Taking license

It is done. The State of Arizona - having duly recognized my successful completion of the Motorcycle Safety Foundation's Basic Rider Course at Pima Community College - has seen fit to add a motorcycle operator's endorsement to my driver's license. The course went well, and it turned out that I really did need to be taught how to ride. The thousands of miles I've ridden on bicycles in the 15 to 20 years since I'd last ridden a motorcycle weren't as much help as I thought they'd be.

The search is now underway for a used motorcycle; nothing fancy, but not a complete P.O.S. either. I'm leaning towards a U.J.M., if that means anything to you. Of course, the very first Craigslist motorcycle ad to which I responded turned out to be a scam. The e-mailed reply involved Borat-like grammar, an eBay loan, shipping from afar, and satisfaction guaranteed or my money back (shyeah right!). The original ad had been flagged and purged by the time I'd added the seller to my spam list.

Until I get a scoot, the bicycle commuting will continue. June was an absolute inferno and July has exhibited its usual sauna-like conditions, but I'm still piling up the mileage. I think I'm feeling a bit of preemptive guilt over the eventual ramping down of my bicycling to and from work.

What I'm hoping is that the occasional motorized kind of riding to work will allow me to finish each week with my legs intact so that I will actually feel like bicycling for fun on the weekends, rather than sitting around the house resting up for the next week of commuting. On the other hand, there's the risk that I'll put bicycling completely on the back burner and end up making motorcycling more of a lifestyle sort of thing. BeanSS wants to take the Basic Rider Course for herself this fall, so I'd have an immediate riding partner with whom to explore the backroads.

It's worth noting that I bought my first decent bicycle - a mountain bike - as a useful consolation after determining that the used Honda CB900 Custom I intended to buy wouldn't really be too practical in the snow and ice I was about to encounter in my freshman year at N.A.U. As an ironic side note, I bought that bicycle from a motorcycle dealer. I have no regrets over having chosen bicycling over motorcycling, but it might be good to get back into a different sort of two-wheeled pastime, one I remember enjoying quite a bit.