Doc gave me a Honda for my birthday. My plan is to take this gift horse and restore and customize it, at some risk to my bones and dollars. Then again, what would you pay for a very cool motorcycle? Right, so I pay all of that into making it snappy after which I would be rather delicate in riding it. That's the theory anyway.
I've been thinking a lot lately about replacing my future horse fantasies with motorcycle adventures. I have always wanted to retrace the path of the Lewis & Clark expedition by horse - or at least one week of it with my family. However that will probably have to wait until we can all afford to pay for our own rental, by which time I'll probably be too old and cranky to enjoy it much. But I've had a revolution of my outdoor expectations. Quite frankly, although Pops still likes to rough it up at Big Bear, I have rather tired of the fun of camping. I've seen the wilderness, and there's nothing there but discomfort, and the days are long passed since I sought to prove something through trials of endurance. But fresh air and solitude, remoteness and freedom from civilization with a big gear kit. I can appreciate that. Day trips. Yeah.
All that has to take place on a different breed of bike. This one you see here, the Honda 919 is a sport bike. And it's really just my style, interestingly enough. I used to ride a hot little Suzuki back in the day, shart bars, Yoshi pipe, tuned Mikunis. To scrape the pegs on that badboy took more balls than brains, and quite frankly I didn't have enough of either. So since I rode hard enough to scare myself, I guess you can say I rode hard. The 919 on the other hand is such a superior machine, it seems to make effortless what I half killed myself doing in 1980. And this one's 11 years old. It's everything anyone would want who is not determined to go to the track, and the tracks are (Willow Springs, Buttonwillow) way too far to ride out to on the kind of super sport crotch rockets with no personality that they crank out of the factories nowadays.
So in my future, perhaps, is an adventure bike. Doc should be getting his any day now. Some day we'll ride to Sturgis or one of the towns in the area. That should be the start of a new chapter. Meanwhile, I'll get the Black Hornet up to code, get my cert and do some sport cruising on the weekends.
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