The New Ride

After a nearly 7 year hiatus from owning a bike, I finally decided it was time to jump back on the horse so to speak. Of Course I consulted my vase database of motorcycle information (Art) and determined for what I was looking to spend the choices were pretty much narrowed down to the 600cc-750cc “pretty decent looking bikes” , and the 900cc-1100cc “old as hell” looking bikes.

Of course since aesthetics is part of what goes with owning a bike, I opted for the better looking decent power category.

So I set a date and began the hunt, I wanted to basically buy a nice little “You’re over 30” now birthday present for myself, since I knew no one else would. It took about a month to narrow down the selection of available rides that seemed to flood craigslist.com, and backpage.com. Craiglist.com turned out to be the best bet for getting a feel for what the going rates were, but it also appeared, that everyone and their mother was selling their Suzuki Katana’s, which is what I used to have pre-hiatus, and what I thought I would go for again.

Turns out the Katana wasn’t for me, even though I hadn’t ridden anything other than Oscar’s ZX6, and Hawk’s ZX7, I knew from memory and Art’s constant berate of his recent Katana , that the Katana 600’s would be a huge disappointment. So as the days grew closer to my birthday and became desperate and almost called on a few 2003 Katana’s with the mentality of surely the bike has improved since Art and mines old bikes had come out, but alas a silver lining a appeared, literally.

I was just about to call and get quote on a 2004 blue Katana with green, and yellow accents, when I saw an add for a 750R something or another, it grabbed my attention because for the 1st time I didn’t see a price hover just above $4000. I hesitated before clicking the link because it didn’t display the “photo’s included” icon next to, it but figured I had nothing to lose by checking and maybe calling the seller. The ad in turn did have a link to its backpage.com ad that did have pictures.

Everything about the pics should have told me to stay away; it was red, it was black, it was used, it had been chromed out, over the existing flat black frame, it had been down. But the price was right I needed it to be, and was still up for negotiations, and the nagging voice in the back of my head, the one that was edging me towards calling one of the katana owner, started getting louder in a persistent mantra “ it doesn’t matter what you ride, as long as you ride”. I grabbed the cell and called the guy thinking he wouldn’t be there or I’d get some voice mailbox, setup just for buying the bike, but amazingly the guy was there and we set up a meet to look and ride the bike.