I pulled into my driveway at 2:30PM Sunday. 1,020 miles later. I looked at my rear tire and was amazed it held together this long. Next time out, I�m going to have NEW TIRES on BEFORE I set off on a long trip!
Conclusion:
This was my first long trip on my Suzuki Hayabusa so there were a few lessons I had to learn. The Busa made an excellent sport-tourer. It offered excellent wind and weather protection. It returned 50 mph on the highway. And its myriad of sport-touring features such as a gas gauge, two trip meters, a clock, and a powerful engine coupled to an excellent chassis made the bike a wonderful tool for covering ground in a short period of time. However, everything was not perfect. The Hayabusa�s riding position was quite sporty. This limited my stints on the bike to no more than 300 miles a day. In addition, the bike�s propensity to eat rear tires meant going on long trips required extra planning ahead to make sure there was enough rubber available for the entire trip.
Luggage played a very important part on trips such as these. I had a Tourmaster Deluxe Duffle bag at the rear, and a Chase Harper Aero tank bag up front. The TM Duffle bag worked wonderfully as it had lots of storage space as well as small pockets. The Aero tank bag up front didn�t work so well. This bag had no other compartments except the main one, thus making it harder to store often used small items since it required me to fish through the main compartment to find those little things I always seem to need.
The time of year we went on this Central Coast trip, Memorial Day weekend, wasn�t an ideal time. There were plenty of tourists on the road, which took away some of the fun of being �away from it all�. The ride through Highway 154 in the middle of Sunday was definitely a pain with all those cars lining up the road. It�s always better to take road trips during the week. Overall however, Dean and I liked the trip so much we planned on doing it again in 3 months. And that is the subject of my 2nd Sport-tour of the Central Coast. |
