Joe Berk

Book Review: Letters from Uncle Dave

Letters from Uncle Dave is quite a read. It’s the story of Staff Sergeant David Rosenkrantz, the middle child of Russian Jewish immigrants who joined the US Army and became a paratrooper. SSG Rosenkrantz fought in Sicily, Italy and Holland during World War II. He was killed in battle and listed as missing in action for 73 years. I originally heard this story from Phil Rosenkrantz, SSG Rosenkrantz’s nephew and a fellow retired professor in the College of Engineering at Cal Poly Pomona.

Good buddy Phil is many things. One of the adjectives that can be accurately assigned to him is diligent. Another is persistent. Professor Rosenkrantz spent the last 20 years searching for Uncle Dave, and it was a search that ended successfully. Phil identified where his uncle was buried in Europe. SSG Rosenkrantz’s remains were returned to the United States, and last year he was reinterred in Riverside National Cemetery with full military honors. You may have seen it reported; the story made national news.

Letters from Uncle Dave contains 49 letters SSG Dave Rosenkrantz wrote home, 106 images, documents and maps, and much more. I was one of the beta reviewers for Phil, and I’m happy to report that Letters from Uncle Dave is now available on Amazon. You should pick up a copy. It’s a great read.

More ExNotes book, movie, and product reviews are here!

Patton Museum Reopens!

We recently blogged about the General Patton Memorial Museum at Chiriaco Summit, California, and in that blog, we mentioned the museum was closed due to the Covid 19 pandemic. Well, that’s changed…I had a nice conversation a couple of days ago with Margit Chiriaco Rusche (Co-Founder and President of the Museum) and she told me the Patton Museum is now open. I’m going to plan a ride out there as soon as the heat breaks (watch the ExNotes blog for more details), and if you’d like to go, let us know.

Margit asked me to mention the Patton Museum’s USO Room and theatre, the lecture series, and the library. These are important parts of the Museum and we’re happy to do so.

The Patton Museum’s theatre and USO room.

The Patton Museum has hosted two years of lecture series and Margit tells me they were well attended. Prior presenters have included the Superintendent of Joshua Tree National Park and a key speaker from the Metropolitan Water Department (refer to our earlier blog for the story about the Patton Museum’s Big Map, donated by the MWD), as well as several others. The lecture series was suspended during the pandemic, but it will resume in 2021. My good buddy Phil may be one of the speakers next year on his research and his new book, Letters from Uncle Dave. We’ll have an upcoming blog on Phil’s new book in the near future, too, so as always, keep an eye on the ExNotes blog.

The USO Room presents the story of the United Service Organizations, a group focused on keeping military morale high. This exhibit features exhibits on Al Jolson and Bob Hope, two major forces in the USO’s entertainment world. The USO Room has the original juke box used at Camp Young’s entertainment center (Camp Young was the headquarters camp for the Desert Training Center, and it was located at Chiriaco Summit).

One of many exhibits at the Patton Museum.

The Patton Museum library contains a large book collection, along with notebooks chronicling the lives and activities of World War II veterans (the Museum currently has over a hundred of these, and more are being added). It includes tactical maps used by Patton during World War II, and a collection of rare books. The library is also a source of genealogy information.

If you would like to learn more about the General Patton Memorial Museum, Chiriaco Summit, and the Chiriaco family, in addition to our earlier blog on the Patton Museum you might want to pick up a copy of Chiriaco Summit, a book that tells the story well. You should buy a copy. It’s a great read.

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A Tale of Two More .45s

A couple of weeks ago I tested three .45 ACP loads in a Model 625 Smith and Wesson and my Rock Island Armory Compact 1911 using Winchester’s 231 powder and Jim Gardner’s 230-grain cast roundnose bullets. We’ve done a bunch of accuracy testing in both .45 ACP revolvers and autos with other loads (and you can find those stories here). This blog focuses specifically on Jim’s 230-grain roundnose bullets with Winchester 231 propellant.

Reloaded .45 ACP ammo with Gardner 230-grain cast roundnose bullets. The 230 cast roundnose bullets replicate GI hardball ammo and this bullet feeds in just about any .45 auto.

To get to the point quickly, the Gardner 230-grain cast roundnose bullets did well (as you’ll see below). My testing consisted of three .45 loads with 4.5, 5.0, and 5.6 grains of WW 231 powder:

I was checking for accuracy and functionality in both guns. Here’s what I found:

- The Compact 1911 likes 5.0 grains of 231, and that load functioned best with this powder in the automatic. The slide locked back after the last round the way it is supposed to; it would not do so with 5.6 grains of 231. Getting a short-barreled 1911 to function well is a bit tougher than a full-sized 1911. With 5.0 grains of 231 and the 230-grain cast bullets, my Compact 1911 functions reliably. Your mileage may vary.
- 4.5 grains of 231 functioned okay in the 1911, too, but it is the least accurate load in both the 1911 and the Model 625 (of the three loads that I tested).
- The Model 625 likes both 5.0 and 5.6 grains of 231, with a slight accuracy edge going to the 5.0-grain load (although what you see here is probably more a result of my skills than anything else). The 625 is not as accurate with the lighter 4.5-grain 231 load.

Lyman’s reloading manual has 5.8 grains of 231 as the accuracy load with this bullet, but I didn’t go that high (it was a max load). Like I said, it doesn’t function reliably in the Compact 1911, and my testing showed 5.0 grains to be the Model 625’s sweet spot from an accuracy perspective.

All shots were at 50 feet, and all loads used the Lee factory crimp die (which assures easy chambering in 1917-style revolvers). The loads would do better from a machine rest or a steadier shooter. It was hot out on the range the morning I fired these targets and that probably adversely affected accuracy, too.

Here are the Compact 1911 targets that I shot using the 5.0-grain 231 load:

Compact 1911 results: Close enough for government work. I use Alco targets for this kind of testing; these have four silhouettes per sheet.

The Compact 1911 is not a target gun, but it is accurate enough for its intended purpose. The Rock Compact 1911 is very concealable and it’s the handgun I carry most often. They are surprisingly inexpensive and surprisingly accurate with the right loads.

These are the targets with the Model 625 and 5.6 grains of 231:

The big Smith and Wesson Model 625 worked well with 231 and Jim’s 230-grain roundnose bullets. This is the 5.6-grain target; 5.0 grains of 231 were even more accurate for me.

The Model 625 Smith and Wesson is more accurate than the Compact 1911 (hey, no surprises there). They are both fun guns to shoot.

I usually load .45 ACP ammo with either Unique or Bullseye powder, but I thought I would try 231 just because I had some on hand and I wanted to see how it would do. I have an accuracy load for the Compact 1911 with Bullseye and a 185-grain bullet that we wrote about earlier. Other guys tell me 231 is their preferred .45 ACP propellant and I still had a can of it that I had purchased for the 9mm cast bullet comparo some time ago, so I thought I would give it a try in the two guns featured here. With the sketchy availability of reloading components during these uncertain times, it’s good to know that this powder works well in .45 ACP. But after this test, I’m going to stick with the other two propellants (Unique and Bullseye), assuming I can get them. What I didn’t like about 231 is that it is a sooty powder…I found it to be significantly worse in that regard than Unique.

WW 231 propellant is accurate, but it sure is a dirty powder. My left hand was covered in powder soot after just a few rounds.

I’ve been real happy with Gardner’s bullets. They are less expensive than other cast bullets, the accuracy is good, and I observed no leading in either handgun. I’ll be purchasing Gardner bullets again. If you haven’t tried Jim’s bullets, you might give them a try.

More Tales of the Gun, 1911, 1917, bolt action sporter, milsurp, load data, and other good shooting and reloading posts are here!

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Day 8: Sweet Home La Ceja!

Our last day on the road in Colombia was just a few days before Christmas, and it was a fine ride down from the Volcan Nevado del Ruiz back home to La Ceja. It had been a grand adventure, and I had mixed emotions about it coming to an end. I was looking forward to going home, but I felt bad about wrapping up what had been one of the greatest rides of my life.

Posted on December 22, 2015

Yesterday was our last day on the road. It was yet another glorious day of adventure riding in Colombia.

The night we spent under the Volcan Nevado del Ruiz was freezing. It was the coldest night we experienced on this trip. I had on every layer of clothing I brought with me when we left. Juan told me not to worry, it would warm up as we descended. As always, his prediction was right on the money.

I had mixed emotions as we rolled out that morning. This ride has been one of the great ones, and I am always a little sad on the last day of a major ride because I know it is drawing to a close. But I am also eager to get home. This was a magnificent ride, and it was a physically demanding one. We experienced temperature extremes, from the humid and sultry tropics to the frigid alpine environment we were leaving. The riding was simultaneously exhilarating and terrifying. We road magnificent winding mountain roads, but at times the traffic (especially when we were passing the big 22-wheeled tractor trailer trucks) was unnerving. My neck was sore, most likely from the stress of this kind of riding. But it was grand, and riding Colombia is one of life’s grand adventures.

Juan knows all the good spots in Colombia, and he took us to this one where we could grab a few photos with the volcano steaming in the background.

I had to get a shot of the three of us with the bikes, using the D3300’s self-timer. If we look like three guys (the three amigos) who were having the ride of their lives, well, it’s because we were.

We rode on. We went through towns, we went through the twisties, and we passed more trucks. Another day in Colombia, another few hundred miles. At one point, Juan took us on a very sharp 150-degree right turn and we climbed what appeared to be a paved goat trail. Ah, another one of Juan’s short cuts, I thought. And then we stopped.

“This is Colombia’s major coffee-producing region, and we are on a coffee plantation,” he announced when we took our helmets off. Wow. I half expected Juan Valdez (you know, from the old coffee commercials) to appear, leading his burro laden with only the finest beans. It was amazing. I had never been on a coffee plantation (or even seen a coffee bean before it had been processed), and now here we were. On a coffee plantation. In Colombia. This has been a truly amazing ride.

That big stand of lighter yellowish-green plants you see just left of center in the above photograph is a bamboo grove. More amazing stuff.

These are coffee beans, folks. Real coffee beans.

The beans are picked by hand, Juan explained. It’s very labor-intensive, and these areas are struggling because the world-wide coffee commodities markets are down.

Juan picked a bean and showed me how to peel it open. You can take the inner bean and put it in your mouth like a lozenge (you don’t chew it). To my surprise, it was sweet. It didn’t have even a vague hint of coffee flavor.

As we were taking all of this in, two of Colombia’s finest rolled by.

Juan told me that the police officers in Colombia often ride two up. I had seen that a lot during the last 8 days. Frequently, the guy in back was carrying a large HK 7.62 assault rifle or an Uzi. Colombia is mostly safe today, but that is a fairly recent development.

Vintage cars are a big thing in Colombia. A little further down the road we saw this pristine US Army Jeep for sale. I thought of my good buddy San Marino Bill, who owns a similar restored military Jeep.

Here’s one last shot of yesterday’s ride…it’s the Cauca River valley.

The Andes Mountains enter Colombia from the south, and then split into three Andean ranges running roughly south to north. You can think of this as a fork with three tines. There’s an eastern range of the Andes, a central range, and a western range. The Cauca River (which we rode along for much of yesterday) runs between the western and central Andes. The Magdalena River runs between the central and eastern ranges.

Okay, enough geography…we rolled on toward Medellin (or Medda-jeen, as they say over here) and dropped Carlos off at his home. Juan and I rode on another 40 kilometers to La Ceja (or La Sayza, to pronounce it correctly) to Juan’s home, and folks, that was it. Our Colombian ride was over.

Like I said above, I always have mixed emotions when these rides end. It was indeed a grand adventure, and I don’t mind telling you that I mentally heard the theme from Raiders of the Lost Ark playing in my head more than a few times as we rode through this wonderful place.

In the next few days, I’ll post more impressions of the trip. In a word, our AKT Moto RX3s performed magnificently. The RX3 is a world-class motorcycle, and anyone who dismisses the bike as a serious adventure riding machine is just flat wrong. I’ve been riding for over 50 years, and this is the best motorcycle for serious world travel I’ve ever ridden. Zongshen hit a home run with the RX3.

I’ll write more about the minor technical distinctions between the AKT and CSC versions of this bike, my experiences with the Tourfella luggage (all good), and more in coming blogs. I’ll tell you a bit about the camera gear I used on this trip, too (a preview…the Nikon D3300 did an awesome job).

Today I’m visiting with the good folks from AKT Moto to personally thank them for the use of their motorcycle and to see their factory. It’s going to be fun.

More to come, my friends…stay tuned!

Get all of the blogs on Colombia here. If you want to read the book about this ride, pick up a copy of Moto Colombia!

A good Citizen: The Blue Angels watch

My first-edition Citizen Blue Angels watch, the one you see above, is one of my favorites. There’s a lot going on in what the watch displays, including the time of day in three time zones (local, any other location in the world, and Greenwich Mean Time). The Citizen has a stop watch, a countdown timer, a calendar, and the ability to set up to three alarms. It also has a 24-hour clock. Those two LCD displays at the bottom of the watch face? I haven’t figured those out yet. I guess I could read the Owner’s Manual. Some day, maybe. And that complicated bezel? That’s a slide rule. I’ll explain it in a bit.

I travel overseas frequently (or at least I used to, before this Covid 19 business hit), and knowing what time it is wherever I am and what time it is at home is a feature I like. The watch has a digital display for every time zone and the analog hands display the local time. Or, you can reverse the displays. Press two buttons simultaneously, and the displays switch (what was displayed digitally displays on the analog hands, and vice versa). It’s a cool feature and it’s fun watching the hour hand sweep around to a new time zone.

One feature I use a lot is the stop watch. It’s handy when I’m cooking, which I like to do.

Ravioli alfredo, with mushrooms, timed to perfection by the Blue Angels. Three minutes on the boil for the ravioli provides the al dente texture I prefer.

The slide rule is cool, too. It’s the complex blue bezel with all the numbers and graduations. Go back 50 years and every engineer on the planet had and used a slide rule (we had pocket protectors, too, but that’s a story for another blog). My engineering class was the last one that used slide rules. Calculators had just been invented, and in the early 1970s a basic Hewlett Packard or Texas Instruments calculator sold for something north of $600. That was a lot of money, and I remember thinking that calculators would never catch on. Who needs a $600 calculator when you have a slide rule?

A few years ago we road tested the early CSC 150 Mustangs, and we hired a couple of my Cal Poly engineering students (guys who weighed 130 pounds soaking wet) to ride the things. We wanted to check fuel economy, and flyweight riders would register the best possible miles per gallon. At our first fuel stop we noted miles and fuel. I used my Citizen’s slide rule bezel and calculated the fuel economy while our young engineers were still fumbling with their cell phone calculators. One of them asked how I knew so quickly, and when I told them I used a slide rule, I had their attention. These two young engineers had never seen a slide rule, much less one built into a watch bezel. I showed them how the slide rule worked, and they had a lesson right there at the gas pump from their old engineering professor.

Steve (CSC’s CEO), Peter, and Joel by a historic bridge in the San Gabriel Mountain foothills. The verdict was in and my Citizen watch made it official: 98.3 miles per gallon.

Citizen Blue Angels styling themes have been applied to several iterations and styles of their Blue Angels series since I bought my watch. There have been titanium versions, solar powered versions, leather strap versions, GMT versions, radio-synched-time versions, and more. I checked the Citizen official US website as I wrote this blog and they show nine different models in the Blue Angels watch collection. That’s not counting models that have been discontinued (like mine).

Citizen Blue Angels

I don’t need or want one of the newer Blue Angels watches. Mine is the original version and I like it. Like most quartz-movement watches, it’s scary accurate. Yeah, it takes a battery, but a battery seems to last about three years and I can live with that (spending $3.25 every thousand days for a new battery is doable). I think I spent about $275 for my Blue Angels watch when I bought it 20 years ago. That was in the pre-Amazonic era (which came after the Triassic, Jurassic, and Cretaceous periods), when dinosaurs like me ruled the planet. New Blue Angels Citizen watches today range from the high $300s to just under a thousand bucks. They seem to last forever, so your money will be well spent.

The funny part, I guess, is that the real Blue Angels, the guys (and gals) who fly F-18s for the US Navy and the US Marines, don’t wear Citizen Blue Angel watches, and I don’t know if they ever did. In researching this topic, I found that the Blue Angels’ official watch is an IWC (they go for a cool $10,900), but I don’t care. I like my Citizen.

The IWC Blue Angels watch. Got a spare $10,900? And just look at it: For that kind of money, you’re not even getting a slide rule.

I’m not sure what the relationship is between the Blue Angels and the Citizen company these days. I tried to find out with several search phrases on Google, but I came up empty. My guess is that the Navy allows Citizen to use the name for a fee, but that’s just a guess on my part.

Citizen also offered a Thunderbirds version of my watch, something they no longer do (the Thunderbirds are the US Air Force flight demonstration team). The Thunderbirds watch is an even rarer animal. I don’t think the colors work as well as the Blue Angels watch (they look better on an F-16), but hey, different strokes for different folks.

A used Citizen Thunderbirds watch that sold in Singapore a couple of years ago for 50 Singaporean dollars (about $40 US). Nice, but not as nice as the Blue Angels version.

I used to have a bunch of cool Blue Angels photos I shot at the Reno Air Races (photos of the real Blue Angels flight team in action), but I guess I deleted them (I looked, but I could not find any). I had posted the photos way back when on the old MotoFoto site, and a law firm sent me a registered letter reminding me that my ticket to the Reno Air Races included a prohibition against displaying any photos from the event. It must have been a slow day for the lawyers. I imagine with Instagram and Facebook that would never fly today. If you ever had an opportunity to see a Blue Angels or Thunderbirds flight demonstration, you should go. I’ve seen both, and they are impressive.

More product reviews are here on the ExNotes Reviews page.

Click on the Citizen Blue Angels link to see more Citizen Blue Angels.

Chiriaco Summit and the General Patton Memorial Museum

The thought came to me easily: The Patton Museum. We’d been housebound for weeks, sheltered in place against the virus, and like many others we were suffering from an advanced case of cabin fever. Where can we go that won’t require flying, is reasonably close, and won’t put us in contact with too many people? Hey, I write travel articles for the best motorcycle magazine on the planet (that’s Motorcycle Classics) and I know all the good destinations around here. The Patton Museum. That’s the ticket.

General George S. Patton, Jr., and his faithful companion, Willie, at the General Patton Memorial Museum in Chiriaco Summit, California.

I called the Patton Museum and they were closed. An answering machine. The Pandemic. Please leave a message. So I did. And a day later I had a response from a pleasant-sounding woman. She would let me know when they opened again and she hoped we would visit. So I called and left another message. Big time motojournalist here. We’d like to do a piece on the Museum. You know the drill. The Press. Throwing the weight of the not-so-mainstream media around. Gresh and I do it all the time.

Margit and I finally connected after playing telephone tag. Yes, the Patton Museum was closed, but I could drive out to Chiriaco Summit to get a few photos (it’s on I-10 a cool 120 miles from where I live, and 70 miles from the Arizona border). Margit gave me her email address, and Chiriaco was part of it (you pronounce it “shuhRAYco”).

Wait a second, I thought, and I asked the question: “Is your name Chiriaco, as in Chiriaco Summit, where the Museum is located?”

“Yes, Joe Chiriaco was my father.”

This was going to be good, I instantly knew. And it was.

The story goes like this: Dial back the calendar nearly a century. In the late 1920s, the path across the Colorado, Sonoran, and Mojave Deserts from Arizona through California was just a little dirt road. It’s hard to imagine, but our mighty Interstate 10 was once a dirt road. A young Joe Chiriaco used it when he and a friend hitchhiked from Alabama to see a football game in California’s Rose Bowl in 1927.

Chiriaco stayed in California and joined a team in the late 1920s surveying a route for the aqueduct that would carry precious agua from the mighty Colorado River to Los Angeles. Chiriaco surveyed, he found natural springs in addition to a path for the aqueduct, and he recognized opportunity. That dirt road (Highways 60 and 70 in those early days) would soon be carrying more people from points east to the promised land (the Los Angeles basin). Shaver Summit (the high point along the road in the area he was surveying, now known as Chiriaco Summit) would be a good place to sell gasoline and food. He and his soon-to-be wife Ruth bought land, started a business and a family, and did well. It was a classic case of the right people, the right time, the right place, and the right work ethic. Read on, my friends. This gets even better.

Fast forward a decade into the late 1930s, and we were a nation preparing for war. A visionary US Army leader, General George S. Patton, Jr., knew from his World War I combat experience that armored vehicle warfare would define the future. It would start in North Africa, General Patton needed a place to train his newly-formed tank units, and the desert regions Chiriaco had surveyed were just what the doctor ordered.

Picture this: Two men who could see the future clearly. Joe Chiriaco and George S. Patton. Chiriaco was at the counter eating his lunch when someone tapped his shoulder to ask where he could find a guy named Joe Chiriaco. Imagine a response along the lines of “Who wants to know?” and when Chiriaco turned around to find out, there stood General Patton. Two legends, one local and one national, eyeball to eyeball, meeting for the first time.

A Sherman tank, the one Patton’s men would go to war with in North Africa and Europe, on display at the General Patton Memorial Museum.

Patton knew that Chiriaco knew the desert and he needed his help. The result? Camp Young (where Chiriaco Summit stands today), and the 18,000-square-mile Desert Training Center – California Arizona Maneuver Area (DTC-CAMA, where over one million men would learn armored warfare). It formed the foundation for Patton defeating Rommel in North Africa, our winning World War II, and more. It would be where thousands of Italian prisoners of war spent most of their time during the war. It would become the largest military area in America.

General Patton and Joe Chiriaco became friends and they enjoyed a mutually-beneficial relationship: Patton needed Chiriaco’s help and Chiriaco’s business provided a welcome respite for Patton’s troops. Patton kept Chiriaco’s gas station and lunch counter accessible to the troops, Chiriaco sold beer with Patton’s blessing, and as you can guess….well, you don’t have to guess: We won World War II.

World War II ended, the Desert Training Center closed, and then, during the Eisenhower administration, Interstate 10 followed the path of Highways 60 and 70. Patton’s troops and the POWs were gone and I-10 became the major east/west freeway across the US. We had become a nation on wheels and Chiriaco’s business continued to thrive as Americans took to the road with our newfound postwar prosperity.

Fast forward yet again: In the 1980s Margit (Joe and Ruth Chiriaco’s daughter) and Leslie Cone (the Bureau of Land Management director who oversaw the lands that had been Patton’s desert training area) had an idea: Create a museum honoring General Patton and the region’s contributions to World War II. Ronald Reagan heard about it and donated an M-47 Patton tank (the one you see in the large photo at the top of this blog), and things took off from there.

I first rode my motorcycle to the General Patton Memorial Museum in 2003 with my good buddy Marty. It was a small museum then, but it has grown substantially. When Sue and I visited a couple of weeks ago, I was shocked and surprised by what I saw. I can only partly convey some of it through the photos and narrative you see in this blog. We had a wonderful visit with Margit, who told us a bit about her family, the Museum, and Chiriaco Summit. On that topic of family, it was Joe and Ruth Chiriaco, Margit and her three siblings, their children, and their grandchildren. If you are keeping track, that’s four generations of Chiriacos.

The Chiriaco Summit story is an amazing one and learning about it can be reasonably compared to peeling an onion. There are many layers, and discovering each might bring a tear or two. Life hasn’t always been easy for the Chiriaco family out there in the desert, but they always saw the hard times as opportunities and they instinctively knew how to use each opportunity to add to their success. We can’t tell the entire story here, but we’ll give you a link to a book you might consider purchasing at the end of this blog. Our focus is on the General Patton Memorial Museum, and having said that, let’s get to the photos.

The Patton Museum’s new Matzner Tank Pavilion. When we were there, one of the two M60 tanks you see in front was running. If you think a motorcycle engine at idle makes music, you will love listening to an M60’s air-cooled, horizontally-opposed, 1790-cubic-inch, 12-cylinder diesel engine. I drove an M60 once when I was in the Army. Yeah, I still want one.

The business end of an M60’s 105mm main gun. This one has been out of service for a long time; hence the rust. Firing one of these settles disagreements quickly.

The M4 Sherman, our main battle tank in World War II, on the right, with an M5 Stuart tank on the left.

Don’t tread on me, or so the saying goes. Everything on a tank is big. You don’t realize how big until you stand next to one.

When Patton’s men trained at the DTC-CAMA, they used mockup aggressor vehicles (jeeps fitted with frames and canvas) to simulate the bad guys.

M60 main battle tanks parked behind the Museum. This was a shot I could not resist. If Joe Gresh was into tanks, this is what Tinfiny Ranch would undoubtedly look like. The Patton name was attached to the M47, M48, and M60 tank series. I asked Margit about these tanks, and she told me that when the Museum raises enough money, they’ll be made operational and put on display. For now, Margit said, “they stand as silent ghosts with General Patton at the helm.” I like that.

The General Patton Memorial Museum outdoor chapel. The chapel was built using desert rocks. If someone is looking for a unique wedding venue, this is it.

When I first visited the Patton Museum nearly 20 years ago, there were only three or four tanks on display. As you can see from the above photos, the armored vehicle display has grown dramatically.

Like the armored vehicle exhibits, the Museum interior has also expanded, and it has done so on a grand scale. In addition to the recently-built Matzner Tank Pavilion shown above, the exhibits inside are far more extensive than when I first visited. Sue and I had the run of the Museum, and I was able to get some great photos. The indoor exhibits are stunning, starting with the nearly 100-year-old topo map that dominates the entrance.

The Metropolitan Water District’s scale map of southern California, Arizona, and Nevada. MWD brought this model to the US Congress in 1927 to secure funding for the California Aqueduct, then they stored and forgot about it for decades. An MWD executive overhead Margit talking about the planned Patton Museum in the Chiriaco Summit coffee shop one day, he remembered the map, and one thing led to another. MWD donated the map to the Patton Museum in 1988. The Big Map (as it is known) covers the area used by Patton’s Desert Training Center and the California Arizona Maneuver Area. It’s a visually-arresting display that is truly something special.

Generals Patton and Rommel, the two key players in North Africa. If you’ve never seen the movie, Patton, you need to fix that oversight. It is a great movie.

George S. Patton: The early years. Patton attended the Virginia Military Institute and the United States Military Academy at West Point. His family was from San Marino, California. Patton was born into wealth and could have done whatever he wanted. He chose a career in the US Army.

One of the display rooms inside the Patton Museum. I could have spent the entire day in just this room. That’s an A-10 Warthog model in the foreground. It’s the airplane we used to take out Iraq’s Republican Guard tanks in Operation Desert Storm. I worked for the company that manufactured the A-10’s 30mm Gatling Gun ammo and Combined Effects Munitions cluster bombs that did most of the heavy lifting in that war.

Another view inside the Patton Museum. A tripod, a Nikon, a wide angle lens, and having the room to myself. It was a grand day.

A model of Patton’s command vehicle. Patton lived in a trailer and moved with his troops during most of World War II, unlike other US generals who mostly stayed in hotels. Patton was an RVer before there were RVs.

The Patton Museum has an extensive World War II small arms display. I could have spent half a day just viewing this part of the Museum. I’ll be back.

The Patton Museum’s small arms display included this beautiful Model 1917 Colt .45 ACP revolver. Most of the surviving specimens you see today (when you see them at all; they are not very common) have a Parkerized finish. This one has the original blued finish. I own a Colt 1917; mine has the original finish, too. There’s quite a story behind these revolvers.

A beautiful British Infantry Lee Enfield No. 4 rifle. I grabbed a photo of this one because it had an unusually attractive stock, something you don’t often see on infantry rifles.

A replica of General Patton’s ivory-handled Colt Single Action Army revolver. Patton carried different sidearms during World War II, including this Colt SAA and a Smith and Wesson .357 Magnum (also equipped with ivory grips). Patton’s Colt SAA had two notches carved in the left grip. Then Lieutenant Patton was part of the Pershing expedition that chased Pancho Villa in Mexico from Fort Bliss (my old stomping grounds). Patton personally killed two men in a gunfight during that action. There’s no doubt about it: Patton was the real deal, a genuine warrior.

In addition to the General Patton Memorial Museum, there are several businesses the Chiriaco family operates at Chiriaco Summit, and the reach of this impressive family is four generations deep. As we mentioned earlier, it’s a story that can’t be told in a single article, but Margit was kind enough to give us a copy of Chiriaco Summit, a book that tells it better than I ever could. You should buy a copy. It’s a great read about a great family and a great place.

I enjoyed Chiriaco Summit immensely. That’s Joe Chiriaco in the lower left photo, and Ruth Chiriaco in the upper right inset. Margit Chiriaco Rusche, their daughter, is seated in the 1928 Model A. Fourth-generation Victor (whom we met) runs a vintage car header company at Chiriaco Summit. Victor is the young man standing behind Margit.

So there you have it: The General Patton Memorial Museum and Chiriaco Summit. It’s three hours east of Los Angeles on Interstate 10 and it’s a marvelous destination. Keep an eye on the Patton Museum website, and when the pandemic is finally in our rear view mirrors, you’ll want to visit this magnificent California desert jewel.

More great Destinations are right here!

LA Sheriff’s 1938 Pistol Team Video

Here’s one that’s pretty cool…a 1938 video from the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department. There are a few things in there that are a little scary, but I’ll let the video show all that. Enjoy, my friends…and kids, don’t try the chalk or cigar stunts at home (or anywhere else).

More gun stuff? Check out our Tales of the Gun page!

Watch this…

My name is Joe and I’m a watchaholic.

It started for me when I was a kid and my parents bought me a Timex, and it’s never subsided. I can’t walk by a watch store or jewelry counter without stopping. Watch technology has jumped through several advances in my lifetime, and I’ve enjoyed them all. I like digital and I like analog watches, and I like that different watches work best for different applications (it gives me an excuse for buying one that, you know, I might need). I like the idea that I can order a watch from overseas that’s not marketed here in the US, and I like a lot of the watches that are marketed here. I travel overseas on a fairly regular basis, so I’m a sucker for a good-looking GMT watch (they’re the ones that allow you to see the time in two or three different places in the world simultaneously). I’ll do another blog about the GMTs at a later date. The focus of today’s blog is ride-specific watches. I tend to think of watches by major motorcycle adventures, and there are three I want to mention today.

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The first one I’ll mention is the green-faced, military-styled Seiko I wore on the Western America Adventure Ride. It’s a quartz watch and it’s not a model that was imported by Seiko’s US distributor (which doesn’t mean much these days; I ordered it new from a Hong Kong-based Ebay store and it was here in two days). But I like the fact that I’ve never seen anybody else wearing this model.

I bought the Seiko on an Ebay auction about 15 years ago, and I think I got it for something like $52 brand new. I like the style, I like its relative light weight, and I like the size (it’s the right size, not ridiculously-large like many watches today). The Seiko is impervious to wet weather and it has served me well. Just for grins, I tried to find it again on the Internet, and I only found one that was used in an Ebay auction, and it had already been bid up to over double what I paid for mine new. You might be wondering about the compass directions on the Seiko’s bezel. There’s a method of using those, the watch hands, and the sun to identify which way is north. I don’t need that feature, I don’t use it, and I’d have to read the directions to learn it again, but it’s cool to know it’s there. It’s kind of an Indiana Jones thing, I guess.

Next up is the safety-fluorescent-green Timex Ironman I wore on the ride across China. I’d seen one at a Target department store and for reasons it would probably take a behavioral psychologist to explain, I decided it was one I had to have on the China ride. Gresh arrived in California a few days before we left for the China adventure, and we spent a good chunk of our pre-departure time running around to several different stores trying to find that watch. Maybe I thought it would match my riding jacket. Maybe I thought it would be good because you can light up the face at night (a feature that is very useful for finding your way to the latrine at night). Like I said…who knows? The Timex did a good job for me. It was bitter cold up on the Tibetan Plateau, hot in the Gobi Desert, hot and humid everywhere else, and it rained so hard at times I swore I saw a guy leading animals two-by-two into a Chinese ark. My Ironman is still going strong on the original battery. Those Ironman watch batteries seem to last forever.

The last one is a Casio Marlin diver’s watch. It has to be one of the best watch deals ever. I’m not a diver, and there are really no features (beyond telling time, luminescent hands, a rotating bezel, and a waterproof case) that I need, but I just like the thing. You can get a brand new Casio Marlin for a scosh under $50, and folks, that’s a smoking good deal.

It rained like hell half the time we rode in Colombia, and the Casio never let me down. I vividly remember waiting for the ferry to arrive in Magangué for our cruise down the Magdelana River to Mompos when a Colombian boy came over to see what we were all about. He fixated on my Casio as we waited in sweltering heat under the shade of a very small tree. He finally touched the watch and simply said “good.” You know, I needed that watch on the trip (it was the only one I had with me), but if I had a spare, I would have given it to him. I still wear the Casio regularly. It’s just a good, basic, comfortable, and easy to read watch. It’s a favorite.

Watches, saws, generators, and more…it’s all on our ExhaustNotes Reviews page!

Tequila!

Jose Cuervo is no friend of mine. Not after I’ve seen how (and where) the good stuff is made.

This, my friends, is the story of how tequila is manufactured. It occurs in one place and one place only: Tequila, Mexico. And it all begins with the blue agave plant. That’s what you see in the big photo above.

Yes, Tequila actually is a place. It’s about 50 miles northwest of Guadalajara, Mexico.

The origins of this story, for me, go back to the early 1990s, when Baja John and I rode our motorcycles the length of Baja and then took the ferry across the Sea of Cortez to mainland Mexico. John and I stayed in beautiful Guadalajara for a few days on that awesome trip and I fell in love with the place. I was determined to get back there someday, and that someday occurred sooner rather than later. Just prior to a 4-day Memorial Day weekend in 2003, I bought three AeroMexico tickets, and Susie, our daughter Erica, and I explored Guadalajara and the interesting places around it. One of those places was Tequila, with good buddy Carlos as our guide. You’ll see Carlos a photo or two down.

Making tequila starts in the fields with the blue agave harvest. The blue agave is a majestic plant that grows in the red earth of the region, where the soil, water, sunlight, and everything else the tequilameisters worry about is Goldilocks perfect.

The blue agave takes about 8 years to reach maturity, and each one produces about 8 bottles of tequila. As you might imagine, security around these fields is tight.

The guys that harvest the agave plant are the Airborne Rangers of the operation. They chop away the pineapple leaves (the pineapple is the plant’s heart), and they do so with a tool that made me nervous just looking at it. It’s a deal that has a plate-sized blade on the end of a long handle. The operators keep the plates razor sharp (they carry stones and sharpen the blades constantly). The scary part is they hold the pineapple down with one foot and whack at it with that tool, missing their toes by millimeters. The plants are tough, the guys work quickly, and when I asked our guide Carlos about it (that’s Carlos in the photo above), he told me accidents are not unheard of out in these fields. Think about that the next time you sip a good tequila.

Here’s the agave field after it has been harvested.

The pineapples weigh between 80 and 120 pounds, so the guys doing this get a workout all day long. I imagine the truck you see below was resting on its axles after it had been fully loaded. I’ll bet those guys sleep well at night.

The pineapples are then transported to the factory to be turned into tequila. The process goes like this: Bake, squeeze, ferment, distill (a little or a lot), age (a little or a lot), bottle, label, and drink (a little or a lot).

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s throttle back a bit to see what it all looks like.

Caldera is Spanish for boiler, and the heat and steam produced by the boilers is needed for the slow agave pineapple bake. Hang in there; this is about to get very interesting.

The tequila pineapples are delivered to the hornos in the factory. Horno is Spanish for oven. It’s where all that heat and steam from the calderas gets put to good use.

The hornos are room-sized brick ovens that are stacked full of the harvested agave pineapples. Think of them as immense crock pots.

After an all-day bake, the pineapples are soft and mushy. Carlos peeled off a piece for us and we tasted it. The plant had a sweet and faint tequila flavor, but it contained no alcohol yet. It would make for a good candy, but the plants are too valuable for that. There’s more money in turning them into tequila.

The baked blue agave hearts then go through crushers, which separate the juice from the pulp.

The juice goes on to giant vats (we’ll see those in a second) and the pulp is sold separately as an agricultural byproduct. Farms use it for feed (lucky cows, I guess) or compost.

The vats shown below are where the agave juice ferments for 2 to 5 days. That’s where it develops its initial alcohol content. Carlos explained that it is basically a tequila-based beer at this point. When the Spaniards arrived in the New World, they found the native Mexicans making and drinking this. The Spaniard’s contribution to the development of tequila was the distillation process, and that’s what takes this gift of the gods from agave beer to tequila.

I noticed that some of the vats were bubbling, and I asked Carlos if there were air injectors or heaters in the vats. Nope, that bubbling occurs naturally as a consequence of the fermentation process.

The factory helps the process by planting fruit trees that attract a certain kind of insect around the fermentation building. The bugs are drawn to the scent of the fermenting tequila juice. They fly into the vats and drown, and their decomposition accelerates the fermentation. It’s a good thing I developed a taste for tequila before I knew that.

The photo below shows the distillation line.

Distillation is followed by aging in oak barrels, and how that’s done is a big part of what makes for different grades of tequila.

The pecking order for different tequila grades goes something like this:

- Cheap tequila is produced from the juice of the agave plant mixed with other juices. You can get a pretty nasty hangover from this kind of tequila (like I said at the beginning of the this blog, Jose Cuervo is no friend of mine).
- The next big step up is tequila made of 100% blue agave juice. If it’s that kind of tequila, there will be a notation somewhere on the label that says 100% agave. If it doesn’t have that, it’s the cheap stuff, not matter what some smooth-talking liquor store dude tries to tell you. 100% blue agave tequila is less likely to give you a hangover, too.
- Higher grade tequilas are aged in oak barrels, and the amount of time they are aged makes for a better grade of tequila. Longer is better.
- Really good tequila is distilled multiple times and aged.
- Really, really good tequila is aged for 2 years in French oak barrels. This kind of tequila has a dark brown appearance, and when you turn it in the light, it looks like it contains little flecks of gold (it doesn’t actually have flecks of anything in it, but it looks like little pieces of gold). This tequila can go for hundreds of dollars a bottle.

After distillation (and after aging, if you’re going for the good stuff), the next step is bottling. Then the bottles are labeled, and then they’re packaged.

Our tour was at the La Cofradia distillery in Tequila, about an hour northwest of downtown Guadalajara. Surprisingly, the La Cofradia distillery had a tasting room (just like you’d see at a vineyard), and we sampled different tequilas after the tour. The bottle that our guide, Carlos, is holding in the photo below is the good stuff with the dark brown color and gold flecks. I tried a sip, and it was very, very smooth indeed. I was tempted, but I wasn’t going to drop $400 (in 2003, or for that matter, at any other time) on a bottle of tequila.

Just for giggles, I Googled “expensive tequilas” and I found that you can pretty much go crazy spending money on tequila, including one that sells for $6700. I’m not into it like that. I’ve found that the best place to buy reasonably-priced 100% blue agave tequila is Costco.

I am glad we visited Guadalajara and Tequila when we did. With the pandemic and the drug cartel situation down there, I don’t know if I would do it again today. I looked up Guadalajara safety and it’s rated as a medium risk city. By today’s standards, that’s probably accurate. Truth be told, I’d much rather visit Guadalajara than, say, Portland, Chicago, or Seattle these days. The pandemic will pass; the drug situation in Mexico will take longer. I hope the Mexican government gets on top of it soon. I’d like to explore mainland Mexico again.

If you’re planning a ride into Mexico, make sure you insure with the best and our favorite: BajaBound!

Want to know more about riding in Baja? Just click here.

If you enjoyed reading about how tequila is produced, you might enjoy our story on Jack Daniel’s, too.

It’s not a BSA!

I saw this YouTube video a few days ago on the Royal Enfield 650 Interceptor, and I’ve been meaning to post it here on the ExNotes blog. I think YouTube motorcycle reviews are generally a time suck, but I enjoyed this one. The dude who made it (MotoSlug, a guy I never heard of before) nailed it, I think, with his description of the Enfield, its capabilities, and the riding experience. It’s no BSA, Senator, but it’s still a fun ride. Actually, it’s way better than any BSA I ever rode.

I’m inspired. It’s late afternoon here in So Cal, which is to say it’s hot. When things cool off in a couple of hours, I’m going to fire up my Enfield (that’s it in the photo above) and go for a ride.

Read our story about riding Enfields in Baja here.