The Ride Report

Spring has sprung here in SoCal, with all its attendant bug guts.

I’ve been pretty busy with a career change and assorted generalized fucking off, so I haven’t posted an entry in awhile. Oops. I’ve been riding back and forth to Fontana (about 60 miles each way) during the week for truck driving school and riding for fun on the weekends. Two of the longer rides I’ve done lately are:

First off, I’ve been kicking around an idea for a poker run for my club, so I decided to pre-run the route to make sure it’s a good one. It’s about 100 miles from the start point at Glendale Harley to where it ends at a VFW in Canyon Country, and it has stops at three popular local biker destinations along the way: the Hidden Springs Cafe on Angeles Forest Highway, the Rock Inn in Lake Hughes, and the Big Oaks Lodge in Bouquet Canyon. I got together with a few of the prospects from my club last weekend and we gave it a shot.

It was a fugly day at the start: overcast and threatening rain, and the clouds were so low that we were riding through them as we climbed Angeles Forest Highway. We stopped about a mile into it to don raingear, and as we continued visibility got so bad that you could hardly see 20 yards in front of you. It got so bad that I started considering canceling the ride for safety, but then we broke through into the sun and it was clear and beautiful for the rest of the day.

The final assessment: this will make a great route for a poker run — if the weather is clear. Here’s the route:

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…and then yesterday I did one of my favorite local rides: take the 5 North to the 14 North, exit Sand Canyon and turn left, over the hill to Sierra Highway and turn right, turn left on Vasquez Canyon, then right on Bouquet Canyon (my favorite local road). Up Bouquet to Spunky Canyon to Lake Elizabeth, stop for lunch at the Rock Inn, then down Lake Hughes Road to get to the 5 to head for home. Check out the good non-freeway parts:

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In maintenance news, my right footboard is starting to get ground down to nothing in the turns, so I recently bolted some steel brackets to the bottom so I’d grind down a 25-cent bracket instead of the $50 footboard. It worked — sort of. I was definitely grinding the brackets — until I ground them completely off. It’s a good solution, but it looks like I’m going to have to use thicker steel next time.

What’s really cool is that the guy riding behind me said I was throwing up showers of sparks as I scraped through the turns. Ya gotta love that…

My odometer clicked over to all 4s while I was out riding last weekend. Because I’m a big geek, I pulled over to take a picture.

This is what’s called a “filler entry.”

The phone rang at 10:30 Sunday morning. It was one of the guys from my club with a revolutionary and ground-breaking question: Did I want to go riding? Lately we’ve been joking that our MC stands for Meeting Club because we haven’t been doing much riding, so hell yes I wanted to go. I was out the door ten minutes later.

The route we took was a new one for me. We made a big loop of Topanga Canyon to Pacific Coast Highway to Mulholland Highway. I’ve ridden Topanga to the beach dozens of times, been up and down PCH many times, and ridden parts of Mulholland to get to the Rock Store, but I’ve never ridden the whole thing in one non-stop shot like we did yesterday. It was great. It’s my new favorite ride.

It was also one of the most challenging rides I’ve ever done because of a few sections with back-to-back hairpin turns that, while fun, also inspired some serious pucker moments. Scraping my floorboards is nothing new for me, but there were a few points where I went way past floorboard and was scraping my frame, and I knew if I counter-steered any harder I was going to lever my rear wheel into the air and low-side it. I’m still picking my seat out of my ass. Big fun.

As hairy as the turns along the route were, though, the scariest moment of all was this:

$4.29 a gallon for gas. Ouch. We definitely pay a premium for our year-round riding out here. Of course, I got to ride along the coast in beautiful, sunny, 78 degree weather while it was 38 degrees with snow and ice in Akron, so maybe it’s worth it.

Here’s the route we followed in case any of you ten readers are ever out this way and want to try it:

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I was meeting some friends today and I decided to do a nice thing and bring a couple dozen donuts. I got a nice assortment: glazed and jelly-filled and maple bars and etcetera, and I learned something when I took the two boxes of donuts out to the bike: Donut boxes don’t fit in Road Glide saddlebags. Who knew?

Fortunately, I have a new pair of LidHaulers that I put on just the other day, so they got broken in today with the donuts. I strapped one box on each side and hit the highway. All the way up I kept reaching back and checking the boxes to make sure they were still there and each time I felt for them they were there. Those LidHaulers work pretty good.

Along about halfway to the clubhouse I picked up an escort: a California Highway Patrol black-and-white patrol car. He was definitely keeping pace with me — I’d speed up, he’d speed up; I’d realize that doing 85 with a cop in the next lane wasn’t such a great idea and slow down, he’d slow down; etc. It was starting to make me a little nervous. When I finally got to my exit I signaled to get off … and he got off with me. That’s when I knew something was up.

As we sat at the red light at the bottom of the off-ramp, waiting for the light to change and turn left, I started rehearsing in my head what smart-ass comments I’d make when the cop pulled me over. The two main contenders were either to offer him a donut to let me off with a warning, or if he asked if I knew why he’d pulled me over, to answer “You smelled donuts?” I figured I was getting a ticket no matter what, so I might as well earn it.

But then I felt for my donuts again and found that one of the boxes was coming loose. The lid had flipped up and torn off and half the donut cargo was spilling out onto the highway as I traveled. The cop didn’t want me, he wanted the donuts!

I felt much better after that. And for some reason, he didn’t pull me over. Maybe I didn’t have his favorite kind…

I’m strictly a street rider at this point in my motorcycling career. My first taste on a motorcycle was off-road in a farmer’s beet field, but since that day back in about 1975 the only non-pavement riding I’ve done is on gravel stretches of roads being repaved. Homey don’t do dirt.

My daughter, on the other hand, is tabula rasa motorcycle-wise. She hasn’t ridden at all so she’s open to everything, and lately she’s been agitating for an ATV. Much to her chagrin I keep saying no, saying that $500,000 is too expensive. Her ATV, plus the one I’d have to get for myself to ride with her, plus the dirt bike I’d have to get because that’s what I’d really want to ride, plus the dirt bike I’d have to get her so she could ride with me on my dirt bike, plus the dirt bike we’d have to get for my wife to try to get her to ride with us, plus the trailer I’d have to buy to haul them all, plus the new Ford F450 Super Duty Diesel truck I’d have to buy to tow it, plus the toy hauler I’d have to buy to tow the toys and give my wife the amenities of home because Mrs. Homey don’t do camping, plus the motor home I’d have to buy because my wife would hate living out of a toy hauler almost as much as she hates camping and requires the luxury only a Fleetwood Revolution LE motor home can provide… You can see how it all adds up. That initial three or four thousand dollar investment snowballs pretty fast; it would cost at least half a million dollars, easy. So I’ve been saying “no,” but…

But now I’ve been bitten by the Adventure Riding bug. My biggest motorcycling dream/goal/desire at this point is to get into the dirt and play. Reading Neal Peart’s Ghost Rider was the bait that lured me into getting interested in dual sport riding, the documentary Dust To Glory got me to nibble on it, and the website Adventure Rider set the hook. Now I’m dying to get a BMW — a R1150GS, or R1200GS, or maybe the new F800GS (oooooh!) — and head down south of the border for a Baja tour. Unfortunately, finances aren’t cooperating at this point, so all I can do is read about it right now. Which leads me to this…

A group of guys over at Adventure Rider put together an amateur team last year and rode in the Baja 1000, then they posted a collaborative report on it — one of the best damn ride reports I’ve ever read. If you want a taste of what I’m talking about, what I’m dying to do, go read their story. It’s really great reading.

I went down to San Diego Saturday to attend the memorial service for the wife of one of my club brothers, who was killed riding her motorcycle. I was expecting it to be a relatively small affair but, boy, was I wrong. It was huge; there were hundreds of riders there. When we turned the last corner leading to the rally point at the Mount Soledad Memorial in La Jolla, we found a sea of motorcycles, and there were so many of my club brothers there that the hillside looked like it was carpeted with our colors. It was really touching to see so many people turn out to pay their respects.

The guy who lost his wife led us in a prayer, then we all rode over to the cemetery where the memorial service was held. The cemetery is about 15 miles away from the memorial, so several hundred bikes all going there at the same time required some, uh, special traffic considerations. I don’t know if the police had sanctioned it or not (probably not), but we provided our own road guard services, blocking off intersections and freeway on-ramps along the way so the funeral procession could proceed without interruption.

I helped block traffic along the way myself, and it was impressive to watch that line of bikes go by. Riding two-by-two at about 30 mph, it took at least five minutes for the whole procession to pass. I tried to count the bikes going by but I couldn’t keep up and gave up when I hit 250, which was at about the halfway point. It was impressive.

There was a cranky old guy in a BMW at the front of the line at one intersection I was blocking and I don’t think he appreciated the wait — at one point I made eye contact with him and he flipped me off and mouthed “fuck you” to me. I was a little surprised (and impressed) by that — he looked to be in his 70s and a little too old for that sort of behavior, but I recovered quickly and returned the favor.

Following the service there was a big party at a local VFW hall, then I and the guys I rode down with saddled up and headed back home. I pulled into my garage just as dusk was falling and barely beat the rain. My daughter was hugely impressed that I had ridden to San Diego and back in just one day.

275 miles, a funeral, running traffic breaks for a 500-motorcycle funeral procession, a party, and an old man giving me the finger, all in one day? I guess maybe it is a little impressive — if you’re 11. I just thought it was cool.

I’m a new member of Motorcycle Bloggers International (MBI), “…an informal association of people who ride motorcyles or scooters and write about it,” and one of the requirements of membership is that I point you toward their annual Rider’s Choice Awards and encourage you to vote in them. I’ll do it because I like what MBI stands for and what they’re trying to do, but I do it under duress because I think the award topics themselves are pretty lame. Among the inspiring voting categories are:

• Best manufacturer’s website
• Thumbs down
• Thumbs up
• What were they thinking?
• Wish we’d thought of that

See? Lame. And don’t get me started about the nominating process…

I don’t have a solution or suggestions for how to improve it — I’m just exercising my god-given right to bitch about it. I just wish the categories were more interesting and focused more on people than on manufacturers or products — or manufacturer or product websites, fer fux sake.

If the powers that be behind MBI really do want to be taken seriously, then I think these awards need to step it up a bit. As it is now, I think they make us look like exactly what they say they don’t want to be taken as: “a fringe group of people with nothing to say.”

But what the hell, I’ve always been a grumpy bastard, so what do I know. Go vote.

I rode over the hill into Hollywood for lunch yesterday, to a little hole in the wall hamburger joint on Santa Monica called Irv’s. Irv’s has been around just about forever (check out this LA Weekly feature on it for details) and the food is pretty good too. But the reason I’m posting about it is this:

Sonia (the owner) apparently does these little plate illustrations for everyone, but I’d never noticed it before. It made me smile because she captured me so perfectly and with such economy: big head, sunglasses, bald. It’s not quite a police sketch artist kind of thing, but it’s definitely me.

I have no idea why it touched me enough to make me save the plate, fold it up and put it in my pocket, bring it home, scan it, and then write about it here. It just did.

This is the goofiest thing I have ever seen. A cage on a motorcycle to protect the passenger — with seatbelts, fer fux sake. WTF? Just take the damned car if you’re such a puss — and sell your bike, because you don’t deserve it.