I don’t know what that is in Celcius… but for a guy from Toronto it means “damn hot”.
Another weekend in Phoenix, another bike: this time a Kawasaki Ninja 636: my first inline-4 rental: not as comfortable as other bikes but I wanted to try something with a bit more get-up-and-go 🙂 Today it was a trip out to Prescott and back, with a side-trip to Jerome since the roads around there are so much fun!
I passed by lots of fields and ranches, and since I was ready to stop for a drink anyways I pulled over to visit some 4-legged friends. When I parked the bike they were all laying down.. but quickly got up as I walked over to their fence. I think they could smell my leather gloves…
The first curvy bits I hit on the way to Prescott were climbing the hills to a place called Yarnell. The road kept twisting back on itself, so there were several good places to look back down across the plains below… where I was a few minutes ago:
Closer to Prescott the road had more and more corners… many marked as low speed (but you could still get around them much faster 🙂 ) – many had guardrails since if you strayed only a few feet off the road you’d be falling for quite some time before hitting bottom…
This bike felt a lot different from my SV. For everything you read about sport 600s I was expecting something with a lot more bite… but at low RPM it’s very docile: it doesn’t pull hard at all: my SV “feels” much stronger driving at less-than-highway speeds. But at high speeds it was a different story. When my bike was running out of steam, the 636 was just at the bottom edge of it’s powerband. Without listing exact numbers… on the 636 I was 25km/h over the highest speed I _ever_ reached on my SV and was still accelerating. If my jacket hadn’t been flapping in the wind so hard that my glasses were rattling around in my helmet I could have let it go faster: wow!
Now my two trackdays made sense: on a SV650S I was pulling away from other riders on 600s coming out of corners (mind you, this was the beginners group)… but they would blow my doors off by the end of the straights. If you can get used to revving the guts out these things they can really move!
After passing through Prescott on my way to Jerome… I found more friends!
I took a look down a couple short dirt roads… just to see what I could see. But I didn’t really have the bike for riding on gravel, so I only have a couple pics of the surrounding hills… and what must be the most remote mailboxes in Arizona!
Finally I turned around in the rest area just outside Jerome, then made my way back to the I17, then South back to the hotel in Phoenix. Another day of exploring, and home safe…
