Changing bikes again! I seem to change bikes about every 2 years. For those that have been reading this blog know, I started on a Hyosung GV250 and that bike lasted me 2 full seasons. After that I did a huge upgrade (in size) and moved to a Kawasaki Nomad 1500. As of now I still have this bike (even though it is just sitting in the garage – which kinda makes me sad as I really do like that bike). But a change has happened again.
One of the things that I did this year that moved me in this direction was attending Americade. This year I really wanted to try as many different kinds and styles of bikes as possible. So I tried a bunch of cruisers, some sport tourers, sport bikes, enduros and adventure bikes. Out of all the bikes that I test rode the 2016 Suzuki DL1000 V-Strom was the one that stood out as the most fun to ride and I repeatedly when back to the Suzuki booth to sit on the bike, which always made me smile.
So 2 months later and I decided to look for an older V-Strom and I stumbled on this 2002 model which had pretty much all the accessories that I wanted. Now a week earlier I had tested out a friends Kawasaki Versys 650 and after riding it I was second guessing my thoughts on moving away from the cruiser type of bike as the Versys just wasn’t (at least for me) the riding position that I was looking for. So maybe I didn’t like this position and riding the V-Strom during Americade was just a fluke. But I would soon find out as I was going to take this older V-Strom out for a ride. Once I arrived back from the test ride I found that same silly smile on my face that the 2016 V-Strom gave me and I knew that this was the bike for me.
Take a look at the video below to see my new ride. There are a few items that I will be looking for to fine tune the ride but over all it has every thing I want. I wouldn’t mind a windscreen extension as well as some handlebar risers to just get the bars a little bit higher. Other than that the bike is pretty much perfect.
Ill try and put together a more in-depth video soon.
[embedyt] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=on-OYh6-8VI[/embedyt]
