Back on two wheels
28 01 10 - 21:57 Up until last Saturday, I hadn't ridden a bike since some time in mid-December. Despite the plethora of machines in the garage, I've ended up using the van to commute in for a month or so - which has given me plenty of time stuck in traffic to contemplate how much I'd rather be on the bike.
This was taken on Saturday afternoon a couple of hours and about 40 miles after buying the black bike in the picture. It's a 2009 Yamaha XT660Z Ténéré. The white one in the foreground is my mate Tom's 2008 model, which he bought new this time last year, and has been having all sorts of fun on, some of which you can find here.
Change of Tack
Even ignoring the demise of the DR800, 2009 was a bit of a frustrating year of running round trying to get whichever bike I needed next to work properly - last spring was spent trying to rebuild the ZXR400 in time for the Performance Bikes Forum's Anglesey trackday in May. Then I fell off it and had more work to do before I went to Cadwell in June with the Morini Rider's Club, where I popped the fork seal that I ended up replacing in a hurry to get to the HUMM after the DR800 let me down. The GPZ500 failed it's MOT in March and with everything else I didn't get time to sort it out, so it sat in the garage for the rest of the year. I did manage to get the CG125 back together for the first time in about three and a half years, then it got stolen the night before it was booked in for an MOT, and now needs a lot of work. By October, I was still commuting on the ZXR, complete with slippery-when-wet Dunlop D209GPs and sounding desperately in need of a top end service, and by the end of the year, I was stuck with commuting in the van, and starting to get seriously stressed with the task of having a bike ready for the Dragon Rally.
Something needed to change - my principle that if I had a load of bikes, at least one of them would work at any one time was being stretched to the limit, and while I love having projects on the go, I wasn't actually achieving any of the things I wanted to change, because I was being hard pushed to keep them going as they were. So I came to the conclusion that what I really needed was one newish bike to do all the day-to-day stuff, and allow me to treat the project bikes as projects, rather than necessary transport.
The DR800, for all its sins, brought about a big change in how I approached road riding, and got me hooked on big Dakar-styled thumpers. I loved the look, the torque, and the fact it kept making me ignore frozen hands and feet to take the long way home, down mud-strewn single track lanes in the depths of last winter. But it was a shonker to start with, and now it was looking like a very marginal prospect to rebuild. So with that big trailie shaped hole in my life, it was hardly surprising that I started gazing longingly at the Yamaha. First at the bike show, where I sat on a rather tasty blue and yellow model, and noted the big '3 years 0% finance' sticker on the screen. I came quite close to my first ever brand new bike, but it wasn't to be - I wasn't ready to seriously think about it before Christmas, when Yamaha withdrew the finance offer. To further move the goalposts they increased the price of the bike from £5,600 to £6,400 for 2010, which was a bit steep for my tastes. At the time I started seriously looking a few weeks ago I could still have got an 09 bike at the 09 price, but it would have had to be a cash deal, which was so close to the limit of my finances that I'd have ended up with a new bike which I couldn't afford to insure or possibly even put fuel in.
So I started having a look around at 'nearly new' examples, for significantly less money, and at this point Tom stepped in and mentioned he knew of someone, via the XT660 Owners Forum, who was selling one not far from where he lives in South Wales. To cut a long story short, I ended up picking it up on Saturday morning, then heading up the road to Tom's for an excellent afternoon of blasting around the local lanes and trails, followed by an evening of food, drink and banter, before heading for home on Sunday Morning, new bike suitably christened with a layer of Welsh mud.
It's good to be back.
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