Moar Adventures in Motorcycle Ownership

In short: I have both motorcycles home and running. YAY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

The long version meanders below:

Sportster wrap-up: on Thursday I get a call from the local dealer where I had dropped off the Sportster last weekend. They say the bike is ready and running wonderfully. Great! I tell them I shall come pick it up Friday morning. No problem! they say.

Friday morning I get dropped off to retrieve the bike. I'm greeted by the service manager by name. As he's printing up my receipt to take in to the dealer to pay, he says, Do you happen to draw cartoons?  Whoa. Uh, yeah...I reply with a combination of suspicion and nervousness. He sees my expression and happily explains,

When you brought in your bike, I thought you looked like an actress. And while the mechanic and I were working on your bike, we talked about that and the mechanic saw your personalized plate on the bike and so we thought we'd Google you to see if you actually were an actress.

HOLY CRAP.

I laughed heartily at that, and told him how I worked on Scooby Doo for seven years, blah blah blah. We laugh and I go in to pay for the Lazarus they managed to pull on the bike. I come back out, wait a few minutes, and hear a mighty roar. The service manager rides the Sportster out, and it. Was. BEAUTIFUL.

So the local dealer is now OK in my book, as the bike ran great when I took it to work on Friday.


Softail wrap-up: Fred and I play email tag about me picking up the bike yesterday. Friday night we proceeded to phone tag. On one message he starts up my bike and says, Do you hear that? Your bike is saying, "Come get me, baby!" On another message he threatens to sing if I miss his call again. Obviously, everything went well in putting the bike back together with its upgraded cam chain tensioners.

Yesterday morning I run errands, dig around for a black Better Red Than Dead t-shirt, and make a thank you card for Fred. Of course I didn't think to scan in the finished design, but you can get a clue-by-four of what I did below:

With helmet, shirt, and card in tow, we make our way to Orange County for bike retrieval.  We hang out with Fred and his wife Cindy for a few hours, and he shows me that the stock cam chain tensioners that the Other Dealer SWORE were shot to hell were barely scuffed at 25k miles. I really didn't need to switch out the tensioners, but the Dear Husband insisted that he get a little peace of mind by mildly upgrading the cam tensioner system where they don't have to be checked for about 50k miles. In other words, the Other Dealer was totally wrong about what was wrong with my bike. I'm not going back there again anytime soon. Fred says, If anything ever goes wrong with your bike again, DON'T TAKE IT TO A DEALER. Bring it here. I know it's kind of a pain in the ass, but I'm not gonna fuck you over on it. ISN'T THAT AWESOME.

So I gave Fred the shirt and card(I think he was more delighted over the shirt!), and we take him and Cindy out to lunch at a local Italian joint that had ridiculously delicious pastrami and calzones with the best meat sauce I've ever had.

After that, I rode the bike back to the Westside...and took a weird detour. Usually, I take the 105 to the 405 freeway to get back home from Fred and Cindy's house, but I spaced and took the 110 freeway instead of the 405. So I ended up lanesplitting to downtown before finding my way to the 10 freeway headed west. Silly me!

I'm tickled to death that the bikes are back up and running. I'm also damned lucky to have good friends!