I've had Yamaha's to Suzuki's to Kawasaki's to Yamaha's to Honda's and then back to Yamaha's since forever. My wife and I began riding together in the mid 90's on a Yamaha Venture Royale that was what I thought was the best Japanese touring bike made until 1993 when they quit making the darned thing and came back in 1999 with some cruiser style tourer that made me grimace. As for the Venture, aged plastic bodywork with 1980's technology did not hold up as well as those crafty designers thought, I suspect, and as I began to find myself without the critical ability to attach major body parts to the frame adequately, the perfect tourer began to look less perfect. I sold her to someone who could hopefully come up with better ideas on how to keep the stress fractures around key attachment points minimized and relieve the every stop walk-around on the "missing part pool". So I bought a Jeep thinking that the top off would come close to the enjoyment of the open air transportation gap that I was going to experience and that my wife would find the same.
Reality bites. It wasn't even a close second placement to riding. So the Jeep was sold and the search for a replacement tourer began.
Our first: 1999 BMW K1200LTI
Drove 600 round-trip miles to look at this incredible machine. When the official color of the bike is "Champagne", how could you not buy class? We bought her with 76,000 miles on the clock and 4 years later sold her with 114,000 miles. Our first Beemer, and I'm sold on German engineering even with that *^;;#;@$^*%$! final drive thing. Been there, done that, got the t-shirt and experience with it. Still loved her, selling her was hard but Mrs. RedTigre said only one allowed in the stable and we just bought a newer one with half the milage and a heated seat and backrest for the Mrs.
Our second: 2000 BMW K1200LTC
Got our second out of the Lake Washington area while our 99 was down for a finaldrivendectomy. We thought we'd be out of riding for 5 weeks and so decided to buy this one, repair and sell the other, and not be out any riding time. Good choice on our part, we put 7000 miles on it from July 09 until just before the snow hit December 2009. Already put near 500 miles in 2010 at 38 degrees average, so it looks like we are off to a good riding season start.
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