So, Who Are We?
And what's this site all about?
Pondering the next blog entry...China, Baja, Russia, Colombia, the American Southwest, or???
Whoa, another site with a blog...
I guess the first thing to mention is the ExhaustNotes.us name. When I was a teenager, our high school newspaper advisor, Churchill Clark, asked me to write a car column for the school newspaper. Those were the golden years for muscle cars, and there were more than a few GTOs, 396 Chevelles, Camaros, Roadrunners, and the like parked out front (some owned by students, some by our teachers). Old Churchill titled the column “Exhaust Notes.” I liked it, and it was my start in the writing game. After a couple of teenage years writing that column, and thousands of blogs for CSC Motorcycles, 15 books, roughly a hundred magazine articles, the old MotoFoto.cc site, and tons of commercial copy, we revived the name for this site. Exhaust Notes. It has a nice ring to it. Churchill Clark would be proud.
So, who is this “we” I mention? Well, it’s four different constituencies: Gresh, me, you (our readers), and our advertisers. You know who you are. Our advertisers are the ones who make this site possible. Gresh is one of the most interesting guys (and the best writer) I know. And me? I’m a crusty old fart who calls it like it is (if that offends you, move along...there’s nothing for you here).
I first met Joe Gresh on the Western America Adventure Ride. That was an interesting one...CSC had just started importing the RX3 from Zongshen, and we thought it would be a grand idea to run an adventure ride around the western United States just for grins. As Gresh noted correctly, it was a big publicity stunt, and boy oh boy, it sure worked. As we were putting the ride together, I wrote to all the motorcycle magazines in America inviting them to join the ride; Motorcyclist magazine was the only one that responded. “We have a guy who likes small bikes,” Ari Henning told me. That was Joe Gresh, and as the saying goes, it was the start of a beautiful friendship, but it wasn’t all smooth. Gresh rode with us and he was a hoot, but initially I didn’t like his story on the ride. It made me look like a crusty old fart who calls it like it is. Then I realized: I am a crusty old fart who calls it like it is.
I next rode with Gresh on the China adventure. We developed a stronger friendship on that ride, mostly because you can’t ride 6000 miles across China, share a room for 40 days, and dress up in gladiator suits without either becoming great friends or mortal enemies, and fortunately for me, friendship prevailed. Gresh wrote the Foreword for Riding China, and I think he nailed it...
It’s evening. Chongqing, China is at a low simmer. It’s hot and the humidity level is nearly at dew point. After a harrowing ride through dense city traffic we double park, restricting the road to a horn-honking single-file column of cars, semi-trucks and 3-wheeled contraptions of every configuration imaginable. Walking past quiet night families sipping tea at folding tables and the lonely men who squat staring into the blackness, our little group ducks into a Chinese motorcycle accessory shop. The Zongshen motorcycle company has brought us here for a dash of Chinese moto-culture.
Looking up from her tea-making, the beautiful, raven-haired proprietress exclaims, “Ah! Dajiu and Arjiu!” This was the exact moment when I became self-aware: I knew then that I had become an imaginary character in the Joe Berk Road Show.
Berk (Dajiu, or Big Uncle) through his many RX3 motorcycle expeditions has made the leap from CSC publicity flack to a full-blown Chinese rock star. Somehow in all this hullaballoo Arjiu (Little Uncle, or yours truly) has morphed into a sort of sidekick, a squire; I have become the slightly dimwitted, always troublesome Robin to Berk’s Batman.
My initial plan for this massive trip was to evaluate the RX3’s touring performance under differing funding models (Zongshen vs. CSC), but it turned out my job was to hand Berk his lance and remind him that his opponent fades left at the moment of impact and that his own horse has pulled a wither (can a wither even be pulled?).
In this book, Berk (a master of the chopstick arts) has recorded our (his really, I just made the coffee) Chinese adventure from the teeming cities of the east coast to the desolate, tourist-free zones in the Gobi desert. We saw it all, man, and each night a tired Berk would sit at his computer and save the memories. His work ethic was so annoying: He’d type 500 words in the time it took to brush my teeth. If I took a shower he did another 700 words. We shared hotel rooms for 40 days and I’ll be damned if he didn’t type nearly every single day. In that same 40 days all I managed to do was contract diarrhea and develop a persistent kennel cough.
At the start of this Chinese tour Zongshen ran out of motorcycles and I was relegated to shotgun duty in the chase car. Normally that would not hinder me in any way. I could write motorcycle stuff so that you’d never know I was caging it but after hanging out with Berk and his real-time typing method I would feel a little guilty phoning it in. Sidekicks get like that some time.
The problem with all this togetherness is that motojournalists, even half-assed ones like me, are supposed to be unbiased. After traveling through marvelous landscapes and enduring the extremes of weather China offers the intrepid motorcyclist, Joe Berk and I have become friends. Which means you can’t really trust anything I say when the topic turns Berkian.
It won’t be the first time a friendship was forged on motorcycles. It seems like enduring, overcoming, even suffering a little brings people together and a long motorcycle trip always delivers the goods. The stuff in this book actually happened. It was the trip of my lifetime and thanks to Joe’s book I’ll never forget it. Now, if you’ll excuse me, Dajiu’s cape is dragging on the ground and I have an uncontrollable urge to tend to the situation.
Joe Gresh
August 2016
The ExhaustNotes.us site has a blog (which is where the new stuff will appear at least weekly, and probably more often), pages with links to the things we wrote that you can get to on the Internet, a books page (we’ll be doing book reviews and providing links to our books), a Baja page (it is the most interesting place on the planet), a YouTube page with videos from both of us (along with others we think you’ll find interesting), and maybe more. On that Baja thing, a major thrust will be about Baja, riding in Baja, and exploring the peninsula. Baja is that good.
One final word: We’re not restricting ourselves to just motorcycles. If it’s something we find interesting, you’ll see it here. Guns, cars, bicycles, 4x4s, destinations, epic rides, and more. As they say, check back often.
Joe Berk