Veteran’s Day

I hope you enjoyed Veteran’s Day as much as I did.   Today was a good day…I spent a few hours at the CSC plant, I had a great Mexican lunch, I played around with some photos, and I went for a motorcycle ride.   Good stuff.

First, the photos.   I spotted a custom Kawasaki at the Phoenix International Motorcycle Show this past weekend that sported a custom military motif paint theme.   The Kawi 1400 and its competitor (the Suzuki Hayabusa) are awesome bikes; they had the highest top ends of any stock motorcycle ever manufactured when they were introduced about a decade ago.   I wanted a Hayabusa for a while, but the urge passed without me ever pulling the trigger.   I still like looking at these uber performance bikes, and the paint on this one really caught my eye.   It seemed like the perfect bike to show on a Veteran’s Day blog.

One thing I didn’t realize when I was photographing the bike was that it had more than a few Pro-One parts on it.  Pro-One is our parent company.   Steve pointed out the grips and the levers (they are Pro-One parts) and I grabbed a shot of them…

More good stuff.   A while back my good friend Tom told me about a photo of himself with a Powell motorcycle (one of the Mustang’s competitors) taken when he was a kid.   That caught my attention immediately, because I knew I had a relatively recent photo of Tom with his Triumph Tiger…

I wanted to do one of my before and after photos like you’ve seen on the blog in the past.   I asked Tom to bring the Powell photo to the plant, which he did a week or so ago.   The “after” photo is the one you see above (today’s Tom with his Tiger).   Here’s the “before” photo (showing Tom as a proud youngster with his Powell)…

Cool stuff, Tom!

Steve and I had a great Mexican lunch, and while we were standing in line to order our food a couple about my age were behind us.   The guy had on a USMC shirt and I asked him if he served in the Marines.   He said yes; I said Happy Veteran’s Day and I thanked him for his service.   He asked if I had served and I also said yes, and he thanked me.   It was a good encounter.

I got back to the house about 2:00 p.m. today and I had an overwhelming urge to go for a motorcycle ride.  The KLR looked like it was depressed (I had not ridden it in a long time), so I topped off the tires, fired her up, and did the Glendora Ridge Road ride.  It was, in a word, glorious.   I didn’t bring a camera, but I thought I would include a KLR photo from one of the Baja rides…

I want you to picture your RX-3 Cyclone in that photo, and I want you to imagine yourself standing alongside it.   That can be you when we do the CSC Baja run.

Looks pretty good, doesn’t it?

Later, my friends.