James Burleigh
Well-known member
About five years ago I experienced a powerful mid-life crisis, the solution to which was to by a motorized toy. For me, if it was a sports car it had to be a Porsche, and if a motorcycle it had to be a Harley-Davidson. The Burleighs could not afford even the least expensive used Porsche, so it had to be a motorcycle.
Growing up in the Southern California beach towns of Hermosa, Redondo, Torrance...., I'd always admired the sleek cool look of the Sportsters crawling up and down Pacific Coast Highway, all that beautiful paint and chrome shining in the sun. So I bought a Sportster in June 2003, the 100th Anniversary edition. This was my first motorcycle.
This week, five years to the month after buying the Sporty, I sold it. The odometer read 49,169 miles. Because it pretty much sat in the garage over the two last years that I've had the Feejer, that translates about 15,000 miles a year on average over those first three years, most of it commuting around the Bay Area. The price I got for it was a respectable 60% of the original price.
It was a great bike, and a lot of fun. We had some great adventures together too, to Yosemite, down the coast to L.A....
But most important, it brought me to work and home reliably through thick rush-hour traffic, and through many nasty wind and rain storms.
I remember one night coming home from San Francisco during a particularly frightening storm. The wind was actually blowing the rain horizontally across the Bay Bridge. When I finally pulled into my driveway after 30 miles in first and second gear in the stop-and-go traffic and the driving rain and the limited visibility (when BTW I crossed myself for the first time since I was about 12), I felt so beholden to the Sporty that I wanted to brush it down, put a blanket over it, and feed it some hay.
So it was with a certain amount of sadness that I watched the new owner ride off down the street on it. I'll miss it. The next day I received the following e-mail from the new owner, a young woman in her 20s:
I just wanted to say thank you...for taking such good care of my new baby when she was yours! I can already tell that I'm going to love the bike!
It's nice to know the bike will be well cared for and, well, loved.
I get the Harley thing, and I'm glad I owned the Sporty for my first bike. But my Harley days are behind me now. That's chapter is closed. But she was a good ol' gal.
JB
Growing up in the Southern California beach towns of Hermosa, Redondo, Torrance...., I'd always admired the sleek cool look of the Sportsters crawling up and down Pacific Coast Highway, all that beautiful paint and chrome shining in the sun. So I bought a Sportster in June 2003, the 100th Anniversary edition. This was my first motorcycle.
This week, five years to the month after buying the Sporty, I sold it. The odometer read 49,169 miles. Because it pretty much sat in the garage over the two last years that I've had the Feejer, that translates about 15,000 miles a year on average over those first three years, most of it commuting around the Bay Area. The price I got for it was a respectable 60% of the original price.
It was a great bike, and a lot of fun. We had some great adventures together too, to Yosemite, down the coast to L.A....
But most important, it brought me to work and home reliably through thick rush-hour traffic, and through many nasty wind and rain storms.
I remember one night coming home from San Francisco during a particularly frightening storm. The wind was actually blowing the rain horizontally across the Bay Bridge. When I finally pulled into my driveway after 30 miles in first and second gear in the stop-and-go traffic and the driving rain and the limited visibility (when BTW I crossed myself for the first time since I was about 12), I felt so beholden to the Sporty that I wanted to brush it down, put a blanket over it, and feed it some hay.
So it was with a certain amount of sadness that I watched the new owner ride off down the street on it. I'll miss it. The next day I received the following e-mail from the new owner, a young woman in her 20s:
I just wanted to say thank you...for taking such good care of my new baby when she was yours! I can already tell that I'm going to love the bike!
It's nice to know the bike will be well cared for and, well, loved.
I get the Harley thing, and I'm glad I owned the Sporty for my first bike. But my Harley days are behind me now. That's chapter is closed. But she was a good ol' gal.
JB
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I felt the same way when my L'il Redhead ran off with another man.
