All along I wanted to do the DIT but suspected it wouldn't happen because of my role as my mother's caregiver. There was a switch a couple of years ago not long after the idea first tickled my brain. Mom had to have angioplasty then developed back trouble and is now no where near as self sufficient as she once was. I hoped after the angioplasty she'd go back to what she was before but that hasn't happened.
Lately, I've been having issues of my own related to not getting my 'scripts in a timely fashion, mainly due to incompetence. I haven't been sleeping much so now all I do is think about what I have planned for Baby and making routes for the upcoming trip.
So that's how a 3 or 4 month tour gets reduced to a 4 week trip. My plan is to visit my best friend in Washington in time to celebrate her youngest daughter's birthday and stay to celebrate my 40th birthday with her. (I could make a whole other post about how it took a thread on the FZ1OA forum to make me realize that I was turning 40 this year, but I won't.) I will see Yellowstone National Park and the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum along the way. The trip will end at the FZ1OA Rally at Fontana's Dam in North Carolina.
In the meantime, I'm still fixing Baby from the accident. I bled the brakes in an effort to get the brake lever to feel like it did before the accident. It helped but it still wasn't the same. So I decided to replace the levers since I was kind of getting tired of all that black on black.
I didn't want the silver like the stock, so I decided to go with blue. I should have found some other contrasting color because blue in the pics and blue in person are often two different things. In the case of the Shinetrust levers I purchased to replace the Fire Dragon Bros levers, the shade of blue you see truly depends on the lighting conditions. I call them Chameleon Blue.
Even in this pic, one lever looks to be a different color than the other! Oh well, they match the windscreen screws. You can also see I need to repaint the handlebars to repair the damage caused when I bled the brakes. I'm kind of hesitant to do it because I really can't tell if they are bent or not.
I've taken the risers out of the upper triple and re-torqued them hoping to remove some of that feeling but they still seem to be tweaked. It could be due to the fairing stay still being slightly off. After the Kawasaki demo ride, I decided to try to get it closer to straight.
I haven't taken pics of that because the change is so subtle I doubt it'd show up. I also "fixed" the oversized hole I made for the Aux lights switch. A little strategic placement of black duct tape and you hardly notice it. The switch is now out of the way of the fairing support too!
After riding the "new" Kawasakis at the demo last weekend, I appreciate Baby even more than before. The forum guys are all drooling over the new Ninja 1000. Anytime a bike like this comes out, it seems they all get excited. Apparently motorcycle manufacturers don't think American motorcyclist like powerful but comfy bikes. When we get them, they are "dumbed" down or "de-tuned" versions of a sporty brother--like the FZ1/R1. I took the chance to see what the hype was about and learned it really is much ado about nothing.
I wouldn't trade my first generation FZ1 for the Ninja based on the demo ride. It wasn't leaps and bounds above what I had, some 10+ year old tech. It didn't speak to me the way the FZ1 had the first time I saw it at Lawrenceville Yamaha. The Ninja is a nice bike though, it's just not for me. One thing the demo ride did was have me putting grease on my clutch lever and making sure I had more clearance on the shift arm since I did the R1 shift arm mod.
The shifts on the Kawasaki were effortless compared to my FZ1. They're smoother now after a liberal application of grease!! That is perfect timing since the weather is getting nice just in time for me to get a little cycle therapy. I'm going to need it too considering all the crap that's going on!
My next post will be about the ride I take a little later today. I'm meeting TopWop1 at 9 a.m.
Thanks for reading,
patrice, theWolfTamer
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