Baja, 150cc at a time…

This was a trip I did almost 10 years ago with a few good friends, and we were all on 150cc hardtail Mustang replicas.   California Scooters, to be precise.  Just as they were being introduced to the market.   Yep, we rode to Cabo San Lucas and back on 150s.

Anybody can ride Baja on a big bike.  We wanted to do something different.  It was all a big publicity thing.  Dog bites man, no big deal.  Man bites dog, that’s a story.   Ride to Cabo and back on a motorcycle?  No big deal.  Do it on a 150cc repop of a bike made 70 years ago?  That’s something the media would pick up, I reckoned, and I was right.

But first, let me introduce the crew…

I invited folks on this ride who had to meet two criteria:  They had to be able to help maximize CSC’s exposure in digital and print media, and they had to say yes.

Simon Gandolfi is a British novelist who rode a 125cc bike all the way to the southernmost tip of South America and back, and then he rode another 125cc bike across India.  He had a blog and he posted a lot on ADVRider.com.

My good friend Arlene Battishill is president and CEO of Go Go Gear, a maker of high end women’s riding apparel. Arlene had a custom California Scooter, she’s a tweeter, and she’s all over that great American institution fortuitously founded before the #MeToo movement, Facebook.

I wanted my longtime Mexico riding partner Baja John Welker to ride with us. John and I have been all over Mexico on our motorcycles.  He keeps me from doing really stupid things on our Baja trips.  To hear him tell it, it’s a full time job.

My good buddy J Brandon (president of American Sahara), tagged along in his Dodge Power Wagon, carrying spare parts and water.  I thought having a chase vehicle might be a good idea.  It turned out that having the chase vehicle along was just okay.  Having J along, though, was great.

You might be wondering…how did I hook up with CSC?  I kind of fell into the CSC gig.  I was initially hired to duel the digital dufi, the cretins badmouthing CSC on Internet forums (dufi is the plural of dufus).  I knew the digital dufi supply was infinite, so I reckoned this new gig might be a job for life.  Dealing and Dueling with the Dufi.   It almost sounded like a TV show (you know, Dancing with the Stars).  What intrigued me beyond that, though, was the CSC motorcycle.  I liked it.  A modern Mustang.  That could be a hell of a thing.

As I was being clever and outwitting unarmed digital opponents in the Great Forum Wars of the New Millenia, I pitched the Baja idea to Steve Seidner, the guy who owns CSC.  Steve was all for it.   “Don’t be gentle,” he said.  “Take the bikes down there and break them.”  Seidner wanted to unearth the modern Mustang’s weaknesses, and Baja’s broad badlands would bubble those up.

So, what was it like?  Okay, here ya go…

I’ll tell you about the ride, and I’ll tell you a bit about each of the riders on this trip, and in this first installment, Simon Gandolfi gets the spotlight.  Like I mentioned above, he’s a British author.  A famous one.  And he’s a blogger, too.  I started reading Simon’s blog during his travels through South America, and I was hooked. He wrote Old Man On A Bike about that adventure.   This guy would be perfect for our ride, I thought.  World traveler, small bikes, and he has a following.  And then Simon met the most important criteria:  He said yes when I invited him.  Simon blogged our Baja adventure, and his words were mesmerizing.   Here’s one of his descriptions…

Joe and Arlene ride production bikes. John and I ride pre-production bikes. These are small bikes, pretty babies to treasure. The average owner will ride down to the store on a Sunday or drop by a neighbour’s – say twenty minutes max. Steve wants the bikes tested to destruction. John is massive and I’m no light-weight. Steve wants destruction, we’re his men. Day one south from Tijuana is horrific coastal-strip development on the cheap side of cheap. Pass Ensenada and I begin to understand Baja’s magic: clarity of light, range upon range of mountains, immense spaces across which merely to travel is an adventure. Even Big John becomes little more than a moving microdot.

This will be maybe six or seven blogs in total, spread out over the next month or so.  It’s a good story and I like telling it.  This has been the first installment.

To be continued…