Goodbye Ural

Within a week of selling my Goldwing, the Ural was gone.

I had listed both the big Honda and the Russian hack on their respective dedicated forums (fora?). The GearUp had technically been up for sale since before the Scooter Cannonball last Summer. However, I had not tried very hard at all to sell it. One person had reached out to me long ago but I missed the initial message due to prep for the Cannonball and, by the time I returned the message, he had found one elsewhere.

When I finally decided to try to sell these bikes, I posted them everywhere. Craigslist isn’t the place it once was and OfferUp is mostly useless in my area. My wife posted them on FB Marketplace since I don’t have anything META for reasons. I even paid to list them on CycleTrader.  Tire kickers and people who aren’t even bothered enough to show up to kick the tires abound on these sites.

Surprisingly, the Adventure Rider forum’s ‘for sale’ section doesn’t have restrictions on which types of bikes can be listed. I listed both there and that is where they ended up being sold. A guy reached out to me there and happened to live in the same town. He said he wasn’t sure whether he wanted it but he was close enough that he’d like to come take a look. I invited him over to see it.

The bike wasn’t exactly presentable. I had disassembled some of it to buff the black paint and the battery was dead. Still, he came over and liked it. He wasn’t ready to buy right then. His biggest reservation was the questionable future of parts availability now that the mothership isn’t making the bikes anymore.

I didn’t expect anything more from that interaction except to meet a neighbor. When the new battery came, I sent him a video I took of the first start-up for another seller along with a message. While he was looking at it originally, he had inquired about whether the CEL had ever come on. It had not. That was, until I put in the new battery. For the first time, a new light was on the dash.

We were preparing for July 4th activities the day before when he sent me a text asking what the deal was with the bike. My response was only that I had not yet had time to troubleshoot and it was still sitting in pieces in the garage. He made an offer on it as-is for slightly less than I was asking and I accepted. You get to a point where you just don’t want to deal with it anymore and I had arrived at my destination.

My wife told me later that she was a little sad when she watched him ride away on it. I think we had more invested in the idea of using it than actually riding it. Otherwise, it would have had more than 2521 miles in the 5 years I owned it.

With the Goldwing and now the Ural gone, I’m down to two and they are both sub-300cc scooters. What a difference a couple weeks make.