During our years of motorcycling we’ve certainly acquired significant experience, but we thought it would be a good idea to spend some time with someone whose full time job is to teach bikers to negotiate the world beyond the pavement.

While talking with the BMW dealerships in Arizona, some drew our attention to RawHyde Adventure Camp which provides off-road rider courses for solo riders as well as two-ups.

We contacted Jim Hyde, the owner of the camp and explained our situation. He signed us up on a weekend riding course, promising that we would come away with a lot more confidence and safety skills.

As it turned out his promise was a huge understatement.

We has an incredible time with Jim and his wife Stephanie. Their little daughter, Jamie Lee was only four months old at the time, so she could not join in on the rides (yet!), but watched the drills intently.

In addition to having a lot of fun, it was hard work to go through all the challenges Jim gave us. Take a look at the picture on the right, where I’m discussing a clutch handling issue with Jim. He was demonstrating the skill, so I had a chance to take off my jacket and dry myself a little in the sun. The lighter part of my T-shirt is dry, and upper part is the testimonial of my hard work. Needing to change my sweat soaked T-shirts earned me the nickname “Two a day”. Monica received the nickname “Pop-tart”, for her sprightly dismounts off the moving bike. Yes, one of the valuable skills the passenger learns is how to bail out.

Jim tried to hand over as much of his proficiency as I could absorb in the given time. There was a lot more of knowledge than I was able to take in over the three days. Despite of the fact that I had to realize how little my experience was compared to his, I did not feel humiliated at all. Jim is a brilliant professor, he is always very careful not hurt the students’ pride and it really helps keep the riders keen through the entire learning curve which undoubtedly has some slips as well.

Failures are of great value too, because it is part of the mental preparation for the ride to know exactly where the limits of your skills are. Two very important results of the RawHyde adventure course were to improve our riding skills and become better aware of our limits.

Belinda, the camp’s newest master chef, prepared gourmet meals for us (from paella to Crème Brule) that we truly deserved before and after so much hard work.

Actually, I cannot say before and after, since we started the day discussing skills during breakfast, while at dinner we reviewed the day’s experiences.

In a nutshell, our RawHyde Adventure Camp experince goes like this:

- we significantly improved our riding skills,
- we learned a lot about the limits of our skills,
- we gained confidence in ourselves,
- we had fantastic meals and nice wines (the latter in the evenings!),
- we had an awesome time with Jim, Stephanie and Jamie Lee,
- we made new friends

You can decide which of the benefits we’ve enjoyed are most important for you. For us, our stay at RawHyde Adventure Camp rated a ten for overall experience and that’s why we recommend it to you as well with great enthusiasm.