New Stuff

Today I put a couple of new items on the bike: a license plate cover and a decal on the windshield. Here are pics of both.

1000 Miles!

Just a short post to say that I hit 1000 miles on the Vulcan yesterday! Doing the first service myself but taking it in to do the oil change on Friday.

My Dad and My Uncle

Last weekend, my dad rode his motorcycle up from Houston, TX and my uncle rode his down from Akron, IA. We spent the weekend riding all over the place.

On Friday, we rode out to PickWick State Park, which is about 100 mile East of Memphis. We had a great ride out with excellent weather. It became apparent that for me to do longer trips, I'm going to have to get a more comfortable seat.

We spent a few minutes admiring the view and taking a few pictures.

Me and my uncle at Pickwick

Some ducks at the lake

On the way back, we hit some rough weather. The storm that blew through knocked out power to a large portion of the Memphis area. When it began to rain, we pulled off into a gas station in Oakland, TN and waited. When the really bad stuff passed, we decided to go ahead and ride the rest of the way in the rain. Needless to say I got soaked. They both had full rain gear and stayed fairly dry, but I just had a rain coat. My boots were soaked through the leather and had turned from brown to black. They never recovered.

On Saturday, we made a shorter trip out to Shelby Forest and saw the Mississippi River bank. Here are a couple of pictures from that ride.

Engine Guards and Windshield

Recently, I added two accessories to my bike: engine guards and a windshield. Both installations were fairly easy to do and only required a small amount of adjustments to the bike. I had to relocate the horn for the engine guards and I had to bend the cable brackets on the front fork to fit the windshield mounts on. Here are the results.

My New Bike!

So, I'm doing this post two weeks after the fact, but I bought my new bike. It's a plasma blue Kawasaki Vulcan 900. This was the day that I brought it home from the dealer.


We had to fill out the paperwork four separate times because we kept making mistakes (oops!).

MSF Beginner RiderCourse

Back in May, I took the Beginner RiderCourse at Southwest TN Community College. It was a three-day event that began on Friday evening in the classroom. On Saturday, we began the day outside on the course. They started off very basic (how to turn the bike on), and by the end of the weekend, we had learned a lot about riding, enough to be able to ride on our own. All-in-all, everyone did quite well. Only one person dropped out ( she had back problems and couldn't continue) and everyone else passed! Here is a picture of the class out on the range.

Did I mention that it was really hot? We're all in long sleeves, but it was 95 outside!