live to ride, ride to live

i’d been wanting to get a new motorcycle for a long time. i’d given my old kawasaki vulcan 750 to my brother back in…uh…i don’t know. he was thinking he’d fix it up. he came down to visit and we went by a couple of bike dealerships and i showed him the two motorcycles i was looking at: another kawasaki 750 and the new-for-2004 honda aero (also a 750). a couple of weeks later, my brother called me up and told me he’d decided to not fix up my old bike, and in fact had bought a new bike…a honda aero. what are little brothers for? ; ) so that meant i really didn’t want to get an aero…i didn’t want to look like we were weird twinkie brothers if we rode together. *shudder* so time went by…
i looked around, got prices, did research, and settled on probably a honda sabre (1100) or *maybe* a honda vtx1300 retro. the price jump from aero to sabre was about $2k, when the jump from sabre to vtx1300 was about $1k. a bit more than i wanted to spend, but for $1k it might be worth it. i went to honda of houston on a thursday a couple of weeks ago and talked with a guy, but they didn’t seem to interested in giving me a price i thought was fair. while i was there, i noticed i didn’t like the vtx1300 retro in person as much as the pics online. but the vtx1300 looked pretty cool.
then today i was planning to go to stubb’s southwest and wild west honda. i stopped by stubb’s first. i told the guy i knew dealer cost, was pre-approved at my credit union, knew they were in business to make money, and was looking to buy that day. he said to make an offer. i did, and his manager approved. so i didn’t get a great deal or anything, but i got a deal i thought was fair and they made some money. so i’m now the proud owner of a 2004 honda vtx1300. color? black, of course. what else would you expect?
i was sort of up against the ropes because my brother and i had talked about taking a road trip this summer, maybe to cornerstone in illinois, but we’d have to leave on june 26th…which meant time was running out. so i bought with two weeks…perfect, right? well…a new bike has a break-in period. it needs to be run at varying speeds, so that means no long road trip to get the miles. this bike’s is 600 miles, then to the shop for fluid changes and such. which means i’ll need to ride an average of 50 miles a day to get in the 600 by june 26…
mileage as of the end of today: 48