Well, it rained today, but I rode in to work anyway. I was getting tired of waiting. :) The scooter handles reasonably well in the rain (it’s wind that’s not much fun – and that’s true rain or not). My rain gear also works well (Joe Rocket stuff; though I don’t have a link), and I’m confident it would do well even without the fairing that’s integral to the bike.
However, my summer gloves are no fun in the rain. The leather soaked through, and it was in the lower 50’s today, so my fingers were cold once I finished the roughly 20 mile ride in. At about 65 MPH for most of the way. I didn’t switch to my winter gloves, since they’re just too bulky (though they do have a nice rain-proof pull-over mitten cover thingie). One of the trips tomorrow will hopefully be to tyhe local Motorcycle shops to see about finding some between-winter-and-summer gloves. I’ll start at Sportland (the metric bike shop) and then probably go next door to the Harley dealership.
I don’t usually like Harley riding gear, since it’s often more about form than function. This is largely from just visual inspection, though I do have first-hand experience with their cold-weather gloves. All of them that I’ve tried absolutely suck in truly cold weather; my poor frozen fingers and I got sick of returning them after the second attempt, andI ran through al of the options the local dealer had (which were quite a few – including the ones which were reviewed as being Harley’s “best”). They probably do have a decent mid-weight glove, though, and they do a pretty good job of getting the “looks cool” part right. :) The cold weather gloves they had probably just sucked because a big portion of the Harley crowd just like to look cool when it’s warm out; it’s not so much about riding. And the hard-core guys must just already have warm gloves. ;)
Or maybe I should just get the miniature hand grip fairings and some heated handgrips, and forget about needing so many kinds of gloves…
