Ninjette

Here is the Ninjette in all her green glory. I had this motorcycle for two years, and what an interesting two years those were. I was 23 and had just started to explore my interest in the world of things automotive. You could label me a tomboy growing up, I liked bugs and snakes and kept frogs as pets. I would rummage through my mom's gardens and overturn every rock she had thoughtfully arranged in order to find beetles and crickets. As I got older I retired the bugs for cars. I'll still catch a spider and put it outside if need be, I just don't go digging through dirt anymore to find them.

No one in my family really shares this interest with me (no one really shared my interest for bugs either though). At some point my mother had a somewhat life crisis and purchased an S2000. She couldn't drive a standard though. She paid someone big bucks to teach her, but she never got further than the roundabout in the center of our neighborhood. I don't think she ever learned to drive it and it sat through at least one winter in its parking spot.

One day I decided I wanted to learn how to ride a motorcycle. Honestly, I really hadn't thought about what could go wrong, and I'm not even talking about crashing it. Bikes are big, and heavy. On two wheels it's easy to simply fall over while standing. The Ninjette wasn't remotely close to a Harley, but it still weighed in at 375lbs. I can attest to its heaviness because one time it did simply fall on me in a driveway. Other things no one talks to you about is what's on the ground; sand, loose gravel, and oil can cause for unexpected falls. I can attest to this too when I tried pulling into a dirt driveway and the bike came to a slow, sinking halt as the front tire sank into the soft ground. Luckily for me I walked away from both these incidents with nothing but a bruised ego.

Then there was that time I did actually crash it. After that I think I said no more. I sold it last year to a girl in her teens, her dad accompanied her and was super supportive (her whole family rode). It's that time of year now where everyone is out riding, it make me a little nostalgic. When I took my motorcycle course they had us on these puny little 125cc Honda's, I rocked the training, even mastered the figure eight in the enclosed box. I think what killed it for me was that I had no one to ride with. One of my coworkers (who owned crotch-rockets for years) told me I should have ridden with a group of people, it would have made me less nervous and I would have learned from watching everyone else. I think he was definitely right.

Perhaps down the road I'll try again. Until then, I'm happy with my four-wheels.