Last month I took the Motorcycle Safety Foundation's Basic RiderCourse. It's a two-day course aimed at teaching absolute beginners how to ride a motorcycle. It runs a Saturday and a Sunday, and you spend about 9 hours each day in a parking lot and in a classroom, learning not only how to stay upright on a bike but how to handle emergency situations — they teach you to swerve at 20 mph, how to perform a quick stop in a turn, etc. It went well, and while I certainly didn't take to motorcycling like Mozart to music, I did feel pretty comfortable and made good progress (unlike some of the other students, unfortunately). We were unlucky (or lucky?) enough to have our course take place on a weekend where the weather was rainy, so we got to perform some of our exercises (and, indeed, the test itself at the end of the second day) in the rain.

I'll admit that I was one of the three students to drop a bike that weekend — at the beginning of the second day, just after a light rain, I was taking a turn at about 15 mph and the bike just slid right out from under me. I wasn't hurt, they fetched me a new bike, and the day went on. Now I have a good sense of where the limits are on wet pavement :) And, as I said, the test itself, given at the end of the second day, ended up occuring in the rain, and I did pretty well, so I felt somewhat vindicated.

So I passed the test on Sunday evening, which earned me my motorcycle endorsement. On Monday I bought the 2006 Kawasaki Ninja 250 that my brother had up for sale, and on Tuesday morning I flew down to Puerto Rico for two weeks. Agony! But finally I found myself back in Knoxville, and since then I've been riding that motorcycle like nobody's business (well, except for professional motorcycle riders, I guess).

The entire first week that I was back, the Civic sat idle in the garage — I was able to use the motorcycle for all of my transportation needs, which felt great. Over the course of the past week I've gotten much more comfortable on the bike, and I plan to let the Civic continue to sit as much as possible.

Today I finished my first tank of gas, and as usual, I noted the odometer reading on the receipt to calculate mileage. It was so great filling up the tank with only 4 gallons of gas — the fill-up only took about a minute. The total charge was about $16, and with 220 miles since Andrés' last fill-up, that works out to 53 mpg. Ahh. The Civic was already pretty frugal with its 32 mpg and 10-gallon tank, but it feels great to cut even that small consumption in half.

And it feels great riding, being out in the world, not traveling through it in a metal box. It's surprising how much more you experience on a motorcycle — the birdsong from the woods along the road, the moist smell as it starts to rain, or the smell of wood stoves burning as I pass through a residential neighborhood. I thought that having your head inside a helmet would be more isolating than driving in a car with the windows down, but fortunately that's not the case.

Now I just find myself looking for more reasons to get out of the house — working from home, I don't have a morning commute to provide an excuse to ride, so I have to come up with other errands to run. I've already gotten a haircut and an eye exam this week. I have been needing another garden hose...