The real deal: Apollo 15 Astronaut Dave Scott’s Bulova, which sold for a cool $1.625 million at auction.
I’ve always been a watch guy. It probably started when my parents surprised me with a Timex when I was a kid. The thought of having my own wristwatch was heady stuff for a boy back on the east coast (or anywhere else, I imagine). To make a long story short, I’ve been a watch collector ever since. I don’t specialize, and many times I won’t keep a watch forever. If I like the way a watch looks and it’s not crazy expensive, I’ll wear it for a while, with the duration of “a while” usually determined by the time it takes for the next interesting thing to catch my eye.
I make no excuses: I like watches, and I always wonder about guys who don’t wear them. Not wearing a watch is a common thing with young guys today. When I taught in Cal Poly’s College of Engineering, one of my topics focused on how to do well in an interview. My guidance was simple. Dress sharply, be early, look the interviewer right in the eye, speak up, don’t use the word “like” incessantly when you speak, and wear a watch. A lot of kids today don’t wear watches. If they have any interest in knowing what time it is, they look at their iPhone. That’s a no go, I’d tell my students. If you don’t wear a watch, the person interviewing you will conclude you have no sense of time-based urgency. It’s what I always concluded when someone showed up not wearing a watch.
Anyway, to get to the subject of this blog, I want to tell you about the Bulova moon watch. It’s a cool piece with an interesting story that goes like this: With the advent of the Apollo lunar exploration program (the NASA endeavor to put men on the moon), the US government decided we needed an official space watch. Omega won the competition with their Speedmaster watch, and for the next 14 missions, that’s what astronauts wore.
Here’s where it gets complicated and where the story gets Internet-fuzzy. Depending on which source you believe, Astronaut Dave Scott wore a Bulova watch on the Apollo 15 mission for one of the following reasons:
He wore the Bulova watch because his Omega broke.
He wore the Bulova watch because he felt like it.
He wore the Bulova watch because Bulova was trying to replace Omega as the official NASA watch.
He wore the watch because the US government, Bulova, or other parties wanted the official watch to be something made in America.
Whatever the reason (and you can find stories supporting each of the above floating around in that most authoritative of all sources, the Internet), Dave Scott wore the Bulova on the Apollo 15 mission, and Omega went from being “the only watch worn on the moon” to “the first watch worn on the moon.” It could not have gone over well at the Omega factory.
Dave Scott’s original Bulova, the one he wore on the moon, sold at auction a few years ago. The predicted auction price was $50,000. As predictions go, it wasn’t a very good one. When the gavel came down and the dust cleared, Scott’s Bulova sold for a cool $1.3 million. Throw in the auction commission and other fees, and you’re talking about a $1.625-million wristwatch. Wowee!
Bulova, today no longer an American watch company (they were bought by Citizen a few years ago) recognized a marketing opportunity when it fell into their laps, and they re-issued an internally updated version of Scott’s watch as the Bulova Moonwatch, complete with a 262 kHz Accutron movement. I have no idea what a 262 kHz movement is, except that the Bulova marketing hype tells me it means it’s super accurate.
The not-so-real deal, but a hell of a deal nonetheless: The Bulova replica Moonwatch, purchased for just under $300. Yep, as I type this, I’m wearing my Bulova.
The increased accuracy really didn’t matter to me when I saw the watch (I’m retired now and I seldom need 262 kHz accuracy when I decide I feel like going somewhere), so that’s not what prompted me to pull the trigger. I just like the way it looks, I like the swirl of stories around the original Bulova moon watch, and my Dad wore a Bulova when I was a kid.
Oh, one other thing helped…a trick that has prompted me to pull the trigger on other discretionary purposes. You know how the Internet spies on us, right? I mean, folks complain all the time about looking at something on Amazon or whatever and then it starts showing up in their Facebook feed. That’s not always a bad thing. When I first looked at the Bulova Moonwatch it was a $600 bauble. I wasn’t going to pay that kind of money, and I guess the spymasters/Internet marketeers figured that one out. They and I knew it was a waiting game to see who would blink first. Because I had looked for the watch on Amazon, I started getting emails from different retailers to buy the watch for less, and I let those roll in. Delete, delete, delete, and then one day, an offer floated into my inbox for $299. Hmmm. Delete. And sure enough, a day or two later and that $299 offer came with a coupon for $20 off and free shipping on my first order. Ka ching!
The China tour story I wrote took a long, winding road to publication. I like to pre-sell any feature-ish story and since we had recently done another big CSC story at That Other Magazine I pitched the China ride to Editor in Chief, Marc Cook. He liked the idea and suggested making the story less about the CSC motorcycle and more about the ride.
All went swimmingly on the tour but while I was in China That Other Magazine was going through upheaval on every level. I returned to a smoking, charred magazine landscape of fewer, thinner issues and a frequently changing vision for That Other Magazine. I ran the China story past each new editor (in quick succession) they all liked it but the reformatted book had many must-print stories and little space for a long feature on China.
That Other Magazine went through another major restyle opting for a spare, photo-heavy layout, a cut back to 6 issues a year and hired a platoon of fresh, new writers. I re-re-re-pitched the thing, refusing to believe it was over but like any failed love affair the day came when I realized my blue passion for That Other Magazine had faded to grey.
Whenever I do a free-riding junket for a motorcycle manufacturer there are no preconditions. I may love or hate their motorcycle but I will write honestly about it. The only thing I can offer in return for their hard-earned money is publicity. My job was to write a story and get it published: I had failed myself, CSC, Joe Berk, my fellow China Riders and Zongshen.
At this point I pretty much gave up on the China tour and shoved the thing into a dark, dusty corner of my hard drive. I couldn’t stand looking at the story, so much effort that came to naught. Newer challenges awaited writing and I wasn’t going to let the China story drag me down. I moved on.
Enter this blog and its demanding publishing schedule. While I’m no fountain of content I’ve never written as many words a month as I have since we started ExhaustNotes. The hectic pace and all-consuming need for content has changed my opinion of writing from an art form into a trade. I make stories like I pour concrete. Instead of a failure, the China tour became just another slab. I pitched the thing to Motorcycle.com and thankfully they bit. I rewrote the story to reflect the new realities regarding That Other Magazine and the result can be found here: Kung Fu Riding. Sorry it took so long.
So I guess Charley and Ewan are planning another ride. I suppose that’s a good thing, even though I thought the first ones were kind of contrived. I mean, really, you have two rich kids riding around the world on their own with corporate sponsorship, followed by a caravan of chase vehicles, spare parts, tool chests, mechanics, and camera crews. Two dilettantes confusing their income with their abilities, making a movie, complete with photos like the one above vaguely suggesting a combat mission somewhere in the mountains of Afghanistan. Give me a break. Maybe I’m being hypocritical; after all, I sort of did the same thing on the Western America Adventure Tour and the China ride. We even had a chase vehicle on both of those rides, too, although I managed to convince myself that chase vehicles are a net negative and I never used them again.
You want to read a real adventure story? Turn to my all-time favorite…the story of Dave Barr’s solo ride around the world.
Dave Barr in the hills above Lake Isabella, photographed by yours truly.
Dave Barr is a guy who lost both legs to a landmine while fighting in Africa. Undeterred and unbroken, after a lengthy recovery he finished out his enlistment, came home, put an electric starter on his beat up old ’72 Harley (which already had a hundred thousand miles on the clock), and with no sponsorship, no chase vehicle, no film crew, and nothing other than a strong will, Barr spent the next four years riding around the world. He’d ride a bit, run out of money, find a job wherever he was, work a bit more, and get back on the bike. That, my friends, is a real adventure, and you can read about it in Riding the Edge. Trust me on this: Riding the Edge is infinitely better than the long way whatever.
It doesn’t happen often, but when it does, it’s an easy fix. You know the drill…you open your fuel petcock on a carbureted bike, and a few seconds later you smell gasoline. And then a few seconds after that you see fuel on the ground, dripping from your bike. Most of the time, the culprit is a stuck fuel float valve in the carb’s float bowl.
In the old days, before there where vacuum lines and multiple cylinders and all kinds of complications, getting to the offending valve was a relatively easy fix. There would typically be three Phillips-head screws holding the float bowl to the carb, they came out, you gently pulled the pin holding the float to the carb, and the valve mechanism dropped out into your hand. You might see a bit of debris that held the valve open, or you might not.
The carb on a TT250. Getting to the three screws securing the float bowl to the carb body was a bit of a bitch.
Weirdly, in our world of fuel injected, multi-cylindered motorcycles, this happened to me twice in just the last few weeks. Once was at the very beginning of a Baja trip, and the other was just a day or two ago on my TT250. The fix was easy both times, except for access. Even on our simple single cylinder carbureted machines, the manufacturers have made getting to the float valve challenging. On my TT250, I had to loosen the clamp securing the rubber passageway from the carb to the airbox, pull that passageway away, and then remove the two nuts securing the intake manifold to the cylinder head. All this was just to get the carburetor away from the engine a bit so I could turn it enough to get access to those three little Phillips head screws on the float bowl. After I did that and I pulled the float (which works exactly like the one in your toilet bowl, which works exactly like the one in a wing-mounted F-16 drop tank, but that’s a story for another blog), the float valve dropped out. Sure enough, there was a bit of rubber debris (or was it detritus?) on the valve. I flicked it away, reassembled the thing, and oila, no more fuel leak.
The trick is betting to those three little Phillips head screws with the carb still on the bike. I need a screwdriver like the one you see in this photo, but a lot littler. It’s out there. I’ll find it or make it.
The trick for me on a go-forward basis is to find a very tiny, very short Phillips head screwdriver that will allow me to get the thing under the float bowl with the carb still on the bike. That will turn a 20-minute job into a 20-second job the next time this happens. It’s off to Harbor Freight for me. I’ll keep you posted.
So the price of the new Harley Livewire has been announced, and it’s just under $30K. With taxes, dealer setup, freight, etc., it’s a bike that will be somewhere around $35K. Every blog, motorcycle forum, and motorcycle news outlet on the planet is carrying the story, and I have little more to add. Everyone with an opinion is posting why this makes sense, or why it makes no sense.
When Harley came out with the V-Rod 15 or so years ago, I said it would flop, and I posted a comment to that effect on one of the forums:
Wow, a 600-lb motorcycle with 85 horsepower. Where does the line form?
That comment ultimately was proven correct, and it somehow seems Livewire-appropriate today. I’ll leave the Livewire pricing, marketing analysis, and deep thinking to the other online pundits. My prediction? It took the V-Rod more than a decade to die. The demise of the Livewire, at $35K, will be mercifully quick. I hope I’m wrong, but I suspect I am not.
Wow, it has been pouring here for the last week, with little respite other than this past Sunday. Sunday was nice. Every other day this week and the tail end of last week has been nonstop rain. Big time. Buckets full. And my iPhone just started buzzing with a flash flood warning for this area. Wow again.
So I’m sitting here at the computer, enjoying a hot cup of coffee, looking out the window, and I’m thinking about what it’s like to ride in the rain. We’ve all had those rides. Those memories stick in my mind. I remember every one of those rides like they happened yesterday.
The first was the return leg of my first international motorcycle foray, when good buddy Keith Hediger and I rode up to Montreal and back. That was in the early ‘70s, and we didn’t call them adventure rides back then. They were just motorcycle rides. I was on a ’71 CB750 and Keith was on a Kawi 500cc triple. It rained the entire length of Vermont at about the same intensity you see in the video above. We had no rain gear. It wasn’t cold, but it sure was wet. We were soaked the entire day. Wouldn’t trade a minute of it. It was a great ride.
Another time was on the second ride I ever did in Baja with good buddy Baja John. It was pouring when we left at 4:00 a.m., and it didn’t let up for the entire day. I was on a Harley then, and we finally stopped somewhere around Colonet to checked into a cheap Baja hotel (a somewhat redundant term, which is becoming less redundant as Baja’s march in to the 21st century unfortunately continues). Leather, I found out on that trip, makes for lousy rain gear. I went hypothermic, and I had the shakes until 4:00 the following morning. It made for a good story, and the rest of that trip was epic. Down to Cabo, back up to La Paz, on the overnight ferry over to Mazatlan, out to Puerto Vallarta and Guadalajara, back up to Nogales, and a thousand-mile one-day dash to make it home on New Year’s Eve. Wouldn’t trade a second of it.
Riding with Marty on the ’05 Three Flags Classic, we were caught in a downpour the second day out as we rode along the Dolores River in Colorado. It was a magnificent ride, with Marty on his K1200RS and me on my 1200cc Daytona. It wasn’t a drizzle. It was a downpour, just like you see in the video above. I remember it vividly, and I wouldn’t trade it for anything.
Colombia had lots of rain, but it only hit us hard on the very first day. It was raining hard that first morning as we rode out of Medellin and into the Andes early on that fine Colombian morning, but it lightened up by breakfast. I had real rain gear and the only issues were visibility and passing 22-wheelers on blind curves, as my Colombian riders did with gleeful abandon. Exciting times. But good times, and certainly ones I remember. Colombia was an adventure for the ages. I wouldn’t trade a second of it for anything else.
I’d have to say the heaviest rains I ever rode through were in China, where it rains a lot. It probably rained 25% of the time on that trip, and the first few days were the worst. Imagine riding up into the Tibetan Plateau, in the dark, on dirt roads, in rain way heavier than what you see in the video above. That’s what it was like, and I loved every mile of that ride. I wouldn’t trade it for anything else on the planet.
You might be wondering…why no photos? Well, the simple truth is that my cameras on each trip were tightly wrapped in plastic bags, and I wasn’t about to break them out in the rain. That’s something I guess I forgot to mention in my earlier blog about what to bring on a Baja trip: Garbage bags. They take up almost no space when you’re not using them, and they work great for keeping stuff dry when you ride in the rain.
Doug Turnbull’s personal 1886 Winchester. Note the color case hardening on the receiver and the ultra-high grade walnut. These are magnificent guns.
I’m bombarded with emails and phone calls every day. I haven’t answered a call on my home phone literally in years because of the marketing calls (anyone important calls me on my cell phone), and now I’m starting to get marketing calls on my cell phone, too. Sorry, folks…if I don’t recognize the number, you’re going to voicemail, and just so you know in advance, I don’t need any work done on my home and I’m not in the market for solar panels. And email, wow…delete, delete, delete, delete, and on and on it goes. Once in a great while my inbox will have a marketing email I’ll take a look at, though, and this morning was one of those times.
The email that caught my eye this morning was from Turnbull Restorations. A quick word about Turnbull…they are a company back east that restores firearms and they’re known for their color case hardening. That’s a process that adds magnificent colors to selected bits of a firearm to enrichen their appearance dramatically. It’s what you see on uber-expensive shotguns, Colt Single Action Army revolvers, and a few select lever guns. Turnbull has mastered the process, and Mr. Turnbull makes and restores some of the world’s finest firearms.
I’m surprised color case hardening hasn’t shown up on custom bikes. A few years ago, engraving on selected bike bits had a brief half life on custom Harleys and the like. I thought that was kind of stupid, actually, and it never got an “oooh” or an “ah” from me. But I could see it working with color case hardening. Say an all black bike with color case hardened clutch covers, handlebars, and a few other pieces. Just for accent.
Anyway, the email that caught my eye was about Doug Turnbull’s personal rifle, a restored and rechambered 1886 Winchester, and the scars it bore from the various hunts he’s taken. It referred me to the Turnbull blog, and I just spent the last few minutes reading that story. It’s a good one, and it’s one that hit home. I’ve got a few nicks and dings on my favorite rifle from its outings. You might enjoy the Turnbull story, too. You can read it here.
That got me to thinking about some of the scars on my motorcycle. I like a bike that has a few battle scars on it. Not the ones induced by careless motorcycle technicians during routine maintenance (don’t get me started on those), but the ones that come from real trips to real exotic places. Or the ones that occur naturally through aging. I’ve got more than a few of those on my personal RX3, and each one of them tells a story. That might be a topic for another blog. We’ll see. In the meantime, I’m going to poke around a bit on the Turnbull blog. I love looking at those color case hardened Turnbull guns.
The paper magazine business has taken a beating in the last few years. One magazine that seems to have their stuff together is American Iron, a book that focuses on American-made motorcycles. Somehow these guys get away with charging subscribers what it costs to produce 13 issues a year. For those of you counting that is three more issues a year than Cycle World and Motorcyclist combined!
Nestled among the beauty, health, gun and celebrity gossip periodicals, American Iron is the only motorcycle magazine still sold in supermarkets and drug stores. Start looking around; you’ll see AIM everywhere. I don’t fully understand what happened to the other guys but they made a half-hearted grab at the Internet while letting go of the fun and exclusive part: the monthly magazine.
I subscribe to a legacy magazine and I open my mailbox expecting to see nothing and at ever-diminishing intervals I get it. No matter how good they may be, four or six issues a year cannot keep the pot on boil. I don’t even know if I have time left on my subscription. I’ve gone from anticipating a new issue to being surprised by a new issue.
American Iron’s content is not exactly in my wheelhouse: when no one is looking I’m a dirt rider. But if you throw in a free Indian Bobber I could see myself getting into asphalt. Heck, promise me a one-cent decal and I’ll bite the head off of a pigeon. Offer me a T-shirt and I’ll rob a bank for you, just do something, anything, for readers other than shrink the product to reflect the subsidized pricing subscribers have been trained to expect.
So here’s the deal: Subscribe to American Iron and ride that Indian Scout Bobber home. It’s more costly than the lose-money-on-subs-make-it-up-in-advertising books but those guys aren’t giving away a Bobber and we need paper magazines to survive in America. When you subscribe do me a favor, tell them Joe sent you, I need a place to flog content!
Lester, one of our Chinese guests, drawing a bead with a Ruger Mini 14 at the West End Gun Club. Photo by Ying Liu.
If you do, sign up for our free email updates. You can do so with the widget to the right (if you’re on a computer) or at the bottom (if you’re reading this blog on a mobile phone). At the end of March, we’ll pick a name from the folks on our email list and that lucky person will get a free copy of one of our moto adventure books. In the meantime, here’s one of my favorite chapters from 5000 Miles At 8000 RPM, one of our best selling books. The background is this: We had a bunch of folks coming over from China and Colombia (huh, Colombia?) to ride with us from LA to Sturgis to Washington and Oregon and back to LA along the Pacific coast, stopping at every National Park and hitting the best roads along the way. It was a hell of a ride. But the events of a trip to the rifle range and a nearby Bass Pro store were equally as interesting.
The Chinese and the Colombians all arrived around the same time, and they all came in through Los Angeles International Airport. Steve and I met our six Chinese guests as they arrived. I’ll take a minute here to introduce everyone.
Hugo was the first to arrive. Hugo is a Zongshen employee, and he is the Zongshen representative and sales manager assigned to Colombia. Colombia is Zongshen’s largest export customer, and Zongshen keeps a full time representative in that country. Hugo came to us as a result of the US government denying entry visas to the original Zongshen people who planned to accompany us on the Western America Adventure Ride. I liked Hugo the instant I met him. He’s a good guy.
I should also tell you at this point that our Chinese guests’ names may be a little confusing. The Chinese use their family name first, and their given name second. Hugo’s real name is Ying Liu, so Ying is his family name and Liu is his given name. I read that and I called Hugo “Ying Lew.” He laughed at my pronunciation and told me how to say it correctly. I tried a couple of times and then dropped any pretense of being culturally sensitive. Hugo it would be.
A lot of the Chinese adopt an English name to make it easier for big dumb Americans like me to communicate with them. It’s a nice move on their part. I’m telling you all of this so you’ll realize that some of the guys have Anglicized names, and some have Chinese names. You’ll get the hang of it as the book progresses.
The next flight brought Lester, Tony, Tso, Kong, and Kyle to us.
Lester is a tall man who looks just like Yul Brynner in The King and I. He’s a physical fitness instructor in a primary school in China, and he also owns a very successful motorcycle and bicycle luggage manufacturing company in China. Lester spoke English well. He is a prominent blogger in China on their premier motorcycle forum. Lester blogged about our trip extensively while we were on the road.
Tony is a celebrity photographer. He owns several motorcycles and his photos are widely published in China and other parts of Asia. He’s an interesting man. You’ll see him holding a small stuffed dog in my photos. That’s MoMo, a mascot who has accompanied Tony to more than 20 countries.
Tso would emerge as the quiet one in our group. He stuck with his Chinese name (it’s pronounced “szo” with a hard “sz” sound). Tso is another industrialist; he owns a motorcycle clothing company in China. He was wearing his company’s motorcycle gear, as were several of the other Chinese riders.
When I met Kong, I immediately told him that from this point forward on our ride, he would be “King Kong.” The Chinese got a big laugh out of that. They all knew the movie and they all liked Kong’s new name. Kong is a prominent automotive journalist in China.
Kyle had an English name, but he didn’t speak much English. He is an advertising designer and executive, and his customers include the big oil companies in China. Kyle was a lot of fun, and he sure could work wonders with a video camera.
I asked Hugo how Zongshen selected these guys for the Western America Adventure Ride. I didn’t understand everything he told me, but I think it was based on their motorcycling experience and a contest of some sort Zongshen had held in China. Each of these guys has a huge media following in China. They were all what I would call high rollers. These folks owned their own companies and were well-known writers and bloggers in China.
The two Colombians also met us at the airport that night. Their participation in the ride was a last minute arrangement. I received a Skype message from Hugo about a week before the ride asking me if the Colombians could accompany us. It was a surprise to me, but I didn’t have a problem with it. I thought they would be AKT employees, but they weren’t.
Juan Carlos, one of the two Colombians, owns the only motorcycle magazine in Colombia. He’s a tall thin guy and an excellent rider. He once rode a KLR 650 to Tierra del Fuego, the southernmost tip of South America, and he had written a hell of a story about it.
Gabriel Abad was the other Colombian. He was instrumental in helping Juan Carlos start his motorcycle magazine. Although Gabriel is a Colombian, he lives in Canada. That certainly was in keeping with the international flavor of our team.
When our good buddies from China and Colombia arrived in the USA that evening, one of their first requests was for an In-N-Out Burger. We did that on the way home from LAX. Then it was on to the hotel in Duarte (the next town over from Azusa) and a good night’s sleep after their long journeys to America.
We had a spare 2 days before the ride. We rode around locally to get everybody used to their bikes on the first day, and on the morning of the second day I asked our guests what they would like to do.
Their answer was direct: We want to shoot a gun.
I was happy to oblige. I’m a firearms enthusiast and I’ve been a member of our local gun club for decades. I put my Ruger Mini 14 in the van and we were off to the West End Gun Club.
Our guests were fascinated with everything America has to offer, and the freedom guaranteed by our 2nd Amendment was obviously high on that list. After a brief lesson at the gun club on the rifle, the .223 cartridge, and firearms safety, we set up a target and took turns putting the Ruger through its paces. The guys loved it. The smiles were real, and I had brought along plenty of ammo. The Chinese and the Colombians did well. Literally every shot was on target. They told me I was a good teacher. I think they are just good shots.
Now before any of you get your shorts in a knot about guns and shooting, let me tell you that even though I am a strong 2nd Amendment supporter, I can understand why some of you might be opposed to the freedoms guaranteed by the US Constitution. When I go to a public range I sometimes see people who I wouldn’t allow to have oxygen (let alone firearms).
The problem, as I see it, is that if you restrict our rights in this area, it would be a government pinhead making the call on who gets to have guns and who doesn’t (and that scares me even more than some of the yahoos I see with guns). It’s a tough call, but I’ll come down on the side of the 2nd Amendment every time. The founding fathers knew what they were doing, and they did it before the pinheads permeated the government.
Ah, but I digress yet again. Back to the main attraction…my day at the range with our guests.
I didn’t get photos of that event. I was busy teaching, watching, and explaining, and I just didn’t have an opportunity. The Chinese and the Colombians did. They were having a blast (literally and figuratively), and they captured hundreds of photos. I didn’t realize just how special this would be to them when we first left Azusa for the gun club, but it became apparent as soon as we arrived at the range. They all ran up to the line and were fascinated by the spent brass lying on the ground. Several of our guests took pictures. Imagine that…taking pictures of empty shell casings!
When I took the rifle out of its case and opened the ammo box, there were even more oohs and aahhhs. And more photos. I guess I’m so used to being around this stuff I didn’t realize how special this day was for our guests. These guys had never held or fired a gun before. Ever. I was amazed by that. They were amazed that we have the freedom to own and shoot firearms. It was an interesting afternoon.
When we finished, all of our guests collected their targets. I had brought along enough targets to give each person their own. We had the range to ourselves that afternoon, so each of the guys would shoot a magazine full of 5.56 ammo, we made the rifle safe, we went downrange to see how each person did, and then we put up a new target for the next guy. Many of the guys repeated that cycle three or four times. It was fun. The guys were like kids in a candy store. I enjoyed being a part of it.
It was hot when we finished shooting at around 4:00 p.m. that day. We were due to meet for dinner at Pinnacle Peaks (a great barbeque place in San Dimas) at 6:00 p.m., and we had a couple of hours to kill. I asked our guests if there was anything else they wanted to do before we went for dinner. My thought was that they might want to go back to the hotel and freshen up. That’s not what they had on their minds. They had another request: Can we go to a gun store?
That sounded like a good idea to me. We have a Bass Pro near where we were, and it’s awesome. Okay, then. Our next stop would be Bass Pro.
I was already getting a sense of how much our guests liked taking pictures, so I told them when we entered the gun department at Bass Pro we should put the cameras away. Usually there are signs prohibiting photography in these kinds of places. We gun enthusiasts don’t like being photographed by people we don’t know when we are handling firearms (big brother, black helicopters, and all the rest of the unease that comes with a healthy case of paranoia and a deep distrust of the government). I told our guests I would ask if we could take photos, but until then, I asked them to please keep their cameras in their cases.
The guys were in awe when we entered Bass Pro, and then they were even more astounded when we reached the gun department. They were literally speechless. Open mouths. Wide eyes. Unabashed amazement. There isn’t anything like Bass Pro in China or Colombia. I’ve been to both countries and I know that to be the case. Hell, there wasn’t anything like Bass Pro in America until a few years ago. It’s a combination of a museum, a theme park, a gun store, an armory, and a shopping emporium. I love the place and all that it says about America.
Now, you have to picture this. The Bass Pro gun department. Hundreds of rifles and handguns on display. Targets. Ammo. Gun cases. Reloading gear. A bunch of guys from China talking excitedly a hundred miles an hour in Chinese. The rest of the customers watching, literally with dropped jaws, wondering what was going on. We were a sight.
The Colombians were talking excitedly the same way, but in Spanish.
I was the only guy who looked like he might be from America (my YouTubby belly probably gave me away). The gun department manager looked at me with a quizzical eye. I explained to him who we were and why these guys were so excited. He smiled. “Would they like to take pictures?” he asked. Hoo boy!
The guys loved it. So did the Bass Pro staff. They were handing the Chinese these monster Smith and Wesson .500 Magnums so they could pose for photos, ala Dirty Harry. It was quite a moment and it made quite an impression. One of the guys had his video camera out and he was recording one of the Chinese riders holding a huge Smith and Wesson revolver. The guy with the revolver did a pretty good impersonation of Clint Eastwood (albeit with a Chinese accent):
Do you feel lucky, punk? Well, do ya?
It was pretty funny. That Dirty Harry movie is 40 years old and it was made before most of our guests were born, but these guys knew that line. The Chinese would surprise me a number of times with their mastery of many American things from our movies and our music. All that’s coming up later in this story, folks.
The Chinese and the Colombians were absolutely fascinated with the whole guns and shooting thing and what it is like to live in America, and the Bass Pro staff were quite taken with them. I was pleased. Our guests were getting a first-hand look at American freedoms and American hospitality. It was a theme we would continue to see emerge throughout the Western America Adventure Ride.
For me, a crowning moment occurred on the way to dinner that night. One of the Chinese told me that all the time he was growing up he had been told that Americans were evil and we were their enemy. “That’s just not true,” he said.
I had a great lunch last week with Trevor Summons, the fellow who won our quarterly email drawing for a copy of Moto Colombia. Wow, was I ever surprised. When I met Trevor and gave him a copy of my book, he gave me a copy of his!
Good buddy, fellow traveler, and author Trevor Summons…and a copy of Trevor’s Travels.
Trevor writes a newspaper column appropriately titled, “Trevor’s Travels.” The columns feature cool places to visit, mostly here in the Southland. Well, Trevor combined some of his favorites into a book with the same title (Trevor’s Travels, of course) and it’s good. Really good. I enjoyed reading Trevor’s column and there are a few I’ve missed, but I’m busy catching up with the book.
Hey, don’t feel bad if you haven’t written your own book. You can still win a copy of one of mine when you add your name to our automatic email update list. Our next contest ends 31 March, so don’t wait…add your name now!
The China tour story I wrote took a long, winding road to publication. I like to pre-sell any feature-ish story and since we had recently done another big CSC story at That Other Magazine I pitched the China ride to Editor in Chief, Marc Cook. He liked the idea and suggested making the story less about the CSC motorcycle and more about the ride.
The paper magazine business has taken a beating in the last few years. One magazine that seems to have their stuff together is American Iron, a book that focuses on American-made motorcycles. Somehow these guys get away with charging subscribers what it costs to produce 13 issues a year. For those of you counting that is three more issues a year than Cycle World and Motorcyclist combined!
