Recently I’ve had a strong urge to buy a motorcycle. Not sure what triggered it. I’ve always thought that riding in South Florida was the quickest way to become a traffic fatality statistic but now that I’m driving a 400+ bhp coffin-on-wheels I suppose that a motorcycle no longer seems all that deathwish-y.
So I’ve been browsing the motorcycle sites for the past few days. I’ve had my eye on the Yamaha Warrior forever, but at $12K+ new that was never gonna happen. The V Star Custom and V Star 1100 Custom seem like a better mix of what I’d like and what I’d be willing to spend.
And there’s the Honda VTX1300S, right on the edge of being too expensive but damn it’s sexy in metallic blue. The downlevel Shadow Aero seems like a bargain at just under $7K.
Then I remembered this ultra-hot bike that I saw once in Germany. At first glance I thought “Daayumn, what kinda Harley is that?” and then I was like “OMG, that’s a mother-fucking BEEMER!” And so I go looking for it at bmwmotorcycles.com, figuring it probably costs as much as I paid for my used ‘97 M3 in ‘01, only… it’s not there! WTF? Turns out that the model I’m looking for is the R 1200 C and BMW discontinued it back in 2004. Worldwide production over 8 model years was only around 45K so there’s not a huge selection of used models to be found, but they are out there and priced from $6K to $12K or so.
It’s all academic at this point, I don’t quite have that much money burning a hole in my pocket and it seems foolish to take out a loan on a bike while I’m still making car payments (just 36 to go!), but… I could have the cash by summer. Guess it’ll come down to Oktoberfest vs. Motorcycle.
Oktoberfest has yet to win one of these competitions but I had been thinking that this might finally be the year…
