beneath the water. I jumped in & helped him out. I also helped drag his bike out in an attempt to save it, along with the assistance of other riders who had by now stopped. Obviously, a small disaster for a new motorcycle owner.

An hour later during our "award ceremony", we each had to tell the group what our highlight & lowlight of the day was. The guy with the submerged motorcycle answered "the entire day" to the first question, and to the second question (the lowlight), we all giggled, and he answered: "I had no lowlights" — to which we gave a round of applause.

He went on to share that he had only purchased the bike 4 months earlier & when he collected the bike at BMW, he had a learner's license but had never actually ridden a motorcycle. He asked the BMW salesman to ride the bike out the showroom floor for him & park it alongside the road facing in the direction of his home. Legend.