I’ll be doing my first run to Orlando and back tomorrow, which is a little sooner than I expected, so I’ll be using the gear that I have on hand. Later on, I plan to get some better gear, because, as you will see, my gear is a bit old.
Yep, that’s my old gear. The best and most important part of it is the helmet. Yeah, I don’t have to wear a helmet in Florida, but then I don’t have to turn off the main power in my house when I’m working on the electrical wiring either, but I would be pretty stupid not to.
The rest of my gear is so, so. The suit is a two piece Dainese that I got used about ten years ago. The good part about it is that it’s leather and the pants zip up to the jacket, so when I go sliding across the asphalt I’m not going to lose any skin. Sadly, there are a few bad things too.
- It doesn’t have any armor at all, so when I hit something, it’s going to hurt.
- It doesn’t have vents, so wearing this during a Florida summer is crazy hot.
- When it rains, it get’s pretty wet, and whatever that I’m wearing underneath the suit turns red thanks to the die leaching out of the leather.
As you can see from the label, this suit is pretty old school, but hey, it’s made in Italy, so at least it looks good!
My gloves and boots are bad, and I need to replace them pretty much as soon as possible.
The worst part about the gloves, besides that big hole in the side, is that they don’t have any padding. The handles on a Ninja are hard plastic, and the riding posture has me pressing down rather hard. As a result, I’m going to get some sore palms if I don’t replace these soon. My previous Ninja had some soft foam handles. Perhaps I’ll add that to my new Ninja some time in the future.
One of the biggest problems I have with riding on the highway is dealing with the wind noise that comes from having air passing by the bottom of my helmet at 70 mph. I’m not sure how common this is since either a windshield or a short neck could prevent that from happening. I have neither, and as a result, after 30 minutes of highway speeds, my ears 
are ringing for the rest of the day. There are a couple of solutions to this problem. The first is to wear earplugs. A variation is to wear noise obstructing ear buds, like these, however, the law in Florida states that you can only wear an earphone in one ear, and only for a communications device. I.e. not for listening to music. Earplugs are allowed.
The other solution is to prevent the air from getting under the helmet. I could get something 
like a Wind Jammer II, but instead, I use a hood. The trick here is to pull it all the way down, so that my head is sticking out where my face normally looks out, and then turn it around so that most of the fabric is in front and there is very little fabric behind. That way I can lift my head without any obstruction at the back of my neck. Then I don my helmet and shove the fabric in the gap under my chin. Doing that keeps the bugs of my throat, the wind out of my helmet and keeps my neck warm (which isn’t all that great in summer).
That’s it for my gear. I plan on getting better gloves, boots, a riding suit (at least a better jacket), and a rain suit that will work in Florida’s heat.
There’s just a couple more things that I have, just in case all that gear doesn’t do the trick: A decent health insurance:
And if things get really bad, there’s always this:
Hopefully, it won’t come to that. As long as I have decent gear and I ride defensively, I should be able to keep my organs for so long that they won’t be any use to anyone when I’m done with them!
Empulse Experience 