They’re like proud parents, these motorcycle owners. Bonnie Sack of St. Peter coos while she watches her husband park her cycle in the garage.

“Isn’t that a beautiful thing?” she almost whispers.

Joan Roca, with a little prodding, pulls out a picture of his Harley out of his day planner. “You don’t go just showing it around,” he admits, but it’s at the ready in case he meets a fellow avid motorcyclist.

Kimm Julian named his motorcycle: “Thor.”

An owner’s love for his or her motorcycle quickly develops into an all-consuming passion. For a variety of reasons, cycling becomes a way of life, an identifying part of a personality much like a boisterous laugh or a sense of humor. Once someone buys that first motorcycle, a lifelong obsession is born.

Roca, dean of the library at Minnesota State University, Mankato, was riding motorcycles in his native Spain before he moved to the United States in 1980. In Spain, motorcycles were a necessity for navigating heavy traffic and finding parking in crowded cities.

Roca usually rides by himself or takes his wife along. He sometimes rides with small groups, but finding a time for everyone to meet can be tricky. Besides, it’s the freedom of a cycle that he finds most alluring. “Ultimately it’s about feeling that you are closer to nature,” Roca says. “That freedom and openness that you can ride around makes it feel like you’re almost flying. And at the same time, you have a machine that you like that gives you that nice feeling while you do it.”

Joe Grommersch, sales manager at Mankato Harley-Davidson, says all motorcyclists, no matter what they drive, derive a sense of freedom from being on the road. Revving up a bike gives drivers a break from today’s hectic lifestyles.

“There’s different smells. It’s having the air brush against your skin, smelling the flowers and the crops coming in. It’s being able to smell when a rainstorm is approaching. It really involves all the senses,” he says.

Sack, a program manager at an addiction center, says riding her Harley Road King classic is like watching an IMAX movie that completely surrounds the viewer. “If I’ve had a stressful day, I go out and ride for an hour,” she says. “It’s like for some people taking a nice, hot bath. It’s a pleasure and a joy for me to go out and ride. I can’t hear my phone when I’m on the bike. No one can find me. I’m free as a bird.”

She bought a sticker once to place on her helmet that said, “Motorcycles saved my life.”

“It’s not that far from the truth,” she says.

Julian likes the freedom he gets on a motorcycle, but there’s another appeal.

“It’s still a little bit ‘bad boy,’” says Julian, a former traveling opera singer and current voice instructor at MSU, Mankato. Julian owns a Harley and says he and his generation identify with the company’s riches-to-rags-to-riches success story. It’s also a little bit of nostalgia, as baby boomers remember the glory days of motorcycles in their youth and want to recapture that feeling. Sack has a husband, four children and two grandchildren, but when she gets on her motorcycle, she’s a 20-year-old woman again. At least that’s how she feels, and that’s a big reason why she’s drawn to cycling.

“I hope to be riding for many more years,” she says.