I still have my big bike, I'd always wanted to own a sidecar rig, since it was the kind of bike I got my first motorcycle ride on. The sidecar has a definite uniqueness that can not be denied. No one can deny that. I'm going to be 65 in a few months, and some might say that my CBR is an attempt to recapture my youth, I don't think so. My sidecar rig is mostly used for Patriot Guard, and Christian ministry work. My wife also loves to ride, but she has MS, and now has Multiple Myeloma, a type of cancer, we had a Goldwing 1800 prior to getting the VTX rig. It got dropped twice with her on it, and I could not have her hitting the pavement any more. I've had Honda's, Harley's, Kawasaki's, through the years, all were exactly what I needed for the purpose they were purchased, the one that I had the biggest love/hate relationship with was the first "brand new" bike I'd ever owned, a KH400 Kawasaki, I paid $499 for that bike, we were living in Colorado at the time, I gave my wife her first, and last, motorcycle lesson on that bike. She remembered almost everything at the stop, the clutch, the shifter, the brake, and the foot brake, but forgot just one thing, she forgot to put her foot down, I was laughing so hard at her, I couldn't get to her in time to keep the bike from hitting the ground, and the tank got dented, the hate part was when winter came around, it was a kick-start and I had to, more than once, bust through a 4 foot drift, the easy part, or bust through 4-5 foot piles after the plows pushed all those 4 feet of snow over my driveway! I would never fail to start on the second kick in the summer, but come winter, then it was a WAY DIFFERENT STORY, 8-12 kicks were much more common, especially in those weeks where 0 was the high for the week, and I was working the night shift, brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.
Every one of them were ridden til the tires wore off, and further. I bought the CBR after a little research and the inevitable test drive. The 60+ mpg was a big factor, and the fact that my knees would be beaten by the handlebars when I sat on the Rebel, but the biggest decision-maker was when the wife said, "get it, I think you look great on it." Now, I had never heard her say anything like that before.
Will I buy another bike, heck, I don't know, but I really like the handling, power, at least, one up, on the CBR, it responds right, right away. It doesn't have the, "I'm kicking my self in the butt, when I grab a gear, I know many of y'all like having your feet folded up close for grinding pegs off, my reaction time, and response time would not permit me to grind pegs off any more. This is my first "sport" bike, and I absolutely enjoy just bending the curves, rather than carving the road any more. All my bikes til now have been "cruiser" style bikes, and have only once intentionally put the bike over enough to hit a peg, and, believe it or not, that was on my GL1800 'Wing, and that was to prove to myself that the trailer I was pulling would not flip if I got too far over., I've got an older Kwik-Kamp popup camper I was pulling around the eastern part of the country.
There's maybe a time that I can't ride any more, but I'll have to be VERY debilitated before that happens. After I retired I was going back to Kansas after a family reunion up in Massachusetts, stopped in at a truckstop, a guy pulls in on a dresser Harley, takes his helmet, and I saw that he was OLD, I asked him about his travels and he told me he was traveling up to Maine from Los Angeles. I offered to by him a cup of coffee and he told me he was 95, no not on I95, he was 95 years old! He was riding completely across the country, and back, at 95 years old. I hope I still have it together enough to do a trip like that, at that age.
Changing bikes is part of the human experience on bikes, but make sure you've wrung everything you want to get out of it, 800 miles, or 1,000,000 miles like one guy had on his older Goldwing.
Doc