Baja, 150cc at a time: Part III….

So we’re back on the story about our trek to Cabo San Lucas on reborn Mustangs, the little CG clone 150cc hardtails.   We’re doing this story in installments.  This is the third, and if you are new the ExNotes blog, you might not have seen Part I and Part II.   My advice?   Take a few minutes and read them before continuing with Part III (this part of our ongoing 150cc adventure ride)…

Part I:  Baja, 150cc at a time…

Part II:  Baja, 150cc at a time…

And with that, I’ll pick up where I left off at the end of our Part II Colonet coffee stop.  After our coffee stop, we rolled on for another hour and stopped for breakfast. Here we were, in this little Baja restaurant, and they had wireless Internet access. That’s where I posted the first CSC blog entry on our Baja trip (and we wanted to keep moving, so it was short).

What is the world coming to, though? Wireless Internet access in Baja.  I was surprised.   That trip was the first time I had Internet access in Baja.  I knew the peninsula was changing.

Breakfast was good, and after that, it was a short hop down to El Rosario to top off the tanks before climbing into the Valle de los Cirios. Our bikes climbed, and so did the temperature. I’ll bet we had a 60-degree temperature swing that day. It was right at about 100 degrees in the desert. September is the hottest month of the year in Baja.  Why make it easy?  We stopped several times to peel off our layered riding gear as the temperatures continued to climb.

When Catavina came into view, we decided to call it a day. We might have pushed on to Guerrero Negro, but there is literally nothing between Catavina and Guerrero Negro, and it’s another 140 miles or so down the road. Too hot, too far, and we didn’t want to ride after dark.

We had a lot of fun with Simon, and we quickly dubbed him “the world’s most interesting man.” Do you remember those Dos Equis commercials? You know…the ones where a guy holding a Dos Equis beer is proclaimed the world’s most interesting man…with descriptors like “he never uses lip balm” and “his mother has a tattoo that says ‘Son.’”  We really enjoyed getting to know Simon, and he most definitely is the world’s most interesting man. Before I left, someone gave me a list of “world’s most interesting man” descriptions he grabbed off the Internet, and I dribbled them out to our group as we journeyed through Baja. The one that got the best laugh was “Simon Gandolfi is the world’s most interesting man…he once called a psychic…to warn her.”

Simon was also keeping a blog for his readers. Here’s an entry from Simon’s blog…

The bikes are small and pretty, surely an unusual description of a bike. Best of all they make people smile, not with scorn but with pleasure – as does watching your children play out in the yard.

The bikes were performing well. We had two current production bikes (mine and Arlene’s), and two preproduction bikes (Simon’s and John’s). During development Steve and the boys found a few improvement opportunities on the preproduction bikes, and these resulted in upgrades on the production bikes. Simon’s and John’s preproduction bikes have had some of the problems we found earlier, but the production bikes performed flawlessly.

We didn’t coddle the little Mustangs. We ran on some pretty rough roads, and the speed bumps (topes) in every little town we pass through were brutal. The Mexicans don’t just use one speed bump. They use about 20 of the things in a row, maybe 30 feet apart, one after the other. When they tell you to slow down, they mean it. We’d slow down for the speed bumps when we saw them in time (which didn’t always happen), and then we’d speed up after the topes. As I said earlier, the bikes liked running around 45 mph. We occasionally cranked them up to over 60 mph, but then we’d settle into a relaxed putt to enjoy the scenery and the ride. It’s a sweet way to see Baja.

Here’s another cool entry from Simon’s blog…

The desert here is a vast up-and-down jumble of immense gray boulders, candelabra cactus, Judas trees and skinny scrub. To the south and west lie mountains scrubbed to their stone core by a few million years of wind and occasional rain. To the east a long roll of cloud or fog lies low over the ocean. The dawn light washes the mountains a pale chalky blue. The cloud bank is touched with pink.

I have ridden on ahead. I haven’t met another car or truck in twenty minutes. Cut the engine and the silence is total. Two buzzard glide overhead. Nothing else moves. I am absorbed into the stillness and the quiet and the beauty and find myself shivering, not with cold, but with that exultation that comes sometimes when, tired yet wonderfully content, you get into a bed spread with Egyptian cotton sheets stiff from the laundry and wriggle in minor ecstasy as you clutch yourself in your own arms. Never done that? Never slept between Egyptian cotton sheets? How sad…

And if you have never visited Baja California, start planning. Right now this is about as close as you can get to heaven without a one-way ticket.

We rode into the Catavina boulder fields, one of the prettiest parts of Baja.  It’s a surreal region with huge white boulder and enormous Cardon cactus.

Our destination that night was Catavina, where we would spend the night in the Desert Inn. It was a grand day and a great place to call it a night. I’d stayed there many times before on prior Baja adventures, and I knew it was good. The Desert Inn is nice. It’s 100 miles from anywhere.

They turn the generators off from 12:00 to 4:00 at the Desert Inn, so there’s no electricity in the afternoon.  The desolation and the surrounding landscape just make it a cool place to be, even if was 100 degrees (as it was when we stopped that day). We ate in the Desert Inn’s restaurant, we sampled their Tequilas (hey, our riding was over that day), and then we hung out in the pool. Wow, that sure felt good.

To be continued…stay tuned for Part IV!

---

Want to learn more about riding in Baja?   Check out the ExhaustNotes Baja page!