Best ride of the season, ever!

I've been couped up in the office for seemingly forever.

Due to the holiday i was in overtime as i didn't work monday (never do) so my normal schedule got me in over hours. My boss said i needed to offset the hours but we were too busy. I got all my work caught up and asked to take off early yesterday and amazingly he said yes!

I had rode to work so I took off.

Unfortunately, my oil light came on just as I was heading out the parking lot and got on it. I was immediately faced with a :( :( :( :( on my face. The ticking on the valve train still bothered me as I figured it was just on the looser side of things (much like the 250) but wanted a second opinion...

Off to the Ducati dealership I went. Handed the keys to one of the mechanics and asked if he could ride it and give a second opinion (these are really the only people i'm willing to hand my keys over to). He came back and said the ticking was normal and i'm just not used to the desmodue (remember that i bought this bike at a point where i had no idea what maintenance was done) and the noisy valvetrain, assured me it was fine (second person to say that).

Turns out the oil light was the oil pressure sensor having corrosion... same thing that caused the death of my turn signal flasher (this bike apparently was either owned in the valley at some point, or the coast). got it fixed, worked fine.

FINALLY... with everything out of the way I took off. I decided to keep my backback on and my work phone and say "SCREW IT! We're hitting the mountain!"

I headed out of town and hit the backroad twisties and on my way ended up passing a guy in a bmw who was really chugging right along... (that comes into play later) but thought nothing of it and kept going. 13 miles of twisties later i'm in town... unfortunately it's hunting season here and i hit a roadblock of campers coming down the hill heading into town. No openings, no chance to fit in. Up along side me comes the BMW guy with his left turn signal on. My thought was "WTF? I'm turning left... what a dick." and he rolls down the window. I'm thinking "Uh oh..." and he first kind of looks mad and says "You were driving WAY too fast man!" and i said "Eh, sorry about that!" and he smiled and lit a cigarette and said "Yeah that's ok I'd do the same thing if my car were that fast, besides, that's a gorgeous bike, enjoy it!" i said "Hey thank you! Nice BMW!" and then he told me to go ahead. So we waited for like another awkward 5 minutes.... and finally got into traffic.

I passed my way through town and headed out to my favorite road. Normally there is gravel, trees in the middle of the road, sometimes boulders and huge rocks, and dirt... but on the way up, there was none of that... apparently the road had been entirely cleaned off for the hunters. I stayed pretty conservative until halfway up which is where it usually transitions into garbage... and my favorite twisties came up, CLEAN ROAD! I started dipping right in and having a blast. No traffic, no gravel, no trees, no rocks, clean road... twisties, CLEAN ROAD! TWISTIES! CLEAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAN FUCKING ROAAAAAAAAAAAAD!

Almost 30 miles up the mountain later I could feel my knees starting to bother me. The amount of fun I was having, plus the amount of focus and i'm going to assume adrenaline from not having ridden in a while and being in a state of having so much thrill really seemed to make it feel minimal. Back down the mountain I was REALLY starting to feel it. By the time I got home and hopped off the bike, it nailed me and I could BARELY wheel the sucker into the garage.

One hell of a ride. Not once in my entire LIFE has that road EVER been clean the whole way up.

If a perfect ride consisted of miles of twisties, a clean road, mountain twisties, and no traffic (ok maybe 1 or 2 hunters on the way up).... THAT.... was the perfect ride.

Now I'm really sore today but look back going "WHOOOHOOOO!"