I sold my motorcycle.
To this girl. It’s her first bike.
Tag Archive for 'motorcycle'
I took off work on the 4th of July (we don’t get a holiday) and went up to Portland. Laura had recently gotten her motorcycle back after the accident, so we rode up to Mt Hood to visit the Timberline Lodge. Originally, we had planned to eat lunch there — until we saw the menu. $14 for a veggie burger and potato chips? Uh, no thanks. But the view was nice and we did run into Optimus Prime, who was sunbathing out front. Priceless.
Flickr photos: Timberline Lodge
Beacon Rock has an interesting history, and is one of the largest monoliths in the world. Since it’s just on the other side of the Columbia river, Laura and I decided to take a day trip on our motorcycles to hike to the top of it. The ride was awesome and so were the views.
We stopped on the way for a photo op:
Here’s a view from near the top:
Flickr photos: Beacon Rock, WA
Laura and I thought that it would be a good idea to learn how to do some basic maintenance on our motorbikes, so we went down to Autozone and bought a socket wrench set and oil filter remover. 4 hours later, and a couple spills on the garage floor, we now know how to change the oil.
I bought a windshield for the Virago the other day. The install looked pretty easy, until I realized that I had to cut the wires on the front turn signals so I could relocate them a little bit farther down the fork. It wasn’t very difficult but it did turn an “I think this’ll take about an hour” project into a “Damn, that took three hours!” project.
Still, it’s better to know how to do things yourself — even if it takes longer than you thought — than to be stupid and pay someone else to do it.
The windshield is great at blocking the wind (was that redundant?) and rain. And bugs. Now that I have one, I can’t imagine going without it.
I also ordered a generic book on motorcycle maintenance as well as the full service manual for the Virago 535 on CD-ROM. Just a few things to prepare for the cross country trip at the end of July…
5 days legal, 300 miles already. Sometimes, I surprise myself.
Laura and I went on a scenic loop from Portland to Mount Hood this past Sunday. We saw a few waterfalls, rode on the Historic Columbia River Highway for about 15 miles (all that’s left of it), spent too much time on boring I-84, visited the Bonneville Dam, and headed south towards the mountains.
The road from Hood River to the mountains was nice. Not much traffic. At one point, as we were coming down a hill we had an unobstructed view of Mount Hood towering above the pavement in front of us. As we got closer the temperature dropped and caught us by surprise; we entered a “Snow Tire and Chain Zone” and started to see some snow beneath trees on the side of the road. Thankfully, it hadn’t been raining or snowing recently.
At the first sight of civilization, we stopped south of the mountain near Government Camp, got some hot coffee, warmed our hands, and took a break. Fortunately, this was where the road declined sharply back towards the valley, and we had only about 10 more minutes of really cold weather. The ride back to the city wasn’t too bad… nothing much to see, but at least the traffic wasn’t too crazy.
Flickr photos: Motorcycles to Mount Hood