My motorcycle is a used bike found on Craigslist, the seller had purchased it for his wife. She rode the bike only 160 miles - less than one tank of gas - and decided it was too much for her. "The beast" scared her so it sat two years unridden.
Several of my friends have motorcycles and they let me know pretty succinctly that Harley-Davidson was the right choice. Governor Schwarzenegger's term "girlie man" was used to describe people who ride the alternative brands. And so I took the class, got licensed, and went shopping on Craigslist. Since May I have put more than 4,000 miles on the odometer. Not just weekend and evening jaunts, I also spin it up to the office when the weather is clear. At first I called them "ride your mid-life crisis to work days."
My experience with motorcycles is in the distant past. When I was 12 years old, my brother and I ran a driving range at a local golf course. We were paid $1 per hour (for both of us, not each) and worked six eleven-hour days a week. The golf pro's wife paid us in cash each day and by the end of the summer we had a large wad of one, five, and ten dollar bills. We gave it to our dad with instructions to pick up a Honda Trail 50 minibike. We were pretty pleased when he instead brought home the larger Trail 70 - more like a real bike, it even had a clutch and manual four speed transmission and would top out at 50 mph. The next two summers we practically lived on the Trail 70. We rode it hard in the field and forests near our rural home. That experience taught me to love riding and quite a bit about repair and maintenance.
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