Gotta love the morning commute.

It was a great morn­ing to take the detour off of 280 and take Sky­line to Page Mill to work. Nor­mal­ly I hate stop­ping to take pic­tures, but I just felt the need to make every­one jeal­ous, so here:

	Bay from Page Mill View from Page Mill Road		South Bay from Page Mill Anoth­er view from Page Mill Road
	Page Mill Page Mill Road		Page Mill Guzzi Moto Guzzi parked at the side of Page Mill

In oth­er news, I picked up my jack­et and new wind­screen yes­ter­day. The jack­et has had reflec­tive tape sewn in to the stripes on the back, which is a good thing for vis­i­bil­i­ty. The wind­screen’s clamps would­n’t even come close to fit­ting on the Guzzi’s han­dle­bars, which was a lit­tle bit of a dis­ap­point­ment con­sid­er­ing the wind­screen was sold to me for the Guzzi.

A rea­son­able, ratio­nal per­son would have just tak­en the wind­screen back. But is that what I did? No! I installed it on the bike I don’t ride. I’d been the­o­riz­ing that a wind­screen on the Vira­go could make a huge dif­fer­ence, and that if I am to pass this along to some­one else that they would want a wind­screen on it. And darn was I ever right. I did­n’t find a new top speed with the wind­screen on it, but the free­way was no longer as dicey a propo­si­tion as it used to be on the Vira­go. I acceller­at­ed much more quick­ly and got up to my top speed with a lot less windup. I put­tered down 280 last night at 80 – 85mph with­out much dif­fi­cul­ty. Not that I could have gone any faster, but on the Vira­go with­out a wind­screen, 80 – 85mph used to be a “fly her apart!” expe­ri­ence. In fact, it feels a lot more dan­ger­ous to ride, in a good, going fast, got­ta be care­ful not to over­do it kind of way.

Anoth­er dif­fer­ence I noticed was how much sim­pler doing head-checks is with a wind­screen. Every­one tells me how aero­dy­nam­i­cal­ly per­fect the RF-1000 hel­met is, but it’s real­ly only true when fac­ing for­ward. When I turn my head I sud­den­ly feel the force of the wind. The first time I got on the free­way and checked the lane next to me, I thought my head was gonna come off. I’m a lit­tle more used to it now, but with the wind­screen there was no dif­fi­cul­ty what­so­ev­er. Just look, and move my head back. Nice.

So I guess I’ll just tack the price of the wind­screen on to the sell­ing price of the Vira­go, but I’ll be glad that wind­screen is there the next time the Guzzi is in the shop and I have to take the Vira­go to work.

Next: to find a wind­screen that I can attach to the Guzzi.