Motorcycling

This past fall I decided to take the plunge and enter into the world of motorcycling... to the surprise of many friends and family members (who somehow hadn't thought of me in a "motorcycle way").

My foray started with (of course) a training class, since I had never ridden before up to this point. Around here in MA you can do a crash 2-day course that includes classroom instruction, a written test, road instruction, and a road test all within the space of a weekend, so that's what I did (Amy gave me the class for my birthday). Here I am during the training in July, learning how to ride an incredibly beat up old Honda:

I did pass the test and successfully wrested my license from the folks at the Mass RMV. After that it was off to Craig's List, to see if I could find a machine to buy.

Crazy as it sounds, I've found over the years that buying and selling used vehicles (and bicycles I should add) is actually a really interesting experience-- you wind up meeting people that you would be very unlikely to bump into in your "regular" life.  I've had any number of memorable encounters this way, and in fact motorcycle shopping was no exception.

After a fair amount of searching I found just the bike that I wanted, a Suzuki V-Strom DL650, a recent model with fuel injection and anti-lock brakes, offered for sale by a guy up in Salem NH.  I drove up to take a look and meet the owner; he turned out to be a nice guy (maybe ten years older than me?) who had been motorcycling for a long time (he had all sorts of advice to offer). He'd been riding the bike to work and back every day (down into MA, so a fair ways). In addition to the bike itself he was nice enough to offer me his motorcycling jacket (we were about the same size), along with various extra bits and pieces. The bike:

New Hampshire is not Southern California, of course-- it does get cold every now and then, so he had accumulated all sorts of extra kit to try to keep the bike ridable in colder weather. There are hand-protectors on each handgrip to keep the wind off your fingers, then there are electrically heated grips of all things (didn't even know they existed), and finally an electrically heated insert you wear under your jacket and plug into the machine (yikes-- haven't actually tried that yet).

Buying a motorcycle is very impractical in all sorts of ways, but it's especially impractical for us given that we don't really have much space in the garage-- it's already full of bikes, gardening stuff, not to mention my car.  Amazingly, I was able to figure out how to cram in motorcycle as well, down at the end. Photo:

You can see that the bike itself is resting on a sort of wheeled dolly thing; you roll the bike up onto it and then you can move it around on a flat surface.  I hung a couple of tennis balls from the ceiling to provide a sort of marker so that I can pull the car in just far enough to be able to close the door, but not far enough that I run into the motorcycle.

More photos-- getting ready for a ride:



So far I've enjoyed riding, in spite of the cold weather (it's easy to keep your body warm, but not easy to keep your fingers warm!), and I don't seem to have crashed, run over any old ladies or puppies, or had any other accidents. Fingers crossed... you definitely have to pay attention (although when I look around on the highway while riding, it seems that about half the drivers have their cell phones out and are texting, so maybe being on a cell-phone-free motorcycle will put me at an advantage).