Full circle Spyder owner
A little long …. So in 2006 my dealer notified me that BRP was going to invite me to go to San Diego to see a prototype vehicle early in 2007. I had seen marked up drawings of the spyder online and even though I didn’t know what it was called yet I assumed that’s what we are going to see. BRP flew us out to San Diego did an amazing launch event where BRP presented J Leno with serial number 001 and a select group of us got to go for a beautiful ride on the oceanfront and I was in love. My wife and I ordered Premier editions immediately and we ran all over the country with them for the first couple of years then graduated to the original RT and we had two of those and proceeded to do the same thing traveling state to state doing spider events homecomings etc. Every couple years I would trade up until sometime in the last few years I started to really not put a lot of miles on and began to lose interest. So to top it off, in November I got Covid and ended up in the ICU and recovery was drastically slower than I had thought ….even though I was back running my companies just a few weeks later it has been a long hard road back to normalcy and in the meantime I sold my 2020 RTL a ways back and I didn’t even think twice about it. I had owned 7 spyders and was done …. So I thought …
I run about 10 car dealerships and happened to be at one of our Ford dealerships and I passed a 2008 spyder that was 100% stock sitting on the showroom floor. We take motorcycles once in a while on trades so it didn’t surprise me but I kept walking by it every day and finally walked over for a closer inspection. Original owner , had around 7000 miles and I would’ve scored about an eight out of a 10 as far as condition. With every day that passed it kept looking at me or I kept looking at it I don’t know which and I finally told the sales manager to write up a deal in my name then I took it home and next day. To say that ride home of only 15 miles was exhilarating is an understatement. We did thousands and thousands of miles on our RT‘s and don’t get me wrong they are the most comfortable touring machine I’ve ever ridden but as soon as I twisted the throttle on this 2008 GS rolling out of the dealership I realized what drew me to the spyder to begin with. The open air the exhilaration the feeling that makes the hair stand up on the back of your neck every time you get on the throttle and go into a curve. The evolution of the spyder has been an amazing thing but I found out in the last week that it has actually evolved perhaps too far for me and my personal taste. I immediately took off all the panels removed the seat did a full maintenance on it had our body shop paint it back to the original millennium yellow that my 2008 was (even though that as a one tough paint job to do with its tri-coat and pearl layers ) and it came out absolutely stunning. I just got back from another ride and the grin that I had in 2007 When I first rode the spyder in San Diego is back all over my face. I’m not saying I’ll never own an RTL again but I honestly wouldn’t hesitate to swing a leg over this GS and head on an 1000 mile trip. Have a safe holiday weekend I hope everybody gets some good miles this weekend no matter what you ride.
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