BlaRo
Little Nudger
My first big moto adventure. I put 1,000 miles on my bike in a weekend, and I rode from Los Angeles to the Pebble Beach Concours d'Elegance with two guys on retro bikes. The full story is here, if you care to chip into my proverbial beer fund (click on an ad!). Here is the photo report.
We woke up not necessarily at the crack of dawn, then definitely somewhere around the upper thigh. Leaving Los Angeles at 5am, heading to Decker Canyon Rd on the way to the 101.
One of the dudes disappears into the fog (with his camera).
The two guys I rode with were from Road & Track. One guy had a Royal Enfield Continental, while the other had a Yamaha SR400. Both of them were slow as balls.
It was around 8 by the time we rolled into Ojai for breakfast. About 100 miles away, with a gas stop and all back roads in between.
The breakfast special at Bonnie Lu's Country Cafe is the Country Benedict: biscuit, sausage patty, poached egg, drowned in homemade sausage gravy. I ate this in the morning and didn't eat again until 7 at night.
On 33, (my vote for) the greatest driving road in America. It winds up and up through the mountains, a combination of scrubby green scenery interspersed with dirt, typical of Southern California. The big and mighty trees don't come for another couple hundred miles -- but it's already far less hot and humid in these hills.
And then back down the mountains into the Central Valley, where you can look to your left as you go down and see the yawning expanse of tan that comprises the desert, with shimmering mirages in the distance. It's treacherous going down. The corners are sweeping but all entirely blind. Once you make it down, however, there's an arrow-straight road that goes on for a good 20-something miles, past abandoned shacks and long-closed cafes, and the occasional attempt at modern agriculture. I hit 130 mph once in a car here, because there's nobody all the way until 33 meets 166: veer left for the 101 and the coast, veer right for the 5 and Bakersfield.
We went right.
33 follows 166 on the way to Taft, which is like the American Dream gone horribly wrong. The "Petroleum Highway," they call it. And that's all you see on either side of you: oil derricks scattered every which way, rising up and down like silent sentinels. I used to be fascinated by these things, when I was a kid riding in the back of my parents' Chevy Lumina through Illinois. The temperature hits a brutal 96 degrees.
Up on 58, heading back towards the coast. There's a really windy part near 33, that belongs in (to use a hackneyed descriptor) a car commercial, entirely out of place in the flatlands. But it's there. And it's slow, and awesome, and has plenty of plateaus that look over the horizon. And then, turn a few more corners, and you're heading down a huge hill and hitting the ton, trying to look out for the cop car parked on the side of the road up there. Oops. I think I passed him at only 70mph.
SOME TIME LATER...
Made it to Morro Bay. There's a huge rock there.
Morro Bay is where the 1 turns way from the 101 and winds up the coast, which is what public drove earlier this year in a Challenger, and what a million RVs drive every day. But this is usually the starting point -- it's all coastline from here.
Somewhere on PCH.
The two bros.
- - - Updated - - -
Riding a motorcycle around the Monterey Peninsula on Pebble Beach week is like having a VIP pass at all times. You get to do shit like park in the middle of the dock at LouLou's Griddle in the Middle and stash your bike right on the dock -- "Unless the boats have to go out," explained the owner, who came out to check out the Moto Guzzi, "Then you gotta move away from the crane."
You get to park at the Corkscrew. (That's a Can-Am car heading into the turn, that red blur.)
You get to do all kinds of shit. I rode to Legends of the Autobahn and parked on the lawn. I blew through the gates at 17 Mile Drive. At 1833 Restaurant I parked next to a 1964 Ferrari 250 GT Lusso that the valets didn't dare touch, then saw Seinfeld climbing out of his 918 Spyder at the curb. He had parked askew. Later, he parked his prototype 1964 911 there, with New York World's Fair plates.
On Concours day, I passed the shuttle buses and parked it across from the Lodge, right next to the media tent. Some guy yelled at me, so I simply moved around the corner and parked next to a Harley Sportster.
There's always the one guy who says, "why, Italian/French/Polish machines don't deserve such a terrible reputation! I own a Simca 1100/Matra Baheegra/FSO Polonez and I've daily driven it since the Nelson Rockefeller scandal, and it hasn't leaked a drop of oil from anywhere!" On this trip, on my Guzzi, I was that guy.
It took 14 hours to get to Monterey. On the way back, it was 10 hours back to Los Angeles.
- - - Updated - - -
On the way back, some friends joined us, like Alex Roy in his Citroen SM.
And Jamie Kitman, who is an automobile hero at Automobile. He drove a Caterham 360 that thoroughly pissed him off.
We stopped for cheese and crackers.
This is the part where Alex explains how the suspension- and steering-linked headlights on an SM are supposed to work, which is to say, they don't.
And there's no such thing as a 1,000-mile journey without a mishap: in Santa Barbara, we went off the freeway and into a parking lot, and I misjudged how fast the other two guys were going. I ran into the back of the Royal Enfield and dropped the bike.
I was ok, though the bruise on my right knee is annoying. Scuffed up the exhaust and bent the kickstand back (the part that you kick down with your foot, anyway), which I later straightened back out. Also, a headlight bolt went loose and fell off on the 101 somewhere. I have to go to Home Depot and buy another damn bolt.
Overall, it was a ride of a lifetime, except I'll probably do it again, so it was the ride of one lifetime, anyway. Had a ton of fun at the Concours, gained plenty of confidence on two wheels, and I've ridden the hell out of my bike. I've got all this motorcycle business out of my system, then.
We woke up not necessarily at the crack of dawn, then definitely somewhere around the upper thigh. Leaving Los Angeles at 5am, heading to Decker Canyon Rd on the way to the 101.
One of the dudes disappears into the fog (with his camera).
The two guys I rode with were from Road & Track. One guy had a Royal Enfield Continental, while the other had a Yamaha SR400. Both of them were slow as balls.
It was around 8 by the time we rolled into Ojai for breakfast. About 100 miles away, with a gas stop and all back roads in between.
The breakfast special at Bonnie Lu's Country Cafe is the Country Benedict: biscuit, sausage patty, poached egg, drowned in homemade sausage gravy. I ate this in the morning and didn't eat again until 7 at night.
On 33, (my vote for) the greatest driving road in America. It winds up and up through the mountains, a combination of scrubby green scenery interspersed with dirt, typical of Southern California. The big and mighty trees don't come for another couple hundred miles -- but it's already far less hot and humid in these hills.
And then back down the mountains into the Central Valley, where you can look to your left as you go down and see the yawning expanse of tan that comprises the desert, with shimmering mirages in the distance. It's treacherous going down. The corners are sweeping but all entirely blind. Once you make it down, however, there's an arrow-straight road that goes on for a good 20-something miles, past abandoned shacks and long-closed cafes, and the occasional attempt at modern agriculture. I hit 130 mph once in a car here, because there's nobody all the way until 33 meets 166: veer left for the 101 and the coast, veer right for the 5 and Bakersfield.
We went right.
33 follows 166 on the way to Taft, which is like the American Dream gone horribly wrong. The "Petroleum Highway," they call it. And that's all you see on either side of you: oil derricks scattered every which way, rising up and down like silent sentinels. I used to be fascinated by these things, when I was a kid riding in the back of my parents' Chevy Lumina through Illinois. The temperature hits a brutal 96 degrees.
Up on 58, heading back towards the coast. There's a really windy part near 33, that belongs in (to use a hackneyed descriptor) a car commercial, entirely out of place in the flatlands. But it's there. And it's slow, and awesome, and has plenty of plateaus that look over the horizon. And then, turn a few more corners, and you're heading down a huge hill and hitting the ton, trying to look out for the cop car parked on the side of the road up there. Oops. I think I passed him at only 70mph.
SOME TIME LATER...
Made it to Morro Bay. There's a huge rock there.
Morro Bay is where the 1 turns way from the 101 and winds up the coast, which is what public drove earlier this year in a Challenger, and what a million RVs drive every day. But this is usually the starting point -- it's all coastline from here.
Somewhere on PCH.
The two bros.
- - - Updated - - -
Riding a motorcycle around the Monterey Peninsula on Pebble Beach week is like having a VIP pass at all times. You get to do shit like park in the middle of the dock at LouLou's Griddle in the Middle and stash your bike right on the dock -- "Unless the boats have to go out," explained the owner, who came out to check out the Moto Guzzi, "Then you gotta move away from the crane."
You get to park at the Corkscrew. (That's a Can-Am car heading into the turn, that red blur.)
You get to do all kinds of shit. I rode to Legends of the Autobahn and parked on the lawn. I blew through the gates at 17 Mile Drive. At 1833 Restaurant I parked next to a 1964 Ferrari 250 GT Lusso that the valets didn't dare touch, then saw Seinfeld climbing out of his 918 Spyder at the curb. He had parked askew. Later, he parked his prototype 1964 911 there, with New York World's Fair plates.
On Concours day, I passed the shuttle buses and parked it across from the Lodge, right next to the media tent. Some guy yelled at me, so I simply moved around the corner and parked next to a Harley Sportster.
There's always the one guy who says, "why, Italian/French/Polish machines don't deserve such a terrible reputation! I own a Simca 1100/Matra Baheegra/FSO Polonez and I've daily driven it since the Nelson Rockefeller scandal, and it hasn't leaked a drop of oil from anywhere!" On this trip, on my Guzzi, I was that guy.
It took 14 hours to get to Monterey. On the way back, it was 10 hours back to Los Angeles.
- - - Updated - - -
On the way back, some friends joined us, like Alex Roy in his Citroen SM.
And Jamie Kitman, who is an automobile hero at Automobile. He drove a Caterham 360 that thoroughly pissed him off.
We stopped for cheese and crackers.
This is the part where Alex explains how the suspension- and steering-linked headlights on an SM are supposed to work, which is to say, they don't.
And there's no such thing as a 1,000-mile journey without a mishap: in Santa Barbara, we went off the freeway and into a parking lot, and I misjudged how fast the other two guys were going. I ran into the back of the Royal Enfield and dropped the bike.
I was ok, though the bruise on my right knee is annoying. Scuffed up the exhaust and bent the kickstand back (the part that you kick down with your foot, anyway), which I later straightened back out. Also, a headlight bolt went loose and fell off on the 101 somewhere. I have to go to Home Depot and buy another damn bolt.
Overall, it was a ride of a lifetime, except I'll probably do it again, so it was the ride of one lifetime, anyway. Had a ton of fun at the Concours, gained plenty of confidence on two wheels, and I've ridden the hell out of my bike. I've got all this motorcycle business out of my system, then.
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