Yesterday I went to visit friends I have not seen since the Covid adventure began. Both are long time Harley riders who have decades of riding and hundreds of thousand miles between them. I learned last week that Mark had a Mustang Super Touring seat he no longer uses and offered to sell to me. As I have been back-ordered on this same seat for about 2 months now and find the stock seat I have to be a limiting factor on how long I can ride, I jumped at the offer.
I was thinking I'd drive up and get the seat, but... ended up taking my bike. My initial hesitation was that we are in a really hot and humid stretch of weather and A/C seemed a good choice. I would not otherwise have been out riding, but went for it. I turned it into a 37 mile trip and when I got within 5 miles things went from sunny, hot & humid to dark and 10 degrees cooler due to a large cloud front. I arrived without incident, spent some time and then headed back home with my new-to-me seat.
It had clouded up again and there were storms in the area. Confidence was not high. About a mile into the return trip I found the rain and rode in it for 5 minutes, then another 10 on soaked roads where it had already rained, then it dried out for the final 30 minutes home.
During this first excursion with this bike in the rain and on wet roads, I learned that I can lock the rear wheel dropping down into 3rd gear, and also that between downshifting and braking I can lock both front and rear wheels simultaneously, and slide by a road I wanted to turn onto. Take-away here was that I am not on a sportbike and need to have a bit more planned braking lead time under these wet conditions. I still have a lot to learn about the braking of this motorcycle, but no need to learn that both wheels locked will quickly lead to a bad outcome...
First thing this morning, before cleaning, I went out for a short ride.
Different day. Different lake.
Then the plan to was wash and wax the bike. That turned into about 3 hours of time after taking parts off and getting all of the road spray I could reach cleaned out. 4 or 5 coats of wax later and I'm good to go for the next ride.
Ride Safe
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