Endless fuel: 3133km - 3322km

Kino has a 16L tank, which apparently has a cruising range of well in excess of 300km. How do I know this? Well...

Apparently, one of the standard things you do with a new motorcycle is fill up the tank, reset the tripmeter, and then ride until you run out of gas. As ludicrous as that sounds, motorcycles are equipped with a reserve valve that is designed to take you to the next gas station when you were stupid enough to let your tank run so low that the main valve sucked air.

So since Thursday Kino and I have been happily riding on the same tank of gas. Having passed the 100km mark, I thought it was time to test the range theory. After all, with no fuel gauge an accuarate fuel estimation is critical. (Fuel gauges do exist on some motorrands, but such gauges are notoriously unreliable.)

So we rode to Boundary Bay, where I must've burned a sod of a lot of gas just practicing my slow speed manuevers. Kino's not a fan of tight U-turns, and neither am I quite frankly. I tried to emulate some of the excercises of my skills training course, and found that tight circles, U-turns, and shaloms could use some serious work. We also practiced some emergency braking, with the top speed being 60km/h. Yep, gotta lay off that back break. Left some rubber out on the road back there.

After that, a very delicious dinner of shrimp and pork kabobs and chow mein at my parent's. I must admit, I was STARVING. Funny though, Kino worked a lot harder than I did.

After dinner we headed East on the farm roads towards Langley, intent on running the tank dry and making scientific notes of the tripmeter. However, it was not to be. We kept on riding and riding, eventually getting ourselves genuinely lost on some very unfamiliar roads. (Bradner Rd. anyone?) Did see some beautiful fields and old fashion looking general stores, sponsored by Pepsi signs. It felt like being in a different part of the world, and it might as well have been considering how turned around we were. Eventually, I couldn't stand the thought of running out of gas and not having enough reserve to make it to the next open station, so we pulled into a refueling depot and charted a course to the main highway and home. I swore the tank was feeling light, and that there wasn't much sloshing around in there. However, with 245.6km on the tripometer, Kino still had almost five litres left in her tank. Therefore, I'm thinking a conservative estimate of Kino's crusing range is 300km, especially considering how much stop and go city driving and slow speed practicing (read: revving) we've been doing over the past four days. Having said that, in the future I'll probably just pull into the next station when I reach 250km, just because apparently I can't handle the pressure.