We ride our own.

The Wild Lilacs are thirty-one women in the Valley of the Sun who ride our own motorcycles. Not on the back. In front, with the throttle. We're 24 to 67 years old. We're nurses, teachers, a CPA, a firefighter, two grandmothers who retired early to ride more, a college student, and a county court clerk, which would be me. We ride Harleys and Hondas and Kawasakis and BMWs and one Italian thing that sounds like a sewing machine full of bees. Every make is welcome. Every woman who rides is welcome. If you ride with us three times and want to keep coming, you're a Lilac.

I'm Helen Brown. I'm 52, I'm the road captain and the secretary (nobody else would take the minutes), and I didn't get on a motorcycle until I was 45. More on that below. This is the club's page, but I keep it, so you're going to get my opinions too. Sorry in advance.

Every other part of the country puts the bikes away in October. We take ours out. From June through September in Phoenix, riding in the middle of the day is like riding into a hair dryer with the hair dryer also on fire. This summer we did our club rides at 6 a.m. on Sundays and were home by ten, before it hit 105. We still had three days over 115 in July that we didn't ride at all, because we're tough, not stupid.

Now it's cooling off. Mornings are in the 70s, afternoons are "only" in the 90s, and by November it's the best riding weather in America and I'll fight anyone who says otherwise. Starting in October we go back to the regular schedule: club rides on the second and fourth Sundays, kickstands up at 9:00, and a meeting the first Tuesday of the month.

Our fifth annual poker run, on Saturday, March 20, 1999, raised $2,140 for a women's shelter here in the Valley. For anyone who's never done one: riders go to five stops along a route and draw one playing card at each, and at the end the best poker hand wins. You can buy an extra hand to improve your chances, which is the whole fundraising secret. Ninety-two hands went out, which is our best year ever, and about a third of the riders were men, who were very well behaved and only a little surprised to be handed a route sheet by a woman on a Sportster.

The winning hand was a full house, kings over sevens, held by a retired mailman from Mesa, who won the heated vest one of our members donated. In March. In Phoenix. He said he'd wear it to the Canyon. The worst hand was mine. I've led that run for five years and never once held better than a pair. The details of the route are on the ride reports page.

We have very few rules, and we mean every one of them.

1. Helmets on all club rides. Arizona only requires a helmet if you're under 18. We know. We don't care. If you want to ride bareheaded on your own time, that's your business, but on a Lilacs ride you wear a helmet, and if you show up without one, I have a spare in my saddlebag and you'll look silly in it.
2. Staggered formation on straight roads, single file on curves and in town. The road captain (me) leads, the sweep (Debbie Hurtado) rides last. Nobody passes inside the group. See the group riding section.
3. Never ride over your head. If the group is going faster than you're comfortable with, drop back, and the sweep will drop back with you. Nobody gets left. Nobody gets talked into a curve they're not ready for. Peer pressure has put more riders in the hospital than gravel ever did.
4. No drinking before or during a ride. Not one beer. Not at lunch. Not at the last stop. This is the only rule that has ever cost us a member, and I'd make it again.
5. Show up with a full tank and an empty bladder. We are a club of grown women and we know what we're talking about.
6. Dues are $25 a year. They pay for the poker run, the meeting room coffee and the patches.

In 1992 I was 45, recently divorced, and living in an apartment with a lot of beige carpet. I'd always wanted to ride. My ex-husband had a bike for a few years in the seventies and I rode on the back of it, and I spent the whole time looking at his hands on the grips and thinking, I could do that. He said women didn't have the arms for it. That turned out to be the second-most wrong thing he ever said to me.

I signed up for a weekend beginner course. I was the oldest one there by twenty years and I dropped the little practice bike twice in the parking lot. On Sunday afternoon I passed. Three weeks later I bought a used Sportster 883 from a man in Glendale who kept calling it "a good starter bike for a lady," and I nodded and smiled and wrote the check, and I have put a little over 41,000 miles on it since.

What it gave me: Sunday mornings. The smell of creosote after a rain. Knowing how to change my own oil. Thirty friends I'd never have met. And something harder to explain, which is the feeling of coming over a hill on the Beeline at sunrise, with nobody's hands on the grips but mine. If you've been thinking about it, go take the course. I've written down everything else I know on the New Riders page.

1999 Ride Reports · New Riders Start Here

Riders who've stopped by since our first page went up in April 1997:


Want to ride with us? E-mail [email protected], tell me what you ride and how long you've been riding, and I'll tell you where we're meeting. Men, we love you, but this is a women's club. You can come to the poker run.

Last updated September 21, 1999