I brought her home and was just astonished at how easy she was to ride – this stupid bike LOOOOVED corners. You read about folks saying ‘man, all I have to do is entertain the notion of thinking about cornering and it just happened!” Like butter. Soooo smooth. This bike was something special.
At this time I was working as the “Director of Innovative Learning Solutions in the Center for Excellence in eLearning” (say that five times fast) at UC. It was a small office, maybe a dozen of us on the creative side (my side), tech, and pedagogy. Out of that dozen, six of us had or rode motorbikes. Four of us – Mike Mitchum (who as I mentioned before is the man I blame for all of this obsession. Right after Ewan McGregor. Yup.) on his XSR900, Matt Mullins on his Vespa, Mike Suit on his BMW adventure bike – started doing “Braaaaap!” lunches every couple weeks where we’d find a cool restaurant we hadn’t been to yet and ride out. Cincinnati at the time was exploding with new places. Many hipster-tinged joints downtown and maybe a little less-hip on the outskirts. They were waaaaay too much fun.
Once I got the new bike past the break-in period, I did my first long ride on it with the aforementioned Mark Szabo and one of his buddies. We drove from Cincinnati down to Big Bone Lick state park in Kentucky, crossing over the river on the Anderson Ferry, then out route 8 and, well, honestly I’m not entirely sure where the hell we all ended up. Somewhere along the way a wrong turn was taken and it took a sec to get back in the right direction, but it was a beautiful ride and was six hours later by the time we got back. That brand-new seat was -not- so comfy and my ass was less than happy. The rest of my body/mind/soul was ecstatic and told my ass to piss off. What an amazing friggin’ day!
Things were pretty damn good. Good things tend to not last, it would seem.