What are the chances that two people would both have a rare make of sportbike? I don't know, but it seems low to me. A buddy of mine also got an Aprilia: a Tuono. I got my Falco fixed. We went riding along with a third friend who brought a vstrom...some kind of dual sport. There is an on ramp to the highway right in front of my place, so when we started I hit it and took off. The other two guys were not that interested in riding as fast as I wanted to, but it was still awesome.
We got out of Seattle and started hitting the twistys. All of a sudden, our friend who'd seemed shy on the highway seemed more comfortable hitting the turns fast. I was impressed. I'm still getting used to the handling of my bike, and have put off installing the second seat for that reason. I took one turn a hair too fast, learned my lesson, and took it easy. We hit one turn that had a 20 m.p.h. warning sign on it which ended up being super wide and easy. Then we hit a series of turns with no signs, that were super tight. Technical, you could say. Technical is the synonym of "difficult" that makes you sound like you know what you're talking about. Try it sometime. "Yeah, that haircut I did was really technical." Anyway. Flashback.
I was on my old bike, Katie the Kawasaki, heading west on 422 when I saw one blue sports car and a white sports car doing something stupid on the highway. I don't remember much about how it started, but I think the blue one tried to pass the white one, and then the white one pulled a total and unecessary asshole move that caused the blue car to lose control. It spun out directly in front of me. The only good memory I have of that event is being on my bike and watching this blue car spin around its vertical axis in the middle of a highway. Keep in mind that since I was on a bike, one tiny little nick from her tailspin could have easily ended my career as a human being. There was a truck to my right, which pulled over enough to give me room so I didn't hit the blue car. All three of us, the truck, me, and the blue car pulled over. The white car was gone. Probably some idiot in high school who wrongly thought he was a badass. The driver of the blue car turned out to be some girl. I was impressed. I liked the way she drove. I wanted to offer to buy her lunch at a nearby Wendy's so she could calm her nerves while I tried to get her number, but I was pretty shy back then and I think she might have been jailbait anyway. I wrote a Road Ninja story about it short enough to fit inside an AOL Instant Messenger "Away Message" and left it at that. The point of this story is the incredible surreal feeling I remember as I watched her car spin out directly in front of me, because I was watching something from an over-the-top movie happen in real life and without arena walls or even a real windshield.
I had the same feeling when I came around the unmarked, suprisingly tight turn and saw my friend with the Tuono rolling on the ground behind his bike. The road went to the right. His bike slid straight through the oncoming lane and he was following it. I remember not being afraid for him at all--must have been obvious that it wasn't a serious wreck (although if a car had been in the other lane I would be writing about his funeral). My chief concern was the limited visibility and the cars that would be coming around. I stopped my bike near the centerline and looked around, trying to figure out a place to sit where I would be able to wave off cars in time. Then I realized that my friend was completely in one of the lanes, and that I was unecessarily endangering myself, so I found a spot on the shoulder where I could still cover oncoming cars in the lane he was in. He got the bike up, I turned around and parked nearby and eventually our friend who was in the lead realized he was alone and came back, and we had three bikes huddled against the guardrail of a very small shoulder.
Turns out, he took the turn too fast (obivously) which by the way accounts for more than 50% of motorcycle accidents. He said he had it leaned all the way down to the peg, and then his food caught on the road or something, and then he went down. This type of accident is called a low side, where you just kind of go down to the ground, and is the better of the two accidents.
We were surprised at how well the bike stood up. My buddy saw sparks, but aside from cosmetic damage the only real problem we could see was the rear brake lever was twisted beyond operation. Fortunately, it was disabled in the off position. My buddy has chest armor but nothing but jeans down below. It was mostly scrapes with him, except that the thumb on his clutch hand was injured too much to ride. My buddy has some kind of insurance policy where they tow his bike for free. We discovered that insurance policy is useless on a sunday afternoon when no one in the office picks up the phone. Still, because he had this insurance policy, he was unwilling to pay to have his bike towed. Suddenly we had an interesting planning problem: three motorcycles to move and only two to do it. To make things interesting, the guy with the injured hand was heavier than both of us by at least 100 pounds, so putting him in the girl's seat* on either bike was not an option. We ended up just summoning a car. I rode my bike home, and then I rode his.
His bike rode a lot different. The clutch engaged fast, it was more powerful, and the steering felt completely different, and it was more of an upright than a sportbike. I also had no rear brake. All of that led to enough discomfort to make me take the turns slower than my buddy was in his car. Yeah...turns out you only need one good hand to drive something with four wheels. Anyway. As soon as we hit the highway I realized my chin strap was unsnapped. We were so excited about the bike not being stolen despite being left on the side of the road for two hours, and I was so concerned about getting hypothermia from the chill in the air if we took too long, that I didn't even strap my helmet on before rolling out. I discovered this while we were on the highway. So here I was with no armor and I probably wouldn't even keep my helmet on if I high-sided. I tried to do it one handed, but it turns out motorcycle helmet straps are very different than bras. My buddy was in front of me in his car. I had no easy way to signal him that we needed to pull over, and none of the spots I saw were good enough for me to get him to pull over in time. Eventually he put his blinker on to take the exit for an even bigger highway, and I figured it was my last option. I hit the throttle and bounced around, cutting him of and pulling over. Unfortunately I still couldn't get my chin strap on because I couldn't get the bike into neutral to take my hand off the clutch. I waved and tapped my helmet which I've heard is normally a warning for cops, but he got the idea that something was wrong with my helmet and stayed in his car. I then fought with the stupid bike's transmission. I let the clutch out a hair to engage first gear briefly, and then it finally let me switch to neutral. Then we were good to go. By the end of the day I was exhausted, and it took a while to warm up again, but I had plans with a lady friend so I just took a nap in my computer chair and turned the heat up in my car on my way to get her.
Riding with friends was awesome. I'd like to do it again, preferably with a crew that is interested in riding faster. The whole day I don't think I ever broke out of fourth gear.
Lots of people who ride sportbikes wrongly think they are badass because they do showy but useless stunts such as wheelies and stoppies. I don't know if they would recognize true skill if they saw it, because it is not as flashy. Something to keep in mind if you ever run from cops: you may have only gotten away because they let you go.
In other news, I still don't have a good plan for testing my 3-SAT algorithm, but I have been methodically verifying that every community-made Arch linux image for EC2 is defective in some way. This makes me sad because I like Arch, even though the thing that make me fall in love with it was the fact that it let me use the real Sun version of Java which Oracle has ironically withdrawn support for. I am going to switch to the example EC2 image that Amazon provides for new developers. I'll tell you one secret about Amazon: their examples always work.
*technically, (and definitely in a perfect world,) both seats on a motorcycle are for girls. The reason I call the back one the girl's seat, though, is because no guy wants to be there.
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