First Ride Downtown: Coffee

Whew! I was up bright and early this morning. After a quick 7 mile bike ride, I got all dressed up and left the house around 7am. It's Sunday, so the streets were empty. Precisely my goal.

Yesterday evening when I was done with the bike, I turned the fuel supply off. I've been told it's good to turn it off when you aren't riding it. Fine.
This morning, I pulled the choke and started the bike to let it warm up while I had some breakfast. Naturally, I forgot to turn the fuel back on, so it went for a couple minutes and died. Took me a second to realize why. Stupid rookie mistake. I'll probably just leave the fuel on in the future.

Eventually, I did get the bike warmed up...

Unfortunately, it was freakin' 16 degrees! I had to swap into my snowboarding gloves because my hands got cold fast in the regular riding gloves. Did a quick up and down the neighborhood to get into my groove before I set off.

Got on Route 66 and opened up the throttle. Damn it felt good! Other than the fogging issue in my helmet, I was happy as a clam. Roads all to myself, bike behaving well, beautiful sunrise.

Rode downtown with no problems. Wandered around a bit, getting used to stoplights and stop signs and the pressure of having a car behind me once in a while. (I only stalled it once!) Pulled over at Rendezvous for a coffee and to warm up for a while.

I basically sat there and stared at the bike the whole time. I might be a little obsessed.
I also figured out that the vents on my helmet were closed - aiding in the fogging issue rather than de-fogging. Got those opened up and my ride home was much better in terms of fog. Of course, it was also about 6 degrees warmer, so I'm sure that helped as well.

The front brake is still stiff, so I snagged a bottle of brake fluid at O'Reilly and I will attempt a brake fluid flush this morning to see if that helps. I will eventually also need a new front brake lever. Apparently this bike has been set down at least once, and the far right end of the lever was sheared off. It still rides just fine, but it doesn't look great.

Will probably end up washing/waxing the tank soon as well.

Right now I've still got an intermittent weird whirring noise at speed as well as a louder whine whenever I have the steering at full lock, which only happens when I'm parking. Odd. Will look into these noises.

Shot a few pictures on my Nikon P7000.

That's all for now!