1994 Kawasaki Vulcan 500

We arrived at 7am as instructed and waited. It was an hour before the inspector showed up. I knew he wouldn’t be there until 8, but I had assumed we would be able to ride during this hour wait. However, they didn’t let us ride until after the inspector got there and collected our materials. Needless to say, the wait was a bit annoying and did little to calm my nerves.

They had a few exercises set up for us to practice the test. We each got on our bikes and had time to try them out and get comfortable. These are the four exercises:

• First you do a wide u-turn and return to stop with your front wheel inside a small box. This is a pretty easy one.
• Next you have to weave a few cones, do another wide u-turn and then finish with a much narrower u-turn. This is the one I anticipated having trouble with.
• Third, you were to do a controlled stop from at least 15mph.
• And last, you needed to get up to speed and then swerve to the left or right

Ironically, the part that I thought I’d have the most trouble on, the narrow u-turn, turned out to be easy on the Rebel. I had no trouble with that. The one that turned out to be the hardest was the controlled stop. I’m still not sure why. He had me do it twice. The first time I skidded kind of badly. The second time, I skidded less, but still skidded. I think that was my only mistake, but perhaps I hit a cone or two.

I did pass, but it was close. I missed 9 points. Miss 11 points and you fail. It was good enough though. I had passed and was headed back home to Peoria to get my actual license.

It was a few days before I got to take out my own bike, but I’ve now been out three times on it. I’ve been busier in my free time than I previously expected or I would have been out more. Each time I go out, I’m learning a bit more. The first time, I was having a lot of trouble starting out smoothly from a stop at an intersection. A few times I stalled, other times I took turns too wide and strayed into the oncoming lane. It was a good thing that I was driving on the nearly deserted day time streets in my hometown of Morton.

My main realization from the first day of riding was that I was having trouble downshifting all the way to 1st gear when stopped. The second day I realized what I was doing. To downshift from 3rd to 1st, I’d hold in the clutch and tap down the gear twice. However, I would do the second tap before I fully took my foot off the gear shift from the first tap. On the second day, I would tap down from 3rd to 2nd, keep the clutch squeezed, bring my foot up off the gear shift completely and tap it down again. I was now getting into 1st gear pretty reliably.

Also, by the end of the 2nd day, I was getting a lot more consistent coming off a stop. I learned that when pulling out and crossing an intersection, it felt much better to clearly check both directions and then when I was confident of crossing, I’d focus all of my attention forward while easing out the clutch. Previously, I kept checking both directions as I was pulling out and I wasn’t able to keep the bike as straight as I’d like. Also, I started power walking the bike when easing out the clutch at a stop. Power walking was the first thing we learned on the bike, but I stopped doing it somewhere along the line. It was much easier coming out of those intersections by using it a bit.

This may all sound extremely basic stuff and it is. However, I’m finding as a novice biker, things that are extremely simple and nearly impossible to screw up in a car, somewhat challenging on a bike. There are a lot of steps to coming to a stop and turning right at an intersection and many more ways to seemingly screw up. And some of these screw ups could be very dangerous at a busy intersection. Hence, I’m going to need a few more times out to practice this stuff before I feel really confident.

My third day out, my discovery was more interesting. In my basic riding course, they talked about counter steering. As best I can describe it, counter steering is when you begin a turn by pressing slightly on the handlebars in a counter intuitive way. If you are going a reasonable speed and you press the right handle, the bike will start to tip over to the right, causing the bike to turn right. I had been confused on this point because most of our turning was being done by actually leaning and turning the handlebars in the direction we were going, similar to a bicycle. Also, it was confusing because at one point, an instructor was clearly talking about counter weighting (shifting your weight one way on the bike, while you tipped it the other way at slow speeds), but calling it counter steering.

Well last time I was on the bike, I finally decided to give it a try. The first time you want to try counter steering, I suggest getting up to 25/30 miles per hour on a clear empty street and slightly pressing the right or left handle of the bike. A very light press will do. You will instantly feel the bike start to tip slightly toward the direction of your press, and you will start to turn. It was fun to actually feel what was being described in the books. Remember a slight press is all it take to feel this counter steering effect.

We decided that the high school would be a good place to practice since school was still out. We were heading to the main parking lot, but when I passed one of the side parking lots, it was empty and had a fresh new pavement laid down with nice bright lines. Perfect, I thought, let’s practice there.

We made a u-turn, and I turned into the lot. I immediately thought I should do a few laps around the lot, very much like the first thing we did on the second day of my class from a couple weeks back. I drove the length of the lot, did a nice controlled turn and headed back the other way. I decided to slow down a bit and downshift before the next turn. I squeezed the clutch, tapped the gear shift down, released the clutch and…

The engine revved… the back tire began to squeal and skid… I wasn’t going that fast, but I didn’t know quite what to do… two seconds later the bike was on it’s side and I was on the pavement. My knee got scraped up. My pinkie got a little bruised and I was shaken up, but I seemed alright. Erik got my bike back up while I surveyed the situation.

I couldn’t tell you what happened. It didn’t make sense to me. I guess I downshifted before slowing enough and maybe tried to enter the turn too quickly after that. But really the skid happened while I was going straight. I didn’t really downshift in a turn. Did I throttle it just as I engaged the lower gear? Was I not going slow enough? Did I go all the way to 1st gear instead of 2nd?

One thing is for sure, the nice fresh black top on that parking lot didn’t help. It may look nice but it was plenty slick. Also, I’m very glad I was wearing a helmet. The accident happened at a very slow speed, less than 10 miles per hour, but when I landed on the ground, my helmet scraped along the pavement for a few inches. My visor got scraped pretty badly, but it can be replaced. If I hadn’t been wearing the helmet, I would have had to go to the emergency room, I’m pretty sure.

My knee feels remarkably well actually. I’m lucky that it wasn’t worse. It was a small scrape and I think it should heal pretty well. There doesn’t seem to be any swelling or internal damage, just a scrape. My jeans are ruined, they weren’t much protection even at this low of a speed. I’m going to want to get some riding pants soon.

After a pit stop to Erik’s house to put a bandage on my knee, we headed out again to another parking lot, this one with a very old, dry black top and I drove around for an hour or so. I can tell I’m going to have trouble when it comes to the tight u-turn you have to make for the test, but I should pass. I put it off until next week though. I didn’t quite feel good enough after the spill to take it yesterday.

This is what my new bike looks like

That is not my bike, but it’s pretty similar. I will get a picture up next week, once I get it home. It’s a 1994 Kawasaki Vulcan 500, a little bigger than I thought I would get, but it’s a very comfortable bike and doesn’t feel hard to maneuver. I think I can grow with this bike for some time. If I had gone with a Rebel or some similar 250, I think I would get annoyed with it after a few weeks.

I test drove it yesterday in the parking lot of the dealer. It’s a strange feeling riding a motorcycle at this stage. It’s exciting and fun, but it’s also rather scary. I know just enough about riding a motorcycle to do some damage. I can get it going, shift gears, make decent turns, etc. But it doesn’t feel anything like second nature yet. My body doesn’t quite know what to do when things go wrong. For instance, it’s happened a few times that I roll the throttle the wrong way when I’m trying to stop. Fortunately, I’m squeezing the clutch and hitting the breaks too, so I haven’t lost control, but still it doesn’t feel very good to hear that engine rev when you are trying to bring the bike to a halt. I’m confident that control will come with time and practice, but lets just say I’m not 100% confident that it will come.

Once you decide to get a bike, people love to tell you about accidents. Everyone seems to have a motorcycle accident story, and this doesn’t help with the convolution of emotions that I’m feeling as a new rider. One friend was riding on the back of a guy’s bike, they got clipped in a curve on a mountain road and dropped the bike. She was lucky that the only real injury was a very badly scraped knee, but we are talking a very badly scraped knee. Another friend hit a small oil slick on a curve, when the oil patch ended, so did his riding career, with a high side fall (I think that’s the right terminology), that banged up his shoulder and back. Most of the stories are second and third hand stories, but it seems ingrained in our collective conscious that motorcycles are dangerous things. Perhaps in 10,000 years, children will be born with an innate fear of motorcycles similar to how most people seem to be afraid of rats and snakes and spiders.

I’m determined to be as safe a rider as I can be. I’m anxious to get my license so that I can practice by myself. I’m sure there will be many afternoons and evenings ahead of me where I just practice various skills over and over, until all the different operations do become second nature. The fear is part of the process. It’s a good thing, at least in small doses. It keeps you focused. Maybe I’ll never fully master my fear of riding, but perhaps I shouldn’t. According to a book I’m reading, how long you have been riding seems to correlate with how likely you are to have an accident. Obviously, brand new riders are much more likely to have an accident, but there is another spike in accidents when people have been riding for two or three years. Perhaps that is when riders start to lose some of that healthy fear. If a rider makes it to four years, however, their accident rates go way down. Perhaps that’s when experience is the trump card. We’ll see if I make it that far as a motorcyclist.

When you drive around central Illinois in the summer, motorcycles are everywhere. Harleys seem to be the standard, but there are plenty of others as well, including big cruisers as well as gangs of 20 something Ninja riders screaming through downtown Peoria at night. For me, there seems to be a dearth of things to do around here, but I’m beginning to realize that if you live here, you need to make your own fun. Boating, dirt bikes and street bikes are all popular choices.

Last summer I started thinking about getting my license, but I didn’t get around to it. At the local community college, they offer a subsidized class to learn to ride. They even give you the actual test at the end of the class, so you can get your license without any further hoops to jump through. The problem is that the class is such a good deal that all the spots fill up many months in advance. If you don’t sign up for one by the beginning of May, odds are you might not get in one. My schedule is so hard to predict, that it was close to impossible to pick a weekend to take the class.

I kept thinking to myself, there must be a place where you can sign up for basic riding classes a week or two before. Sure, you will probably pay considerably more for private classes, but there has got to be a market for people like me who find themselves in the middle of the riding season and can’t get into the ones held at community colleges. Sure enough there are two such places in Chicago, Motorcycle Riding School and Ride Chicago. There may be more. I went with Motorcycle Riding School mainly because their class fit into my schedule (the whole thing takes place over a weekend) and because they had decent reviews on yelp.

Once I had decided to go however, there was a lot to do. Step one was getting my permit. In illinois, getting your class M license (for motorcycles 150cc or bigger), requires two tests. First you take a written test (actually a test via computer terminal). When you complete that, you have a permit where you can ride in the company of someone who has had their class M license for a year or more. The second exam would be an actual riding exam. This is the one that happens at the end of a basic riding class typically. You don’t have to take a class, you can have a state examiner give you the test right at the DMV if you choose. If you have some experience, you might choose that route, but if you want a break on your insurance rates or you are like me and have next to no experience riding, a basic class is the way to go.

Next I had to get some gear. For the class, they want you to have over the ankle boots, gloves, eye protection, long pants at least a long sleeve shirt to cover all your skin. Before the class, I also got a leather jacket. I didn’t end up using the jacket much in class however. It was hot and the ratio to standing around to riding was too much for a heavy coat. As you can imagine, this turned out to be a little more expensive than I first thought. If you decide to get a motorcycle, you may end up spending several hundreds of dollars on riding gear. It’s probably easy to spend well over a thousand dollars just on a helmet, boots, leather pants and jacket and gloves. Please note that the helmet isn’t necessary for the class. They provide those. They also told us to bring something to protect our eyes, but most of the helmets had a visor so that wasn’t strictly necessary.

The class began at 8am at their office on Halsted Street. There were a few tables set up and most of the students were there when I arrived. The participants were there for different reasons. One young guy had bought a Ninja that spring, but hadn’t learned how to ride it on his own. Another guy had bought a Harley and was taking the class with his dad. One woman was there because she was tired of riding on the back of her husband’s bike and wanted one of her own. Another wanted to ride, but her friends refused to let her until she had taken the class.

Why was I there? I still have a little trouble with that question. I wanted to learn something new, develop a new skill. Motorcycles scare me a bit, and I like facing fears. Having a bike, might provide me with a much needed pastime for the many days and nights still ahead of me here. Perhaps I bought into the idea of being a biker and screaming down the road with a girl holding on tight behind me. Whatever the reason, I was here, and already several hundred dollars invested in this new activity. I intended to follow through, take the class and get a bike.

The first day started out slow. We watched some videos and read through a booklet. The teaching method seemed to be, assign some questions from the booklet and have us look up the answers. Then go over the questions and answers together. Then after every section, we would watch a video. Some of the information was helpful, but I couldn’t help feeling a bit disappointed. There didn’t seem to be much actual teaching going on. We forged through the questions, trying to get done as fast as possible, so we could end up on the range with the bikes.

Once we got out on the actual riding area, the class picked up. They took us in baby steps at first, learning how to ease out on the clutch, finding the friction zone, power walking the bike and finally getting it into first gear and riding it across the parking lot. Very soon after that, we were riding and turning, shifting into 2nd and then 3rd gear, practicing stopping, slowing before curves, and more. The exercises in the first day were all quite easy to accomplish and by the end I was quite confident that I would soon be riding the streets of Peoria on my new bike.

The second day was a little bumpier. The classroom instruction was stronger. We had two instructors and the more experienced one was in the classroom. The material was more involved and practical the second day, but also the guy was a better teacher, actually going over the material more carefully than the previous day. When we got out on the range is when things started to get a little rough for me.

The first exercise of day two consisted mainly of doing figure eights in a small boxed area. I had a real tough time with this. The first few times, I couldn’t do it without putting my foot down. And the last few times, I couldn’t stay in the box. It ended up cutting into my confidence a bit and I started musing once again, “What am I doing here? Do I really want to do this? Or am I going to spend a couple thousand on a bike that I only use a few times? Or worse am I going to get myself run over by a minivan the first time I’m out on the actual road?”

By the third exercise, I was quite distracted and in my head. We were practicing stopping in a curve. We had to start from a dead stop, shift up to 2nd gear almost immediately, go into a curve after about 20 feet, then straighten up, hit both breaks and downshift back to 1 simultaneously. It was too many balls in the air for me. After the third rather choppy attempt, the teacher asked me if I was alright. I nodded and lied, “No, I’m fine,” and headed for the back of the line.

I’m not sure if quitting actually crossed my mind (one woman quit at the end of day 1, despite doing quite well in the class), but I quickly got a hold of myself. I reminded myself about how well I had done the day before, that I really wanted to succeed and become a skilled and safe rider. I quickly went through the steps of completing the task in my head and got myself to the starting box. The teacher signaled to me to go and I nailed it, completing the task perfectly. From that point on, I did quite well, completing all of the exercises easily. It was a good lesson on how important it is to be focused and confident while riding.

The last part of the day was going over the actual riding test. We couldn’t take it right that afternoon. Instead, they arrange for a state inspector to do tests every Friday. I’m not sure yet if I’m going to return to Chicago to take the test or not. Anyway, the test doesn’t look very difficult. The cone weaving is a little tight and they want you to do a u-turn in a 20 foot space, the thing that gave me the most trouble from the class. I’ll want to practice that some more for sure. Still it looks like you can make several small mistakes and still pass. The most important things seem to be, don’t put your foot down, don’t stall the bike and whatever we do, don’t drop it. That’s an automatic fail. In two days no one dropped their bike, so I’m not too nervous about that.

So now I’m stuck in a bit of a chicken and egg dilemma. It will be easier to get my license if I had my bike already, and it will be easier to get my bike when I have my license. And it would be easier to do both if I had a schedule with more time available during the day. It might be weeks before I can take the test. In the mean time, I’m looking for a bike.

My goal is to get a small street bike for under $2000, a used Rebel, GZ 250 or similar. I’ll ride that for a year or so and if I like it, I’ll get a bigger bike for longer rides.

UPDATE 8/6: I’m officially over the Honda Rebel. I took another one out yesterday for a test and I didn’t like it all. I think that I’d get a bit annoyed with it very quickly. It’s a bit too small for me, my legs feel cramped on it, and I’m skeptical that it will feel good when I get close to highway speeds on it.