I’ve been really impressed by both the motorcycle blog community and the ducati.ms message board. Several folks have emailed me to pass along their sympathies regarding the stolen bikes, which is quite remarkable since no one on the net knows me and Milt in a face to face sense. For all of you who have emailed and not received a response, please don’t be insulted. I will eventually get back to you… I just frankly don’t have the mental energy to re-live this over and over within each individual email just yet.

Flipping subjects, MotorMilt & I started kicking tires today. Not sure if that was a good idea or a bad one. We stopped by two different dealers, one Ducati dealer and one Aprilia dealer. Both struck me as amazingly unknowledgable about their own products. The Ducati dealer sales guy told me with a straight face that the frame on a 749s was the same as the one on a 998. Hello! The bikes are a generation apart! At the Aprilia dealer, the sales guy didn’t know how much horsepower the Millie had… Frankly I just don’t get it. Now both dealers are not exclusive and each one carries Japanese bikes as well. So I get the fact that the Italian bikes in the corner probably don’t move as well, but seriously on an average day how many people pop in to ask questions about them? Four? Five? Maybe ten… Spread that out over an average shift and it seems to me that there’s a lot of time to read up on your product. At least I would think so. Maybe I’m insane. I don’t know. What I do know is that I won’t be buying a bike from either of these cats.

From what MotorMilt & I can tell, it appears that the marketplace is a bit different right now than it was two and a half months ago when we purhcased the two stolen Ducs. There don’t seem to be any left over 2003 749 models, there do however seem to be a fair amount of left over 749s models and some 999 models. Also it seems that a couple of dealers we called don’t expect to take delivery of any new 2004 Ducati Superbikes until they release the ‘05 models. So I don’t know if this is a good time to be hunting or a bad one.

Anyway so that’s the deal right now. Hopefully I’ll hear from the insurance adjuster monday…