Goodbye Old Friend

It's the end of an era for me. After a winter of consideration, I decided it was time to upgrade my motorcycle. Stan (my old bike) has served me fairly well over the past three years. If you're not familiar and want to start from the beginning, click here. This was the first post I ever wrote about my old motorcycle.

There have been a lot of ups and downs in my motorcycling career. I had a lot of issues that frustrated me endlessly with the bike, but I learned a lot about how it worked and what I could do to fix it. In all honesty, I'm really going to miss working on little things on the bike. I had a few projects I wanted to fix with it if I didn't get it sold, but I found a buyer very quickly. I sold the bike to a nurse I work with who is giving it to her husband as an anniversary present, which I think is really cool.

Last weekend my brother Justin helped me pick up my new bike (which I am thinking about naming Pony). It is a 2001 Yamaha V-star 1100. It is quite a bit bigger than the Honda, but I think once I adjust to it, I will really enjoy it. Right now the bike is stored in my mom's garage. I am hoping to get it moved up here as soon as the weather is consistently nice, but I'm not sure when that will be.

The new bike is a bit dusty, but will look really spiffy once I get it cleaned up. I'm pretty intimidated by this bike. I know so little about it compared to the old bike. It will be a whole new adventure learning about this one. I hope I am up for the challenge. This bike came with a windshield, saddle bags, a passenger back rest and luggage rack.  I would like to take it out one longer cruises and maybe even get an overnight trip in sometime.

There was a whole big to do in getting this bike purchased. The guy I bought it from decided to let me know at 6:30 pm on the Friday before the Saturday I planned on coming to look at it that he had a loan out and I'd need to get the lien card. He was from a very small town, so the bank was not opened on the weekend. I didn't want to make two trips to see the bike and I work weekdays, so I was not sure how I could purchase the bike without getting screwed over. In the end I got a cashier's check written to him and his bank and had him sign a bill of sale specifying that he would use the check to pay off the loan. Then I had to trust that he would mail the lien card to me. THEN he showed me the title for the bike which early that morning had been chewed apart by his dog. I was reluctant to buy the bike with so many stupid little issues with paperwork and such, but I ended up going for it. I got everything I needed and the title was officially switched to my name this morning.

Regarding last week's movie quote, the line is from The Big Lebowski. Lately I've been going to pub trivia. I decided to throw in one random trivia question that came up during one of these outings: How many ghosts visit Scrooge in the book A Christmas Carol? Think hard. Our firs "obvious" guess was revised once we thought about it a little bit more.