The Ride Report

Aaaaaaaaaaand…. I’m back. Actually, I’m still here — I never left, I just got lazy. I got busy with the club, busy with the bike, busy with the wife (pun intended), busy with work… You’ve seen it before: Blogger blogs, blogger falls off the face of the earth, blogger comes back and resumes posting fitfully until he gives up and quits. So consider this the middle part of that. Onward.

In new news on the motorcycling front… I got a new rear tire. I should say a new new rear tire. I only seem to be getting about 5,000 miles out of a rear tire lately. Maybe it’s the cheap Chinese tires I’m using (Kenda), or maybe it’s the fact that I’m not exactly svelte and the tire is carrying a heavy load, or maybe it’s that I ride it hard — I dunno. I like to think it’s options 1 and 3. Anyway, I’m on Kenda #3 and I’m happy enough with it — now.

I’m running a Kenda Kruz, my second one, and it’s not a bad tire. But the one I just replaced was a different Kenda model — a Sport Challenger — and it suuuucked. It wasn’t too bad for most of the life of the tire, but it got squirrelly as hell toward the end. It started feeling kind of wobbly in the straights, and it started scaring me in the twisties. I’d lean it over and crank it around a turn, and right at the apex the back end would sort of skip just a little bit. I actually started wondering if something was wrong with my swingarm. I’m not sure what was going on; maybe the sidewall was deforming or it was breaking traction, I dunno. All I know is I couldn’t replace it fast enough. Now there’s new meat on the back and it’s riding right again. So I’m a happy man — at least for another 5000 miles.

I’m off work tomorrow, so the plan is to maybe wash my bike. My prospect looked at it the other day and said to me, “You know, soap and water isn’t that expensive.” I told him he’d just bought himself another 3 months of prospecting, but that I appreciated his honesty. I should have made him wash it himself.

You know your bike is dirty when prospects are making fun of it, so I’m thinking I might get productive and show the scoot some sudsy love tomorrow. Or… it’s supposed to rain this weekend. I may just take it for a ride Saturday and aim for the wet stuff to rinse off the worst of it.