Yesterday, I drove north almost to Fort Collins and bought a 1984 Kawasaki KZ550 from a friend of my neighbor. I don’t have a motorcycle license (yet) so he had to ride it home for me. It’s now resting safely in the garage until I can legally ride it. So, I’m signed up for a motorcycle safety course at the end of this month. It’s a 2.5 day course with a mix of lecture and hands-on riding skills. At the end of the course, I’ll get my motorcycle license and won’t have to go take the written exam and driving test at the driver’s license office. Then I’ll be able to ride!
But before then, I need to go buy a helmet, gloves, and a riding jacket. Plus, I need to add it to my insurance policy and get a new license plate.
Since Beth and I have been living with just one motor vehicle – my Dodge Dakota gas guzzler pickup – for the past year, this will be a nice change. She’s going on a two week road trip vacation in the second half of April, and now I’ll have an option other than my bicycle and the bus for getting around. Plus, since it’s springtime, I’m looking forward to doing some riding just for the fun of it.
The motorcycle is in awesome condition. They guy I bought it from did a lot of shopping around when he bought it a year or two ago, and picked the best used bike on the market. Since then he’s given it a lot of TLC, replaced some of the older parts, and cleaned it up very nice. It was his beginner’s bike, and now it will be mine. I just hope I can keep it in as good condition as he did.
I’m also trying to figure out how to reduce the size of my location sound kit so that I can ride my motorcycle to film shoots and still have all the basics for capturing audio. That includes microphones, boom poles, a mixer, lots of cables, headphones, etc. Normally, I’ve got several boxes of stuff in the back of my pickup, and it’ll be a challenge to shrink all that down so it’ll fit on the back of a motorcycle. But I’m going to try.
The motorcycle looks a lot like this and this, but it has smaller “bullet” style turn signals and the colored accents are red instead of…yellow and brown or whatever ugly color that is in the photos. I’ll try to post a photo when I can.
From reading up about this bike online, I’m expecting to get around 55 mpg, which is a big improvement over the 15 mpg I get in the Dodge Dakota. And it’ll be a whole lot easier to park and get around the city!