Weekend Highlights

This weekend was a weekend of many firsts: I received my first motorcycle (see previous posts for make and model), I wore my motorcycle gear with an actual purpose, I learned that I'm completely hooked and there's no way to stop me from riding, and I had my first bike dump.

You see, there's an old saw about there being two types of motorcyclists; those who have dumped their motorcycles, and those who will.  The implication here being that everyone dumps a motorcycle at some point.  Most riders get it over with fairly quickly, for others it may take a while.  The point is, dumping your bike isn't the horrible monster I thought it was.  It was rather akin to falling off my bicycle when I was younger.

What does "dumping your bike" mean?  Basically, dumping your bike is almost exactly that, you dump your bike on the ground.  Chances are very good that you're on it at the same time, and that you aren't doing anything overtly stupid.  Most dumps come from a lack of control during a low-speed maneuver and hitting a curb (or similar) and you just fall over.  My own incident happened at around 10mph.

There's an intersection at the bottom of the hill at the Waltham end of the street I live on.  It's notorious and I hate it, even in a car.  Why?  Because no one has any sense of decency or consideration for anyone else (more so than usual for the Commonwealth).  I met, by chance, one of the few decent people on that stretch, and he was kind enough to stop to let me enter traffic.  I stalled the bike.  "No problem," I thought, as I fired the bike back up.  Problem was, there was a truck in the oncoming lane whose driver was busy on their cellphone instead of, oh, I don't know, paying attention to where he was? and he didn't look like he was going to stop.  So, I released the clutch and gunned the throttle.  And promptly hit the curb on the other side of the road and, well, the rest is, as they say, history.

Suffice it to say, I was really glad I was wearing an armored jacket.  I don't like to think about what my arms would look like otherwise.  Still, I scuffed up my arm just below the elbow and the top of my knee.  Nothing horrendous, and no worse that a scrape.  I am wiser for it, so there's a plus to the whole incident.

Now that I've got that out of the way, the weekend was awesome, taken as a whole.  My car sat in the driveway and sulked (she's been a bitch recently anyway, so she needs time to cool her heels).  All things considered, I'm glad I bought the bike and I can't wait to go on some longer trips with it.

That said, I've already found a lot of things on the bike that I want to customize.  I want to replace the windscreen since the jackass who put it on didn't know what the fuck he was doing; the front foot pegs are the next to go since the stock ones blow ass; I'm thinking of swapping the pillion pegs for running boards, just for that little bit extra comfort for the pillion rider; and the front headlights need to be overhauled.  The primary headlight is fine, but the side ones look like they have taken one hit too many.

Oh yes, this will be an awesome summer.