I bought a bike! Sadly, it's in the shop now, so I don't have pics of it.

A few weeks ago, Liz moved to a new apartment. As a result, she lives on a pretty big hill. She has ridden pillion on my motorcycle a lot over the months that we've been seeing each other, but going down hill, and stopping suddenly have always made her pretty uncomfortable on my little 599. With her new location, the big hill leaving her place made it noticeably harder to get her to go for rides with me.

Now, I bought a bike, with the vision of one day sharing the ride with a pretty girl, and going on weekend motorcycle trips together and that sort of thing, so this was just the kick in the pants that I needed to actually start looking for a bigger sport touring bike to replace my 599. After poking around on Craig's List and elsewhere on the internets for a while, I stumbled on an beautiful looking 1995 VFR with only 7k more miles than my 2006 599 and Corbin Beattle Bags. After emailing with the owner, we agreed on a time for a test drive and potential purchase and I went about getting a big pile of cash out of my bank accounts.

Yesterday, I stashed small piles of cash all over myself and my bike and armed up (in case of trouble) and headed to the middle of nowhere to check out the VFR. The bike is as pretty as the pictures in the Craig's List ad and runs like new. Well... ran like new... we negotiated a purchase price, and I left a deposit while I went home to drop off my bike and acquire other transportation back to pick it up.

I returned to pick up the bike and we finished the paper work and chatted about riding. The seller was emotional about letting the bike go, it'd been his only bike ever and satisfied a dream he'd had years before. When I was ready to go, it was a tiny bit hesitant to start. I should have stopped and had some think about it, but it did eventually start up fine and settle to a nice idle, so I headed off. At the last stop light before the entrance ramp to the free way, as I shifted down to first, the bike stalled out and refused to even try to turn over.

After some fun with getting the bike over to the side of the road, I inspected everything I could and determined that the battery was completely dead. Charging system fault. The seller had installed a brand new battery 3 days earlier. I called the seller and he said he'd be able to grab jumper cables and try to jump it to get me home, and then I called the nearest motorcycle shop to see if they were open and able to look at it and find out about a local tow that would safely handle bikes.

About 20 minutes later, the seller showed up, with not only cables, but a trailer. We talked about it briefly and decided to just trailer it over to the shop and let the pros take care of it. He was extremely protective of (now) my new bike as we loaded up on the trailer and beyond apologetic about the problems. The charging system must have failed somehow due to being not ridden enough over recent years. The shop didn't have any parts for the 1995 VFR in stock, so I had to leave it there... and then the seller gave me a ride over 20 miles home to Seattle.

I still haven't heard from the shop about the exact problem and the damage, but TBH it's no big deal; I was planning to have the charging system checked immediately upon getting the bike home, because older VFRs frequently report problems with it. I'm just amazed at how far above and beyond the seller went to take care of me. Best Craig's List buying experience ever. Best used anything buying experience ever. I can't wait to get the bike back and enjoy the new ride. Not really looking forward to selling the 599, both because I have a lot of cleaning up to do on it first, and because I'll miss it; it was my first bike, and it gave me a lot of good miles in our 3 years together.