bikeload

Eric and I have have been motorcycle shopping recently. Just casually. Eric has a BMW GS and has been looking for something sportier to augment it (and leaning toward a Suzuki SV1000). I haven’t ridden in years and years, although I still have a passle of antique non-running bikes in the garage I need to get rid of. And yet I’m thinking a nice little 250 ninjette would be just the thing to get back onto the road. Thinking. Just casually.

This afternoon Eric was musing about motorcycles and got to thinking about all the bikes we’ve owned over the years. Acquiring bikes used to be a big problem for us (“it was never a problem,” says Eric from across the room.) Our friend Noemi once called our house the “Home for Wayward Motorcycles.” Of course there’s only one bored moment between musing about past motorcycles and actually sitting down and making a list, and some time later we had it.

From: ericm
Subject: bike list
Date: July 16, 2005 6:13:17 PM PDT
To: lemay 

Bikes we've owned since we met:

Laura:
Honda CB125
Honda CB200
Yamaha RZ350 blue
Yamaha DT175
Honda XR200
Honda CB77 Superhawk
Honda CB77 Superhawk
Honda CB77 Superhawk
Honda NT650 Hawk

Eric:
Yamaha RZ350 white
Yamaha RZ350 yellow
Yamaha RZ500
Maico 250
Maico 440
Bultaco Matador
Ducati Elefant
Yamaha TY250 mono
Beta Zero
Beta Techno
Montesa 348
BMW 1150GS
KTM 360
Kawasaki KDX 200
Yamaha TY250D
Scorpa SY250

25 bikes in 14 years. Holy shit, you are probably thinking. Which was pretty much our reaction, too. There’ve always been a lot of motorcycles in our lives, but we hadn’t realized quite how many. There are another seven to be added if you count the bikes Eric owned before he met me. And how did I end up being such a Honda girl?

To be fair: we only have a handful of bikes now. And most of those bikes came and went as passing flings or, in some cases, really crappy bikes that were mistakes to own in the first place. Plus the majority of those bikes were really cheap, so its not like we were flinging money this way and that on bikes. Still: yikes. That’s a lot of bikes.