Ambling around

The weather forecast had been for solid rain from Friday, but it turned out to be really fine. However now this week is forecast for solid rain from Friday again. I suspect this is because my new bike got delayed for a week, so the rain moved forward to this Friday to piss me off...
Anyhow we made the most of the weather on the Sunday, and went for a trip right to the southern-most point of Chiba, ...

Spotted this dude today, riding a trial bike with plates, indicator, lights etc. It's a pretty good ride as far as novelty effect goes, but after that it's just plain stupid. I mean, there is nothing to sit on so he was just standing up the whoooole time

I was looking through a magazine and came across an advert for the driving school I went to for my bike license. In Japan, a driving school is an actual place, with classrooms, blackboards etc, and outside there is a set of dinky little roads to drive around, since you can't use public roads. The other way to get a license is just to go to the testing center and sit their (insanely difficult) test, but I had no choice but to get mine at a school since: ...

There's no doubt about it, this is one mint scooter. As the rest of the caption says "Take it easy, for delightful time" you know this is a ride you'll enjoy.

I finally managed to get everything done properly for the VFR, and it is on it's way to me at last. As Murphy would have it though, we are right at the beginning of tsuyu, aka the rainy season. The forecast for the next three days is full-on rain, and if history is any ...

These bikes are road legal here. How is it in NZ? Do they even exist there?
Like a lot of things here, there seems to be a bunch of people who are absolutely crazy about them, and spend loads of money doing them up. The bodywork on this one is all kinda gold... but it didn't seem in such great shape, making me crawl along behind him waiting to get a shot at the lights.
This is a 'monkey' which is 50cc, you can see how small it is from ...

For some, customizing your scooter is just as cool as customizing a bike. This one has been done up quite a bit, have to admit I liked the brake discs.
Usually these will have a loud muffler on them - since the engine cannot be revved at will for 'look-at-me' attention like a real bike, they need to make up the difference somehow. It's kind of annoying actually because with the way the clutch works, these things are deafeningly loud even when ...

I see bikes like this fairly regularly around Tokyo. As far as I can tell it's a TW200 with a lot of modifications to make it look as bare as possible, and then the swingarm has been changed to a longer one.
I've seen hotted up bikes in the US with long swingarms (stupid looking imho), dunno if this is anything to do with that. Only reason I can think of to have a long swingarm like this (apart from trying to look different) would be to help ...

I stopped by the Shinonome Ricoland today, my wife was picking up some frame sliders for the SV. Ricoland, standing for 'riders community land' is a chain of stores selling all kinds of stuff for bikes. They sell all kinds of clothing, boots, helmets, accessories (covers, locks, GPS gizmos, intercoms etc), commonly upgraded things (mufflers, suspension, brakes, lights etc), and of course consumable like ...