Luggage!

My acces­sories arrived today, and Tues­day night once again became Project Night at Turnsignal Tim’s Garage. This was­n’t any real wrench­ing, just a bit of “some assem­bly required” work to install my new lug­gage mounts and sad­dle­bags. Turns out there was one bolt miss­ing from the kit, but I fig­ure that’s not too bad from a fac­to­ry where the work­ers have wine at lunch. Tim rus­tled around and found a bolt that fit, jok­ing, “hey, it’s from a Ducati, so it’s sill an all-Ital­ian bike.”

I’m not in love with the way the lug­gage mounts look; I pre­fer hav­ing noth­ing at all next to the wheel. Still, the mounts are pret­ty unob­tru­sive so I’m not real­ly all that both­ered by them. With the 40-liter hard sad­dle­bags on, the bike looks about three times its orig­i­nal width. Now that is hard to get used to, but I’m going to love them the first time I take an overnight trip. 80 liters of lug­gage is a lot more than I should right­ful­ly need for week­end trips. But who knows? Per­haps I’ll obtain a pas­sen­ger of the sort that likes to car­ry too much stuff when trav­el­ing. That would be a Good Thing.

The elec­tric hand­warmer grips arrived too, but I’ll have to install those anoth­er day. The first step of the instruc­tions that came with them is: “Remove tank from bike” so yeah, I’ll be get­ting help with that pro­ce­dure for sure. Real­is­ti­cal­ly, I won’t be need­ing the hand­warm­ers for some time, but yes, that means that now is the time to get them installed: before I’ll want them, not after.