Why I Traded My Bonneville T120 for a 2024 Triumph Scrambler 900

This is my brand new 2024 Triumph Scrambler 900. The user manual says it has three riding modes, but in reality, it's got a whole bunch more than that. If you've been following my channel, you'll know that I started back in January on a Triumph T120 Black. It was a 2017 that I picked up used in Medford, Oregon, drove it home five and a half hours in the middle of winter, and couldn't have been happier. That bike served me really well, and I had no intentions of selling it until very recently. I went to a motorcycle show, I rode a Scrambler 400X, and I fell in love with it. It was fantastic. So I went to the dealership a couple of weeks ago, and I put down a deposit on it, and then I went on a trip to the East Coast. My intention was that I was going to have two motorcycles. I was going to have my T120 for long rides and cruising and that type of thing, and I was going to have my Scrambler to kick around in the woods, go camping, hit some gravel trails, and that sort of thing. It made sense at the time, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized how impractical it was to have two motorcycles plus a Vespa in my garage. And also, when I was on the East Coast, a funny sort of strange thing happened that convinced me that maybe I should look at this cosmic yellow Scrambler 900 that I had had my eye on when I went in to put the deposit on the 400X. I'll tell you that story later. First, I want to tell you my initial impressions of my brand new 2024 Triumph Scrambler 900. And spoiler alert, I absolutely love this motorcycle. It's pretty much everything I wanted in a motorcycle. Sure, there are things about it that could be better, but I knew that stuff going in. So far, there have been no surprises, no disappointments, no real dislikes, only positives, fun, absolute happiness. Today's Saturday. I bought this motorcycle on Monday. I've already got 400 miles on it. If you've ever bought a new motorcycle, you know that there's a break-in period that it has to go through before you can really wind it out. For the Scrambler, and for a lot of motorcycles, that's 600 miles. That's 600 miles of taking it easy, being tame, not revving the engine too high, not running it at the same RPMs for too long. Basically, have fun, but don't have too much fun. As you can imagine, it's been a challenge for me to keep this thing under wraps, if you will. All I want to do is twist that throttle, nail those corners, and just have a ball. That's what this motorcycle was made for. It's not made for touring, but you could certainly tour on it. It's not made for racing, and you couldn't race on it, which is good. It's not made for any difficult off-road stuff, but you can certainly take it off-road. The fun of the Scrambler 900 is the torque, the handling, and, let's face it, the beauty. It's an absolutely stunningly beautiful motorcycle. I said in the beginning that the Scrambler has three riding modes, but in my mind, it has a invisible switch somewhere on this bike that changes your mental approach to how you ride it. If I'm feeling calm, I click the calm switch. If I'm feeling like being a hooligan, I click the hooligan switch, and there I go. A bike like this can be any sort of bike you want it to be if you're in the right mindset, and that's a feeling I didn't really get from the Bonneville T120, even though I loved it. It just didn't speak to me in quite the same way that the Scrambler 900 does. I feel like if I were to sit down at a table and design out my own motorcycle from scratch, this is pretty much what I would come up with. I'd want something beautiful, functional, and most importantly, super, super fun, and that's what this is. You might wonder whether going from a 1200cc motorcycle to a 900cc motorcycle feels like a downgrade, and I gotta be honest, it does not at all. There's something about the way that Scrambler produces its torque that just screams out fun. I don't really care about the top end. I'm not looking to go 300 miles an hour on a motorcycle. I've gotten this motorcycle up to about 85, 90 so far, and that's pushing the limits of the break-in period, but at those speeds, that's about as fast as I want to go, and it feels comfortable as hell, and I have no complaints. The other thing about the Scrambler versus the T120 is that the Scrambler is a 5-speed, whereas the T120 was a 6-speed. I don't miss that extra gear. In fact, I've come to really appreciate the 5-speed, and now I prefer it. I was surprised by that because I thought that would be the one thing about this motorcycle that I couldn't get over. Turns out I'm over it. The other thing I thought might become a problem for me were the high pipes, but so far, it hasn't been an issue at all. The only time you ever really notice heat from the pipes on your leg is when you're sitting in traffic, and let's face it, you're already suffering anyway, so what's the big deal? The only real issue with the high pipes is that they block your ability to have a lot of luggage, a side pannier on that side. I gotta figure out a way to deal with that because I do plan on using this motorcycle for a lot of camping and outdoor adventures this summer, and well, I gotta figure out a bag system that's gonna suit my needs. Let me know if you have any ideas. So I told you that I came to the realization that having two motorcycles and a Vespa in the garage was a little bit much, but it was a little bit more than that that convinced me to trade the T120 in and get the Scrambler 900. A funny thing happened when I was home a couple of weeks ago to celebrate my mom's 80th birthday on the east coast. We were driving down Route 95 heading towards 495 to go to Cape Cod when we came up on a gray pickup truck with a yellow motorcycle on the back. The motorcycle caught my eye because I love yellow motorcycles, but there was something else, something really strange. The closer I got to that motorcycle, the more I realized that's my old motorcycle. That's the Suzuki GS500e that I bought in 2004 and sold in 2006 before I moved to Portland, Oregon. I couldn't believe it. I had a look at the photographs that we took to make sure that I was right, and I'm 100% certain I was because there's some things about that motorcycle including the front fairing and the seat and the exhaust that were very specific to that motorcycle. The person who originally built all this stuff onto this motorcycle started a whole website and a very popular online forum that still exists today, so there's a lot of reference material that I can go back and look at and say, yep, that's definitely the same bike. Seeing my old bike, my old yellow motorcycle, brought back a lot of memories, but it also brought back a feeling that I feel like I missed with my T120. I want to say it again that the T120 is a fantastic motorcycle, and if that were the only motorcycle I were ever going to have in my entire life, I think I'd be pretty happy. But in the end, seeing my old motorcycle sparked something inside me that I wasn't expecting. It sparked a need to have something that has more character, something that's a little bit more me, something that's a little bit less... normal? I don't know. Anyway, the point is, I feel like I found a motorcycle that matches my personality a little bit better. Plus, it's yellow. It's gorgeous. How can I pass that up? When I was going through the decision-making process on all of this, my friend Alice sent me a quote from her cousin. Don't get attached to the bike. They come and go. Get attached to the experience. And I think those were the words that really needed a year. So I said goodbye to the T120, and hello to my brand new 2024 Triumph Scrambler 900 in cosmic yellow. Thanks for watching. I really do appreciate it. Today, we crossed the 5,000 subscriber mark. Who knew? If you haven't subscribed yet and you're interested in this kind of content, please click the button. And also, a thumbs up doesn't hurt either. On the next episode, I'm going to be sharing some of the messages you all have left for me in response to the video I did about things my dad taught me about life and motorcycles. We got a lot of good responses, but I could use a few more to put together a really good video. So if you're interested in participating, I'll leave some information down in the description of this video, and you can check it out. Record a quick message, and maybe it'll appear in the next video. Check out this video about overcoming motorcycle fear and anxiety, or this one about riding through a midlife crisis.