Aside from the building of my electric truck, this is my latest form of motorized transportation. Purchased in April of 2000 for about $2600, this was my first almost-new vehicle. It had just over 1900 miles on it when purchased. After dealing with the headaches of owning used vehicles, it was great to make the transition to new, reliable technology. At a dry weight of only 304 pounds, the Ninja is real fun to ride through the twisties. It's also nice to have a vehicle that only sips the gasoline. I'm seeing an average of 65 mile per gallon on my commute. In June of 2002, I saw the 36,000-mile mark on the odometer! If you do the math, you'll see that over 34,000 miles of this was by me... in just over two years! Aside from being my daily transportation to school and work, this bike is simply too fun to keep bottled up in the garage! Two years ago, there was no way I could have predicted doing 17,000 miles a year on a motorcycle! Now, however, I couldn't see myself living without a sportbike in the garage!

Despite the fact that small engines like the one in the Ninja 250 typically last only 30,000-50,000 miles, I have yet to see any indication that this bike is ready to give up! Not too long ago, I had the bike at Firebird Raceway to run at the Friday Night Drags. With 35,000 miles on the engine at that point, I still ran a very respectable best time of 15.425 seconds at just under 82 miles per hour... all of this with a stock airbox and exhaust!

If you're familiar with motorcycles, you may notice a few small indications in some of my pictures that the bike has indeed been layed down. I have actually dumped the bike twice in separate traffic incidents. Neither crash resulted in any bodily harm or any damage to another vehicle, but the second crash did some rather large damage to the plastics on my bike. Rather than pay a great deal to buy new fairings, I decided to fur my bike! Browsing my Ninja 250 pictures, you'll see pictures reflecting both the "green" and the "cow."