I have a few reflections to share, based on my all too-brief ride home, and a few blasts up and down the highway. To summarize, bike technology has come a long way, baby.

Though I have ridden for 14 years now, I have never owned anything newer than an '84. Having owned numerous performance modified 60's - 70's commuters and road-burners, I had, up to this point, purposefully kept away from test riding modern (ie anything newer than 1990) bikes so that I would not have to deny the temptation to buy anything more expensive than what is within my means, or to shatter my desire to live with, nurture, and enjoy what many others would consider to be 'obsolete junk'. However, that said, for the past two years, the Bandit 1200 had been catching my eye, as it was basically the evolutionary modern development of my current '78 Suzuki GS1000 Cafe, a bike I quite enjoyed except for reliability and questionable handling abilities, and is quite probably the cheapest modern affordable replacement available as a current production model. Perhaps this was more of a common sense approach to reliability and enjoyability, versus getting to know the parts counter guys REAL well in order to research obscure microfiches for me, as has been my experience since i hopped on, and hopped up my first bike.

This general gut feeling that a need for radical change in riding tackle was in order, was recently reinforced after an unpreventable mechanical snafu at Deals Gap 2K. This incident had side-lined the bike for a day of repairs (and yes, i had brought my box of tools - with an old bike, you can never be too prepared). Through a haze of cursing during the repair, and during the customary trip to the parts counter soon after my return home, I got to thinking that perhaps 'modern' was not so bad a goal to aspire to.  The trip to order yet another round of parts developed into a serious session of tire kicking in the dealership showroom. Nothing really attracted my attention in the selection of new bikes, but in the basement 'dungeon' of Burlington Cycle City sat a '99 Suzuki Bandit 1200-s, with just enough kilometers on the odometer to indicate that the bikes break-in period was over. After talking to Todd (one of the sales guys there - he's seen me come in and out for years to look at the bikes, and is probably quite sick of wiping the drool off of the Bandits, after i leave the premises), and doing a bit of haggling on the price, which went heavily in my favor, found my signature on the dotted line in very short order. Some people might wonder what went through my mind at the time, but I bought the bike without so much as a test ride, or even hearing it run. I had read enough test reports and magazine comparison articles to pretty well know what to expect. Once purchased, I told the manager at the bike shop, I would be back for it when I made room in the garage through a surplus big-boy's toy liquidation sale.

A few weeks later, room was made.  A call was placed to the shop, 'get the bike ready'. The night before I was due to pick it up, was the worst.  I haven't felt that much anticipation since I was a little kid on Christmas morning at 3:00 am, waiting for everyone to get up so I could open my presents. The bike was picked up, and off I went, on my first meandering ride home. This was a revelation. At one of the first stoplights, I launched away in the spirited fashion that I am used to with the old GS, and realized that my angle of altitude had markedly changed, ground and front tire having parted company by about 6 inches. Time to drag the old throttle action back a few paces, before this new bike demonstrated something else unexpected. Approaching the first real corner along the route, I dropped down a gear and got ready to muscle it through the corner in typical GS fashion, after all this is a Big Bike (tm), right?...  uhh, wrong. No work to do, The bike just laid itself down on command and railed through the corner. I'm gonna get chubby and outta shape, if this is an indicator of the effort required to ride this bike.  No wallowing, no desire on the part of the bike to do a stall and pancake halfway through the corner, no nothing, just 'yawn, give me more'. After a bit more tooling about on local town roads, I got on the highway, and turned up the wick a bit to try to find that infamous Bandit 4,000 rpm buzz, that I have heard so much about in reviews. I found it alright, and it is a joke. While I could detect a certain amount of vibration in the handlebars, it was nowhere near as horrible as all the reviewers have made it out to be. The GS has a 4,000 rpm buzz also, but this is a real man's buzz, compared to that Bandit's wussy girly-bike buzz. The GS vibrates so much in that rev range, that after a half-hours riding, your hands are rendered useless for anything resembling fine motor control dexterity, by three-quarters of an hour, they are in full siesta-mode. I have developed Carpal Tunnel Syndrome that i attribute to this bike's vibration - trust me, the Bandit has no problem whatsoever in comparison. The Bandit reviewers should be required to pay a half-hours penance on the old GS to find out what real vibration is all about, rather than maligning the Bandit for this 'flaw'.

While I would like to keep the old '78 GS1000, space considerations dictate otherwise. There are a few areas in which the Bandit in present stock form is lacking in comparison to the GS and other assorted bikes that I have owned.  First and foremost, the Bandit is so refined, smooth, and well behaved, that it almost seems to be lacking a personality. There is nothing there at present to curse, cajole or praise when required, the bike just performs as i expect it to. Gone are the miscellaenious rattles, clicks and clunks that send you to scanning for missing bolts lost to vibration, and noticeably absent is the exhaust cacophony that i have become so used to, with all of my bikes that have lost the stock exhaust to the ravages of rust. This bike just purrs.  With all the aftermarket goodies and hop-ups available for this beastie, however, I am sure it will develop a hopefully pleasant personality of it's own, in time.

In closing, I certainly am looking forward to future runs with the new bike to Deals Gap and other distant rides, as well as a renewed desire to chase down some of the local roads at a pace that this bike is more capable of, over my previous assortment of 'old school' rides. I'll now say sorry to all those who have passed out on their keyboards, reading this saga, and to those who hit delete in the middle of the first paragraph. To those who stuck through reading this, however, I hope I have gotten across at least a small measure of my amazement on just how much bike technology has advanced and refined, in just a relatively few short years. Before you discount a bike that some reviewer has slagged in an article, take into perspective what the choices were to previous generations of riders, and realize that even the worst rated bike of today, still probably rates and performs far better than what technology had available to offer even fifteen years ago. This, I have just now learned, after 14 years of riding yesterday's bikes, today.