Joe Berk

A recommended TT250 toolkit…

We’ve been featuring toolkits and rider resources in recent blogs, and here’s another one. It’s based on tailoring a toolkit for a specific bike (in this case, the CSC TT250). It’s from a blog I wrote for CSC about 4 years ago when I led a group of TT250 riders through northern Baja. The idea is to carry a tool for every likely need, without carrying any unnecessary tools. This blog should be particularly useful for TT250 riders. The concept can be extended to any motorcycle.

Originally posted on October 13, 2016

I promised a recommended TT250 toolkit a few blogs back, and this afternoon I put together a list of the tools I’m going to bring with me on the Baja trip. The Internet being what it is, I have no doubt this will spark a firestorm of controversy from those of you who have different ideas. Hey, as my personal hero (that would be Dubya) once said, bring it on. Seriously. If there’s something you think I missed, let us know and if I think it makes sense I’ll add it to the list. That last part is important. I’m bringing along the tools I think I might need in the unlikely event something goes south. I’m not planning on doing an engine rebuild on the side of the road. Knock wood, I’ve only ever had one serious breakdown on any of my rides (and it wasn’t on a Chinese bike; in fact, it was on a bike that costs about 10 times what a new TT250 goes for…and that bike didn’t come with any tools).

The TT250 comes with a modest tool kit mounted in a container along the frame, as you see below.

They say halitosis is better than no breath at all, and that’s kind of how I feel about the tool kits that come with new motorcycles (indeed, as mentioned above, some new motorcycles don’t include any tools).

Here’s what you get with the stock TT250 tool kit:

It includes a screwdriver with both blade and Phillips head drives, two wrenches with 8mm, 10mm, 13m, and 15mm ends, and a pressed steel socket that you’re supposed to turn with the screwdriver shaft. The problem is that I don’t think that pressed steel socket would hold its shape under serious torque (and even if it did, and you probably couldn’t exert enough torque with the screwdriver shaft to adequately tighten or loosen the larger fasteners or the spark plug).

I took a hard look at the nuts and bolts on my TT250 this morning, and here’s what I’m putting in my tool kit for Baja:

From left to right, here you go:

- A reversible drive screwdriver with both Phillips and blade drives. It’s a big screwdriver, but I like the thing. It’s one of those tools that’s gone on all of my rides.
- A 17mm wrench. There are a lot of 17mm bolts and nuts on the TT250, including the oil drain plug. It’s a must-have item.
- A cool wrench that has both 18mm and 19mm box ends. This will come in handy for both the front and rear axles.
- A crescent wrench. This is a catchall and it’s a good thing to have. I could have left out several other wrenches and just taken the crescent, but I wanted the others.
- I kept the two wrenches that come with the standard TT250 tool kit. They fit virtually all of the smaller fasteners on the bike.
- A small channel lock pliers. I mainly carry these because I once read about a guy using them when he lost his shift lever. I’ve never had that happen, but these things were on sale for a buck at a Lowe’s and I couldn’t pass them up. If I ever lose a shift lever, I’ll be good to go.
- A pair of pliers. These came with my 1965 Honda Super 90 tool kit, which I bought in 1966. I’ve had them with me on every ride ever since.
- Allen drives in 4mm (for the fuel tank filler cap), 5mm (for the body panels), and 6mm (for the handlebar clamps). I could have bought one of those pocketknife-like things that have a bunch of Allen drives, but these are the only three I think I’ll need and I didn’t want to add the bulk of the larger multi-driver tool.
- A spark plug socket. You might wonder why I don’t have a socket driver for it. The 18mm wrench fits it perfectly.

And that’s about it, folks. All of the above won’t fit in the little plastic case the original factory tool kit occupied, so they’ll go in a tool roll that’s going in my soft luggage. That plastic box for the original tool kit? I may use it to carry a burrito.

Want to see our other rider tool and resources blogs? Here you go:

Rider Tools. Good buddy Mike Huber, our paratrooper-at-large, wrote a concise compendium of website and other resources every adventure rider needs to know.

Rider Tools: Part 2. This blog covers the tools Joe Gresh carries with him. It’s a good one. He saved my butt in Baja with that jump start gizmo!

Baja Spares. This is a list of the stuff I take with me when I ride in Baja.

Another 1917 S&W Record!

It had to happen, I guess. We recently blogged about a Smith and Wesson 1917 .45 ACP revolver that sold for what, to me, was the incredibly high price of $2,525. A couple of days ago, I saw another one that grabbed my attention. It’s a Gunbroker.com auction for an N-frame Smith, but not just any N-frame: This one is the original that Indiana Jones used in his first movie (Raiders of the Lost Ark). I know, strictly speaking, it’s not a 1917. But it’s built on the N-frame and chambered for a close-relative, the British .455 Webley. This revolver played a key role in several Raiders scenes, including the Cairo swordsman and many others.

If you’re interested in bidding, the Indiana Jones revolver is on Gunbroker.com. The good news is the minimum bid is the same as the Buy Now price. The bad news? That price is a cool $5,000,000.

Big Boy!

Maybe it’s a guy thing. For me, motorcycles and trains go together like coffee and a donut. There’s the obvious: The travel and adventure suggested by motorcycles and trains. There’s the subtle: The mechanical beauty, be it a locomotive or a motorcycle. There’s the analogy, one I often use for a fast motorcycle: This thing pulls like a locomotive. It’s an expression that makes no sense, considering the leisurely acceleration of a locomotive compared to even a small motorcycle (in engineering terms, you just can’t defeat f = ma). I still use that expression, though. It conveys power, an attribute I apply to my motorcycles.

Like a lot of guys, I grew up in the Lionel era, dividing my drooling between things like the maroon Pennsylvania Railroad GG-1 locomotives that ran by our place and a variety of British vertical twins (all of which I knew had to pull, you know, like a locomotive).

I had lunch one day a few years ago with the guys at our local BMW dealership (I don’t own a BMW, but they let me hang around). One of the boys was pumped because he had seen Big Boy at the Pomona Fairgrounds earlier. Only half-listening to the conversation, I thought he was talking about a hamburger, and then I realized it was a steam locomotive. My Lionel antenna immediately went up and like everyone else at the table, I started paying attention. To cut to the chase, we decided to visit Big Boy after our lunch that afternoon.

As you can see from the photo, luck was with us. We had a great lunch and then we snuck into the Pomona fairgrounds to see Big Boy. I grabbed all of these photos with my iPhone. They would have been better if I had my Nikon, but you go to war with the army you have, and all I had was a phone.

I didn’t know really anything about the Big Boy locomotives, so when I got home I Googled it. These locomotives, and 4014 in particular, have a fascinating story. They are the largest and probably the most famous steam locomotives ever manufactured. Old 4014 has been restored to operating condition by Union Pacific’s Heritage Fleet operation in Cheyenne, Wyoming (the photos you’re seeing here are before the restoration). As part of the restoration, 4014 was converted to use fuel oil instead of coal for the boiler. It was an obvious move. I mean, where do you go to buy coal these days?

Only 25 Big Boys were ever built, and they all went to the Union Pacific Railroad. They were manufactured by the American Locomotive Company in the early 1940s. Their primary purpose was to pull long and heavy trains (up to 4,040 tons) through the Wasatch Mountains and the main rail lines between Ogden and Cheyenne. They were designed for 80 mph, but 60 mph was their normal cruising speed. Big Boys produced 6000 horsepower and God only knows how much torque. They were 132 long (including the tender) and they weighed 1.2 million pounds. The tender could carry 24,000 gallons of water and 28 tons of coal. The locomotive is articulated (it’s so long that the wheels are hinged and can turn with respect to each other to get through curves). Old 4014 was first delivered to the Union Pacific in 1941 and retired in 1961, and during that period, it traveled over a million miles.

Very cool stuff, folks, made all the more interesting by the fact that No. 4014 finished its restoration in 2019 and entered service for special runs. It would sure be cool to take a trip on one of those special runs. That would be a real adventure.

More railroad posts? Hey, take a look at these:

The Nevada Northern: It’s Worth a Trip To Ely
Golden Spike National Historic Park
A TT250 Ride

Riding Tools

Our good buddy Mike Huber, who literally lives his life from a motorcycle, has shared several great stories with us in the past. This one came in yesterday, it’s one of his best. It’s about the websites and services that support you when in the field, and it’s a great read and a great resource. We’re happy to share it with our ExNotes readers.

Mike, thanks again!

Many people think motorcyclists just wake up, ride in whatever direction we want, have no plans, and live without a care in the world. This stereotype often is true, but for veteran riders who have battled weather, crashes, and other unforeseeable incidents we know that being prepared with the proper tools and having our awareness honed can not only save our lives, but will allow for a more enjoyable ride when we do encounter these obstacles.

There have been a lot of trial and error moments over the years living as a fulltime motorcyclist; some of these errors in hindsight could have been easily avoided with little planning and the use of a few tools. I want to share a few links and tips with you to improve your safety and riding experience while avoiding the headaches I have had to conquer in the past.

Camping

For me, dispersed camping is the only way to go. When beginning motorcycle camping KOAs and local state parks are great for training wheels to learn and overcome mistakes or equipment you forgot or need to purchase, but can be rather loud and unfulfilling as a camping getaway. After a few incidents with generators running at all hours, kids screaming, and dogs barking I realized this wasn’t communing with nature at all. It was, however, testing my patience and destroying my Zen. From that moment on dispersed camping on a motorcycle is all I do (with the exception of some National Parks). Dispersed camping allows you to be alone deep in nature with a crackling fire reflecting off the steel of your motorcycle while embracing the silence. This is an experience not to be missed as a motorcyclist and these two links below have greatly helped in guiding me to some beautiful and unforgettable campsites that otherwise would never have been located.

freecampsites.NET
ioverlander.com

Riding Offroad

Everyone has different ability levels on their own style of motorcycle when it comes to off-roading. The links below provide information on the terrain you will likely encounter and difficulty levels which can keep you from getting in over your head while riding these beautiful roads. Along with these links, speaking to locals in coffee shops and bars can be an invaluable resource since many of them will be up to speed with the current conditions and be able to provide you with tips and suggestions that websites just can’t compete with.

alltrails.com
trailsoffroad.com

Weather/Area Warnings

The apps below are another must have for any serious rider. Storms in the mountains can appear very ferociously and with little warning at times. Staying current on weather and fire conditions will minimize your risk of being caught in a dangerous situation. These tools when used can enable you to avoid and even learn to wait out, outrun, or detour around many storms. An added suggestion would be to scout out the weather and fire conditions in the area you plan to camp. Dispersed camping often will leave you with no cell phone signal or other warning capabilities. Researching these conditions ahead of time will not only ensure you are comfortable from a weather standpoint, but can also save your life if there are adverse conditions or wild fires you aren’t prepared for.

myradar.com
windy.com
https://www.fireweatheravalanche.org/fire/

Emergency Support

When I began my journey I spoke with several riders (especially those doing the BDRs (Backcountry Discovery Routes) who swore on using a GPS or satellite communication device for emergencies. I thought at the time this was overkill even for my deep level of preparedness. Well it just took one solid fall while off-roading to convince me otherwise. I now keep this device in my riding jacket at all times (not on the bike, as in a crash you and the bike tend to part ways) in the event I do require help and am alone without cell phone coverage. The SPOTGen3 also has an “All OK” signal I use each evening when camping so my Mom knows I am safe and not in any danger.

https://international.findmespot.com/#/

These are the websites and apps I have learned to use and appreciate while riding and camping off my motorcycle. I am always interested in learning what other tools people are using on their motorcycle trips in order to continue and pass on ideas to others in our tightly knit motorcycle community.

Mike, that’s awesome. Thanks so much for sharing this with us and our readers. All the way, Amigo!

A Santa Cruz Mountains Loop

I had a great ride this week…a loop through the Santa Cruz Mountains down to the Pacific coast and back. Think giant redwoods, beautiful scenes, great roads, and a rich history.

First, the route: It’s a quick hop down the 280 to the Woodside exit (that’s Highway 84), and then a twisty ride west on the 84 to Highway 35. Highway 35 is called Skyline Boulevard, which runs north to Highway 92, and 92 drops down to Half Moon Bay. Then it was another left onto the world-famous Pacific Coast Highway. I had an interesting stop at a very old cemetery just off the PCH, and after that I continued south to San Gregorio State Beach. Another left put me back on 84 and on into La Honda. From there, the 84 completed the loop. Here’s what it looks like:

The area to the west of 280 is surprisingly rural for a location so close to San Francisco (about 30 miles to the north) and Silicon Valley (which sort of starts just on the other side of 280). Highway 84 is a quick ride to the first town on this loop, and that’s Woodside.

Woodside is one of the wealthiest towns in America. A partial list of the big names who live or have lived in Woodside include Charles Schwab (yes, that Charles Schwab), Steve Jobs, Michelle Pfeiffer (the classiest actress ever), Joan Baez, Nolan Bushnell (the founder of Atari and the Chuck E. Cheese restaurant chain), Scott Cook (the founder of Intuit), Carl Djerassi (a novelist and the guy who developed the birth control pill), Larry Ellison (the CEO of Oracle Corporation), James Folger (as in need a cup of coffee?), Kazuo Hirai (the CEO of Sony), Mike Markkula (the second Apple CEO), Gordon E. Moore (Intel’s co-founder and originator of Moore’s Law), Prince Vasili Alexandrovich (the nephew of Tsar Nicholas II of Russia), Shirley Temple, John Thompson (Symantec’s CEO), and Nick Woodman (founder and CEO of GoPro). Woodside is within commuting distance of Silicon Valley, so it’s understandable, I guess, why so many high-rolling Silicon Valley types call it home. Needless to say, I didn’t bump into any of these folks on my ride (if I had, you’d see photos here). Given the choice, I’d like to meet Michelle Pfeiffer, but it just wasn’t in the cards that day. Charles Schwab would be cool, too, as Charles Schwab & Company have done well for me. Maybe next time.

After passing through Woodside and climbing into the Santa Cruz Mountains, it’s on to the intersection of Highways 84 and 35. Alice’s Restaurant is right at that intersection. Getting there was fun. The road has 15-mph hairpins and there are redwoods, eucalyptus, and other tall trees on either side. In many cases they form a green leafy tunnel over the road. I would have liked to grab a photo or two, but there was literally no place to stop and truth be told, I had my hands full.

It’s only about 3 1/2 miles from the 280 to Alice’s on Highway 84. Before you get too excited, it’s not that Alice’s Restaurant (you know, the one in the Arlo Guthrie song). But the woman who started this restaurant is named Alice, and hey, why not ride that coattail? I was there during the week and I was able to get a photo of the place. When I went by on an earlier weekend, Alice’s was jammed with people, motorcycles, and Ferraris.

Highway 35 is called Skyline Boulevard. I think of a boulevard as a city street, but this was nothing like that. It was another twisting mountain road and the views were stunning.

Skyline Boulevard tees into Highway 92 at its northern end and my ride along it was only 13 miles, but 13 miles can take a while on mountain roads. Part of it is the twisting nature of the roads and part of it is the scenery. I had the road to myself and it was awesome. Skyline Boulevard follows the ridge of the Santa Cruz Mountains. There are places where you can see San Francisco Bay looking to the right, and the Pacific on the left. The photo below shows the Crystal Springs Reservoir to the east, and if you look real hard, you can almost see San Francisco Bay beyond it.

When I reached Highway 92, another quick 5.4 miles brought me to Half Moon Bay.

Highway 92 has twists and turns, but it’s a busy road and Half Moon Bay is a tourist place. Not needing any refrigerator magnets and having been there many times before, I didn’t stop in Half Moon Bay on this ride. But it’s a cool place and based on my earlier visits, it’s impossible to find a bad restaurant (my favorite is the Greek Taverna on the left side of 92 as it nears the PCH; it’s a great walkup place for fresh seafood). Bring money; things are not cheap in Half Moon Bay. The major employer is the Ritz Carlton Hotel (it’s that kind of place).

Another interesting tidbit about Half Moon Bay: They used to host big wave surfing competition here. They get 50 to 60 foot waves when conditions are right and the area attracts the best surfers in the world. The organizers moved the competition someplace else about three years ago. Me? I’ll stick to something safer, like riding motorcycles.

Highway 92 ends at the Pacific Coast Highway (also called the Juan Cabrillo Highway) and it runs long the Pacific for about a dozen miles before our next turn comes up (and that’s Highway 84 again, to complete our loop). Even though the road is the Pacific Coast Highway, it’s a fair way off to the Pacific and for most of that distance I couldn’t get a photo with the road and the ocean in the same frame, but hey, it’s the PCH, man. It doesn’t get much better than that, as these two Triumph-riders near San Gregorio State Beach already knew (where I finally did get the photo I wanted).

Before I reached San Gregorio State Beach, though, I had a stop I wanted to make. In researching this area before the ride, I discovered that there’s a ghost town and an old cemetery about four miles south of Half Moon Bay. It’s Purissima (with two “s”s), not to be confused with the La Purisima Mission, the subject of a recent ExNotes blog. The town of Purissima is long gone, but the cemetery is still there, and I stopped for a few photos. It’s a left on Verde Road, and the cemetery is about a half mile up the road.

I like old cemeteries. After snapping a few photos, I was back on the PCH pointed south.

Eight miles down the road at San Gregorio State Beach I made a left on Highway 84. The town of San Gregorio is just up the road. There’s not much there, but the people are friendly. When I stopped for a shot of their general store there was a guy with a white beard taking in the day. When he saw me taking pictures, he asked if I wanted him to move. “No way,” I said. “Stay right there. You add character to the place.”

The Spaniards were the first Europeans to pass through this area in 1769 when they were expanding the Alta California mission chain. They stayed for a bit and named the area San Gregorio after Pope Gregory I. San Gregorio became a favored 1850s destination when San Franciscans visited the area for swimming, fishing, and hunting. Grizzly bears used to live in these hills, you know. And mountain lion. And deer (the ones the mountain lions didn’t get). I’ll bet the hunting was good. I’ve hunted California’s coastal mountains a hundred miles or so further south (we were chasing wild boar, but all I ever got was poison oak). The thought of going after a grizzly bear with a single-shot muzzleloader 170 years ago crossed my mind more than a few times as I rode through this area.

Further up the 84 (heading east) I entered the tiny town of La Honda (the name means “the sling” in Spanish). Impressive redwood trees made me stop for a photo, but before I could get to the trees this motorcycle whizzed by:

La Honda is a nice little place. I chatted with an old guy who had an English bulldog. I say old, but he was probably about the same age as me. “I did that once,” he said. “Stopped because my car was making a noise and decided this is where I was going to retire.” We had a nice conversation. He’s a former aerospace guy like me, and we talked shop for a bit about the good old days. You know, when the cold war was still in a full tilt boogie and the aerospace industry was the closest you could get to Heaven without a one-way ticket.

La Honda is a wide spot in the road that isn’t very wide at all, but it sure has a colorful background. The outlaw Cole Younger and his brothers used to live here. That’s the Younger brothers who ran with Jesse James (the real one, not the reality TV dude). The Younger brothers hid out in La Honda because it was cool and it was remote. Ken Kesey lived here (he wrote One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest), and his drug-fueled La Honda exploits with Hunter S. Thompson and Tom Wolfe are documented in Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. And like I mentioned above, grizzly bears used to live in these mountains. There are stories about a guy who survived a grizzly attack by killing the bear with his knife (not Davy Crockett, but the two would have probably got along). Fewer than a thousand people live in La Honda (at least as recorded by the last census). It’s a cool place made even cooler (literally and figuratively) by the giant redwood trees in the area.

So, about those redwoods:

I was hungry when I reached La Honda. I usually select a place to eat based on how many vehicles are parked in front (who needs Yelp?) and by that measure, the La Honda Country Market looked mighty inviting (I had to wait for other folks to leave to get the unobstructed photo you see below). The Country Market has a killer deli bar. I had a pastrami sandwich on toasted marbled rye and it was maybe the best pastrami sandwich I ever had. Give it a shot. You can thank me later.

I’m up in this area fairly regularly, but this is the first time I’ve done the loop described here. It’s a great ride best done during the week. Because it is such a great ride (and because it’s close to both Silicon Valley and San Francisco), these roads are jammed on the weekends (motorcycles, Ferraris, Lamborghinis, Cobras, McClarens, and other motoexotica). When I did the ride on Tuesday, the roads were delightfully open.

I’d advise avoiding speeding (especially on the weekends, as the roads had a significant CHP presence) and I’d also say don’t wear a tinted visor. The giant redwoods and eucalyptus trees bathe the roads in alternating patches of bright sunlight and deep shade (the riding equivalent of chiaroscuro), and in the shade it’s tough to see through a dark visor.

The ride I described above is about 60 miles from the point you exit the 280 until you get back on it, as shown in the map at the top of this blog. I’d allow about two hours for a relaxed ride during the week, and maybe throw in another hour or two if you want to stop for breakfast or lunch.

Want to see our other rides on one of the greatest roads in the world? That would be California’s Pacific Coast Highway, and you can see it here.

Day 7: Volcan Nevado del Ruiz

On my 8th day in Colombia and 7th day on the road, we left the town of Honda and rode to the top of Volcan Nevado del Ruiz, which took us up to about 14,000 feet. It was the highest I’d ever ridden and I was surprised at how well the RS3 (the carbureted version of the RX3) was doing. But I’m getting ahead of myself…let’s get into the blog I wrote for CSC Motorcycles at the end of that fine day.

Posted on December 21, 2015

A delightful hotel, sweltering heat, more mountain twisties, freezing cold, fog that cut visibility down to 30 feet, dirt roads, riding at 13,576 feet, hot sulfur baths, and a burbling volcano that killed 23,000 people in 1985…all in a day’s ride for us.

The hotel first…it was the Epoque, a great little boutique hotel in Honda that was one of the coolest places (in one of the hottest cities) I’ve ever parked a motorcycle. It was arranged in a square around a small pool (which we enjoyed immensely the previous night). Here are a few shots of the courtyard, Juan and Carlos having breakfast, and an antique record player in the dining room…

From there, it was another trials ride following the boys from Medellin as we twisted, turned, climbed, and descended cobbleboulder streets in Honda. Juan took us to the first bridge to ever span the Magdalena River, where I grabbed this shot of a Colombian woman taking in the humid morning air of Honda…

Here’s the bridge. It has planks across the bottom as the road surface. It’s real Indiana Jones stuff….

We saw the Magdalena River museum, and stopped in to check it out. Folks, it was hot. I was soaking wet by now, drenched in sweat.

The museum was interesting and it had some bizarre art. This guy reminds me of a boss I had a couple of decades ago…

The Colombians used steamships on the Magdalena, just like we did on the Mississippi River.

We left Honda and started to climb. The temperatures dropped mercifully. We stopped in Fresno. Yep, Colombia has a Fresno, too.

That’s me in the town square. I’m the guy on the right.

Two young ladies in a small store in Fresno.

As we were sipping energy drinks, Juan pointed out our destination for that evening, the Volcan Nevado del Ruiz. It was showing a little steam, and I stuck an arrow in this picture so you could see it.

We continued our climb. The roads were magnificent.

The photo below shows my front tire, with chicken strips that are about as small as I’ve ever been able to make them. I was getting better at keeping up with the Colombian motorcycle community.

Our riding positions are Juan, me, and Carlos. Juan is amazing. I’m struggling to keep up in the twisties, and I know he’s dialed it back for me. He’ll ride through the corners (and the roads are all corners, folks) standing on the pegs. At one point, we were taking a set of curves at speeds way above those at which I would normally ride, with the bikes leaned over at an unimaginable angle, when I looked ahead and saw Juan. He was standing on the pegs, similarly leaned over, and while all this was going on, he was reaching back to check the latch on one of his saddlebags as if it was the most normal thing in the world to do. The guy is an incredible rider.

As we continued to climb, we entered the clouds. Literally. We left the pavement and got on a dirt road headed up to the volcano.

4,138 meters! That’s 13,576 feet, and it’s as high as you can go on a motorcycle anywhere in Colombia. Juan told me he once did this ride on a Yamaha DT100, carrying a passenger on the back!

That’s not dirt on my RX3, folks. It’s volcanic ash. This was not your typical motorcycle ride.

Yours truly, posing with Carlos, on the top of the world, on top of a volcano with indigestion. Wow. This volcano is the very same one that blew in 1985 and wiped out an entire community. It was like Pompeii, as the guys explained it to me. 23,000 people lost their lives in that event. And here we were, riding in conditions where I could barely see Juan’s tail light in front of me, on dirt roads, in bitter cold. Wow.

Here are a couple of shots showing my helmet and my jacket, dusted with Volcan Nevado del Ruiz ash.

We left the volcano, rode another 20 kilometers on this dirt road, and found our hotel in the middle of nowhere.

The hotel had hot springs, and they were awesome. I had a good soak, we had dinner, and that was the end of Day 7 on this epic journey.

Today is our last day. We’re finishing our great circumnavigation and headed back to Medellin. Much of our ride today will be on dirt. I’ll take a few shots and post about it tomorrow.

Later, my friends.

You can read the earlier blogs from this great trip, and a few other moto adventures, here on our Epic Rides page!

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A .22 250 Ruger M77

Custom-crafted .22 250 ammo. With the right loads, 4000 feet per second and sub-half-inch groups can be had from this cartridge.

One of the hottest .22 centerfires ever conceived, the .22 250’s wildcat ancestry goes all the way back to 1937, and to this day it is still one of the world’s hottest .22 centerfire cartridges. The concept was simple enough: Take the .250 Savage, neck it down to .224 caliber, stuff it full of the right powder, and oila, you get a .22 250. Capable of exceeding 4,000 feet per second with lighter bullets, it’s a cartridge so fast that if you pick the wrong bullets, they’ll disintegrate in flight due to aerodynamic heating and spin-induced centrifugal forces. That’s fast, folks.

Until 1963, if you wanted a .22 250 you had to build your own rifle. Browning offered a production rifle chambered for the .22 250 that year, but even then you couldn’t just walk into a store and buy ammo. No, the .22 250 was still a wildcat. You had to make your ammo: Form the brass from another cartridge case, and roll your own. Then in 1965 in a nod to the .22 250’s appeal, Remington changed all that. They offered a .22 250 rifle and the factory ammo to go with it, and it was an instant success.

My Dad was a member of an east coast woodchuck hunter/killer pack back in the 1960s and he regarded the .22 250 as the Holy Grail. Dad used a .243 Winchester Model 70 (another hotrod in its day), but he spoke of the .22 250 in hushed and reverential terms. Dad never owned a .22 250 and that might have been his only character flaw, a family deficiency I’ve been making up for ever since. I remember visiting Effinger’s with Dad before I shipped out to Korea (Effinger’s was an outstanding gunshop in central New Jersey that only recently closed their doors). They had a Ruger No. 1 .22 250 in stock and Dad came close to buying it. But he didn’t. He let it get away and he lamented that loss for years.

Life went on, I spent a year in Korea compliments of Uncle Sam, and then I came back to Fort Bliss, Texas. One night I was in a K-Mart in El Paso (when K-Mart sold guns), they had a bolt action Ruger Model 77 in .22 250, and you can guess the rest. I think I paid $169 (the list price on a Ruger Model 77 was $215 back then). It’s a beautiful rifle with classic American bolt action styling. The bluing is deeper than deep (infinitely richer than what you see on new rifles today), the hand-cut checkering is perfect (today’s rifles have mostly laser cut checkering that’s fuzzy as an old peach), and the profile is just right (thank you, Len and Bill). The walnut is a joy to behold even though it’s straight-grained and doesn’t have much figure, and that red recoil pad is classy. This rifle is nearly five decades old, but it still looks new.

My Ruger Model 77 in .22 250. It’s equipped with a Redfield 4×12 scope.

Classy, huh? Based on my rifle’s serial number and info on the Ruger website, my rifle was manufactured 45 years ago.

The period-correct 4×12 Redfield. The optics on current-production scopes and the ability to dial out parallax make today’s telescopic sights much better, but this one was what was in vogue in the mid-70s and I like the look.

That’s not rust you see on the countersunk muzzle; it’s just muzzle-blast staining.

I tested the Ruger with Nosler 60-grain Varminter bullets at different H380 powder levels. H380 is the “go to” powder in .22 250, and I wanted to see what it would do with the Nosler bullets.

My .22 250 loads with 60-grain Nosler bullets and H380 powder. Win some, lose some.

My buddy Greg recently acquired a .22 250, and that got me interested in shooting mine again. I dug it out of the safe, loaded some ammo, and settled on on the 100-yard line. I tried four different loads for a ladder test using H380 propellant and Nosler’s 60-grain ballistic tip bullet (the rounds you see in the photo above).

I’d like to brag about great groups with the above loads, but the results were disappointing. Sometimes that happens. You have to kiss a few frogs in the reloading game to find a prince (sometimes you have to kiss a lot of frogs), and let me tell you, every one of my loads during that range session was amphibious. But that’s okay. When you develop a load for a rifle, you find out what works and what doesn’t. My Ruger .22 250 doesn’t like Nosler 60-grainers and H380. Now I know.

I knew the rifle had potential, though. Here’s earlier data with lighter bullets:

That one load at the bottom of the table showed real promise, so I loaded a few more with the same 52-grain Hornady bullets and tested them a few days later. Here’s what I found:

The above results were promising, but there were inconsistencies in how the lighter bullets grouped. What was driving that? Was it me being a Shakey Jake, or was it something else? I took a hard look at the bullets, and to my surprise, more than half of them had deformed tips.

Deformed tips on the 52-grain Hornady jacketed hollow point bullets. There are a few other things detrimental to good accuracy revealed in this photo, like the faint circumferential witness mark left by the bullet seater, and the shaved copper at the case mouth.

I called Hornady to ask about the deformed tips, and their guy explained to me that what I was seeing was indeed a bullet defect. He asked me for the lot number on the bullet box, and it turned out these bullets were manufactured in 2013 (which is weird, because I had only purchased them a year or two ago). You’ll remember that 2013 was in the Obama era when component shortages were common and the factories were struggling to keep up with demand. These bullets should have never left the factory, and the Hornady rep put a box of replacement bullets in the mail for me that same day. Hornady is a good company that stands behind their products.

Not content to wait for the new bullets, I screened the ones I had and selected bullets with no visible tip deformation for the next reloading lot. I also tried neck-sizing rather than full length resizing. The theory on this is that the cartridge case is fire-formed to the exact chamber dimensions of the rifle, and it should more precisely locate the bullet in the chamber (when you neck size only, you only resize the case where it grabs the bullet). With visually-screened bullets and neck-sized cases, the M77 returned about the same accuracy. But I was seeing more groups below an inch, and I even had one below a half inch:

There’s still variability and that’s probably due to me. There may still be issues I couldn’t see to screen in the bullets, but I think things are moving in the right direction. So what’s next? Varget is another powder reported to do well in the .22 250 (there’s a can of it on my bench), and the new box of Hornady bullets arrived last week. And I’ve got a few more accuracy tricks I want to try. We’ll see what happens.

More gun stuff is right here!

La Purisima Mission

As a New Jersey boy, our history courses in grade school and high school mostly focused on local and regional things, like the American Revolution and maybe a little bit of the Civil War, and then it was time to graduate. I grew up in the middle of a lot of significant Revolutionary War stuff, with maybe a little Gettysburg thrown in, and our class trips and studies tended to focus accordingly. What I’m getting at is I had never heard of the California or Baja missions until I moved to California, got married, and had kids. Then one day my young daughter came home from school and told me she had been assigned a mission.

“To do what,” I asked, thinking it was like getting a mission in the Army.

“San Gabriel,” she answered.

“Huh?” I was a curious and articulate parent.

My daughter patiently explained to her dumb old Dad what the California missions were. I had never heard of the missions until that day. But I’ve been making up for it ever since. I never pass on an opportunity to learn more about the Alta California and Baja missions, and it’s a story that’s far more interesting than the stuff I studied in school.

My favorite California mission, hands down, is La Purisima. It’s the best one there is north of the border. But I’m getting a little ahead of myself.

A bit on the photography first: I shot all the images here with a film camera (a Nikon N70). That’s how long I’ve been stopping in at the La Purisima Mission in Lompoc, California. It’s just a few miles inland off the Pacific Coast Highway. Surprisingly few people know of it, but if you’re planning a trip up the PCH, La Purisima is a must see destination.

This California motorcycle ride occurred as a backup to a plan to dive deep into Baja 20 years ago that just didn’t work out. Good buddy Paul flew out from New Jersey and rented a Harley in San Diego, and the plan was to ride into Baja to see the whales. That’s how it started. I had my ’92 Softail, but it gave up the ghost somewhere around Ensenada. It happens, I guess. Paul and I had to turn around and head home. No problem. I owned four or five motorcycles in those days (I was like Joe Gresh back then, with lots of hair and lots of motorcycles). We’d just park my Harley and I’d grab another bike.

Yours truly and Paul, both suffering from the two of the worst cases of helmet hair ever captured on film. I no longer have that problem. That’s the Pacific Ocean in the background.

Paul had a Harley Fat Boy he rented from EagleRider in San Diego. It was a motorcycle that worked well for this trip. It would have been cool if I could have ridden my Harley, too, but on this trip the motorcycles were a two-wheeled odd couple.

A skinny guy on a Fat Boy somewhere on the Pacific Coast Highway.

I switched over to my Suzuki TL1000S, a bike most people would think was totally unsuited for long-distance motorcycle touring. But it did the job and it did it well. I was younger then and I bent easier; I don’t think I could do a long ride on a sportbike today. The ADV style suits me better. So does a Subaru Outback, but I digress.

A tankbag and a tail pack, and oila, the TL became a touring machine.

Paul and I rode north on the 101 out of LA a bit and then took California’s 246 west from Buellton. I had been to the La Purisima Mission before and I wanted to show it to Paul. It’s not well known as a tourist destination, but it should be. The place is amazing.

A view out front showing the length of the main building and the bell tower.

La Purisima Mission (Misión La Purísima Concepción De María Santísima, or Mission of the Immaculate Conception of Most Holy Mary) was founded in December of 1787. It was a good stop and I got some great photos with my old film Nikon.

A cool front porch. It’s easy to imagine the original inhabitants seeking shade under this roof.

Another exterior view of the La Purisima Mission.

A sundial that appeared to be keeping excellent time. A friend asked what the sundial did when it was time to switch to Daylight Savings Time. That watch is the first version of Citizen’s Blue Angels GMT. It has a bezel slide rule. I still wear it.

The 2000-acre La Purisima Mission is one of only two missions in California not run by the Catholic Church, and it is the only one that faithfully recreates a complete historic mission operation.

A bit of background: La Purisima sort of fell apart starting in the early 1800s. Things were not going well for Spain in the New World and things were especially not going well for the California missions. The mission’s enslaved Chumash natives rebelled, smallpox decimated the indigenous population, Mexico won its independence from Spain and disbanded the mission system, and things generally just went to hell in a handbasket if you were the guy running the missions. The La Purisima property went through several owners. Union Oil bought the place in 1903 and then donated it to California. A huge research and reconstruction effort commenced, and the La Purisima Mission was opened to the public on December 7, 1941 (yep, the same day as the Pearl Harbor attack). Everything at La Purisima had been resurrected as it existed in 1820, including the furniture, the buildings, and even the adobe bricks made from surrounding soil.

You’ve seen the exterior in the photos above. Let’s head into the buildings to see what life was like in the late 1700s and early 1800s for the mission inhabitants.

Inside the chapel. One of the Mission’s objectives was to convert the native Chumash to Catholicism.

Another one of the rooms in the La Purisima Mission.

There’s disagreement these days about whether the Spanish mission system provided enlightenment or enslavement for the natives. The missions were intended to establish a Spanish presence in Alta California. Spain had claimed Mexico and California (and large parts of the American southwest), but they didn’t really have anyone there watching the store until they started the missions in the second half of the 1700s. The Spanish had concerns about other nations claiming the territory. Teach the indigenous people a trade, keep them busy farming and making stuff, and let’s grow it from there. It didn’t quite work out that way.

An objective of mission life was to teach leather work and other skills.

I’m not sure what this equipment was used for, but that’s okay. It means I have a reason to return to La Purisima.

The Mission’s original latrine. That’s Paul behind the curtain.

Thick adobe walls kept the inside of the Mission cool.

La Purisima is still an active farm and ranch. This rather photogenic turkey kept asking us how many days it was until Thanksgiving.

This, my friends, is a Longhorn. Like the turkey above, he had no qualms posing for us.

If you’re planning that bucket list ride on the Pacific Coast Highway, my advice is to include a stop at the La Purisima Mission. You’re only about 13 miles inland from the PCH, and it’s too grand a destination to pass without a visit. You might want to allow a couple of hours to see and photograph this marvelous old place.

Another word on the images here: I’m going to use some of them in a story I recently wrote for my favorite motorcycle magazine. I knew I had these 20-year-old images squirreled away somewhere, but finding them was a challenge. I finally found the prints, but I couldn’t find the negatives. After another hour digging through old boxes, I miraculously found them, too. I thought I’d just have Costco’s photo department scan the negatives for me, and then I thought it might be a good idea to call first and make sure the photo department was open (you know, what with Covid 19 and all). They were, and I told the photo dude I’d be right over to get my negatives scanned.

“We don’t do that,” he said.

“Yeah, you do,” I answered, figuring I was talking to a new guy who just didn’t know. “You’ve done it for me before.”

“Sir, we haven’t touched anything with film in years,” he said.

Hmmmmm. Come to think of it, it had been a while since I’d seen any film for sale in Costco. And it had been a lot of years since I shot anything on film.

The Costco guy suggested a small mom and pop operation across the street from the Costco store, and that’s where I went. What you see here are the results of the Photo Factory’s scans (thanks, guys!).

Time marches on, I guess.

More Epic Rides are here!

Day 6: Honda

The Colombia motoventure continues! This is Day 6 of my epic ride through Colombia’s Andes Mountains with good buddies Juan and Carlos, two great guys with whom I’ve stayed in contact ever since our Andean adventure. Without further ado, here we go!

Originally posted on December 20, 2015

Let me see if I can get this right: I’m a guy from California riding a Chinese motorcycle in Colombia headed to a town called Honda. Yep, that was yesterday’s ticket.

We left Villa de Leyva early in the morning, climbed higher into the Andes, and wow, was it ever cold. Juan Carlos stopped so we could grab a few photos..

As I was taking in the scenery, this Colombian SUV rolled into the scene…

We next stopped at the point where Colombia was born. The last battle of the Colombian war of independence (against Spain) occurred right here at this bridge in Boyaga…

The Colombian rebels defeated the Spanish regulars here, and at that point, Colombia was born. There are a lot of parallels between how Colombia came into being and our Revolutionary War.

Boyaga is actually pronounced “boy-jogga.” In Colombian Spanish, a y is pronounced like a j. So is a double l (as in ll). A montallanta (a tire repair place) is called a “monta-jonta.” Interesting.

Following Juan through these small towns was fascinating and taxing. We’re up in the Andes, and everything is steep. Juan is incredible…we climb these steep cobblestone streets, cut across some guy’s front lawn, grab a dirt road, pick up a new street, every once in a while (while still riding) he pulls up alongside a guy on horse or a tractor to confirm directions (Juan’s GPS, as he calls it), and we cut across the Colombian countryside. It’s amazing. Here’s a sampling of what it looks like, both in the dirt (and there is a lot of dirt riding) and through the small towns…

We hit a last stretch of twisties (a 50-mile stretch) and then we pulled over for a photo of the Magdalena River valley. Our destination (the town of Honda) is down there somewhere…

Honda is a another steep town. This street (that’s our hotel, the Epoque, on the left) is a typical super steep Colombian town road. The road is a one way road…I tried parking the bike facing down hill, but it was too steep. I thought I could just leave the bike in first gear and kill the ignition, but the street was so steep it pulled the bike through the compression stroke. That’s why the bikes are facing uphill. These are unusual riding conditions for me, but totally normal to the Colombians.

Today we’re headed to Santa Rosa de Cabal. You can read all about it in the next installment in this series!

You can read the earlier blogs in this series from Colombia here!

A TT250 Ride

I woke up last Friday with but one thought: I have got to get out on my motorcycle today.

Well, I did, and I had a glorious ride up through the Cajon Pass in southern California. That’s the pass that cuts between the San Gabriel Mountains and the San Bernardino Mountains. Most folks would just take Interstate 15 from So Cal to the High Desert through the Cajon, but to me riding a motorcycle on the freeway is a bit of a crime against nature. There are surface streets that get you through most of the Cajon Pass, and if you know where to look, there are dirt roads that do the same. Those roads are way more fun, but it’s like I said…you have to know where to look.

Me? I know where to look.

On old Route 66 through the Cajon Pass. Yep, it’s still there, and it was a perfect photo op with my black CSC TT250 on a cloudy June morning.

Big freight trains slog through the Cajon Pass on a regular basis, and there’s a dirt road that runs along the tracks for several miles. It was a perfect road for the TT250. I was out there on my own, having a good old time when I stopped to grab a photo, and that’s when I heard it. The rails, that is. They started singing. They do that when there’s a train downrange. You can actually hear the metallic buzz the rails emit miles before the train comes into view. Time to switch the cell phone camera to the video mode. I didn’t see anything for a couple of minutes, and then way down the hill in the distance I could just make out a headlight. Then that one orange orb became three blurry headlights, the signature of the first of several freight locomotives. They were working hard. It takes a lot of power to pull a train up a mountain pass. The lights grew in size, the indistinct three orange dots came into focus, and there it was:

The train was a monster. I finished the video, I took several stills, and then I mounted up and rode at a sedate pace in the opposite direction for a good five minutes before I saw the end of that train. I’ll bet it was three miles long. Maybe more. There were four locomotives pulling and there was a fifth on the tail end. It’s hard to imagine the weight and the energy of a freight train like the one I saw that morning. And it was doing it all going uphill, charging through the Cajon Pass from the Pomona Valley up to the High Desert. It was impressive.

That train just kept coming, and coming, and coming.

I had a hell of a ride that morning. A bit of freeway (but not too much), a fair amount of dirt, a stream crossing that was deeper than I thought it would be (and damn, there was no one to video me standing on the pegs with water splashing all over my boots and jeans), a train, Old Route 66, and nice, cool weather. It was grand.

It was about 5 years ago that I was sitting in Zongshen’s marketing offices in Chongqing discussing this, that, and the other thing on the RX3 for CSC Motorcycles. All the while, I kept stealing peeks at a 150cc dual sport bike the Zongshen wizards had mounted on a display pedestal in their conference area. Finally, I asked…what’s the deal on that motorcycle? Can it be had with a 250cc engine?

My good friend Chongqing Fan smiled. I could read that guy like a book, and what I was reading was this: He knew, and he knew I knew: The guys at Zongshen, China’s largest motorcycle manufacturer, they can do anything. A few quick digital pics back to CSC, a recommendation, a quick decision from a CEO who’s not afraid to make decisions (that would be Azusa Steve), and the CSC TT250 was born. I own one of the very first to arrive in America, and it’s been a hoot. We’ve even done Baja on the TT250s (talk about brand loyalty…half the guys on that ride also own an RX3). CSC can barely keep TT250 motorcycles in stock; they sell as soon as they arrive. Most of the time, they’re sold before the ship gets here.

I selected black for my TT250 (one of three or four colors available in 2016) because I thought it would photograph well, and I was right. It does a lot more than just sit there and look pretty, though. The TT250 is a great motorcycle. It’s simple, torquey, easy to maintain, great handling, reliable, comfortable, and inexpensive. Plus, I know the factory and the people who make and import this motorcycle. Good buddy Gerry and I wrote the shop manual for this motorcycle, and I know the bike’s innards. You might say I know it inside and out. I think the fact that I know most everyone involved in creating and importing this motorcycle makes it even more of a hoot to ride.

TT250s on the production line in Chongqing. Mine was in there somewhere.

The TT250 is about as simple as a motorcycle gets, and it has what has to be one of the most ubiquitous and reliable motorcycle engines on the planet. You see these motors in various versions (ranging from 125cc to 250cc) everywhere. They’re bulletproof. They’re designed to be rode hard and put away wet, and that’s what folks in South America, Central America, Asia, and the Middle East do. It’s no accident that my good buddies at Janus Motorcycles chose the same engine to power their amazing 250cc motorcycles. I’m going to ride my TT250 until the wheels fall off. Then I’ll buy replacement parts for probably something like $9 and repeat the process.

The TT250 is a light bike. It’s easy to ride and easy to keep vertical (they tell me it’s easy to pick up if you drop it, but I’ve never dropped mine). The TT250 weighs 309 pounds wet and in an age of overweight, bloated, and expensive monster motorcycles, riding it is fun. It’s not an ego statement. It’s a motorcycle. It’s what a motorcycle should be. I feel like a kid every time I get on it (and in six months, I’ll be 70 years old). I started riding motorcycles on a Honda Super 90 (a 90cc single) when Lyndon Johnson was in the White House. Riding a simple single makes me a hooligan again, braapping the mean streets of rural New Jersey before I was old enough to have a license and loving every second of it.

I have the 49T rear sprocket on my TT250 (one down from the stock 50T), and that’s about perfect for me. My bike tops out at about 66 mph indicated, and after my hundred mile ride through the Cajon Pass that morning I topped off and checked my fuel economy. 62.5 mpg. Just a little better than I usually get. Your mileage, as they say, may vary.

I have the Wolfman bags on my TT. They’re light, they don’t get in the way, they’ve held up well, and they’re handy if I want to carry stuff. That’s usually a few tools (just in case, but I’ve never needed them on the road), a bottle of Aleve, a change of underwear, and I’m good for a couple of weeks in Baja.

Speaking of Baja, good buddy Baja John is another guy with the same affliction as me: He owns both an RX3 and a TT250. And a .44 Magnum or two, but that’s a story for another blog. Baja John keeps his TT250 at a beachfront home in Baja, and as soon as this Covid 19 business is in the rearview mirror, I’m headed down there. I want to photograph one or two of the more remote missions, John knows the trails, and the TT250 is the motorcycle to get us there.

More good times are on the horizon, folks. Stay tuned.

Epic rides reside here!