/mike

If the title of this post doesn’t give you any indication as to what happened this weekend, maybe this will help. And if you’d rather not check out that link, it goes a little something like this: “Did I forget to mention I bought a motorcycle today? Hmmm, well I did.”

A Little History

For as long as I can remember I’ve always wanted to ride motorcycles. I’ve always made excuse after excuse and wouldn’t take the motorcycle training course. Well, the time has come where I have absolutely not excuses. So I got myself signed up, took the class, and passed the evaluations.

The next step was actually getting my M1 endorsement, so I could actually ride bikes on the road. To be honest, I was a little worried, about as worried as I was when I took my C class license — so I could drive a car — when my Canadian license expired. After reading through the DMV handbook last weekend I hit up the Santa Clara DMV last Tuesday. It was a pretty smooth process, I managed to only guess wrong on three questions.

Back to This Weekend

With license in hand, safety gear loaded in the trunk, and a couple friends I started looking for motorcycles. First stop was Mission Motorcycles. I’d looked online and they had a couple used Kawasaki Ninjas — buying new didn’t really appeal to me, being a first-time rider and all.

Teresa was an incredible help at Mission Motorcycles. She laid it all out for me and was great to talk to. If I hadn’t noticed SF Moto had a couple used Ninja’s I would have bought right then and there. I wanted to make sure I got the best deal so a quick trip to SF Moto was in order.

Once we arrived, Noelle — I hope I’m spelling that correctly — greeted us and took us to the last used Ninja in stock. As it turns out, it was the same year and colour as the bike at Mission Motorcycles. The only difference was mileage, with the advantage going to Mission Motorcycles in that regard. After some deft negotiating the advantage was clearly at SF Moto.

About 20 minutes later I became the proud owner of this:

My new 2006 Kawasaki Ninja 500R. It has about 3,000 miles on it and looks like it’s in great shape.

Unfortunately it was raining cats and dogs when I purchased my new baby so I couldn’t ride it home. Now I have to wait until Tuesday to pick up my new toy. I’m already itching to get on my bike so the next couple days may end up being pure torture. I wonder who I can convince to take some time off Tuesday afternoon and give me a ride to the city.