Back In The Day – Page 22 – The ExhaustNotes Blog

Bahia de Los Angeles 2006

Yours truly with my Triumph Tiger in Palomar, about 200 miles south of the border along Baja’s Transpeninsular Highway. I had a little bit of hair back in the day, and it was still brown. What’s left now is mostly gray.

Wow, here’s a find…a bunch of older print photos from a Baja trip my old Baja buddy John Welker and I did back in 2006. Man, times were different back then. We both rode big road bikes and we were both working for a living. What a difference 14 years can make. It was a quick 1100-mile weekend ride to Bahia de Los Angeles in the Baja peninsula. John has a house on the Sea of Cortez down there. He still owns it, and he spends several months each year in Mexico. I took my Triumph Tiger for its first long ride, John took his Yamaha Virago, and we had a great time. I guess that goes without saying. Any motorcycle trip to Baja is going to be great.

A Mexican truck driver on the Transpeninsular Highway, who was actually pretty friendly.

We stayed in San Vincente on the way down. It’s a cool little agricultural town along the Transpeninsular Highway, one of many in the agricultural district north of El Rosario. We saw a guy trying to buy beer in the restaurant in San Vincente that Friday night. There was a BMW GS in the hotel parking lot and I asked if it was his. Yep, it was, and Peter introduced himself to me. The restaurant didn’t serve beer, but I went across the street to pick up a couple of sixpacks of Tecate. I asked Peter to join us for dinner, and he did. He’s from Canada (eh?), and he was touring Mexico and the US for a month or two.

Our new GS-mounted good buddy Peter in San Vincente, along with good buddy Annie. Peter said he was looking for a Starbuck’s and got lost. I think there may be a Starbuck’s down there now.

That’s Deema, Annie, John, and Peter. It was a grand dinner. Deema and Annie drove down in Annie’s car on this trip.

On Saturday, the next morning, John and I ran into a fog bank about 250 miles south of the border. Visibility was so bad I couldn’t see the ground beneath me, so I pulled over to wait it out.

I grabbed this shot of my Triumph in the fog.

And another. There was nothing else to do until the fog lifted. The Tiger was a very photogenic motorcycle.

Mexico’s Highway 1 (the Transpeninsular Highway) follows the Pacific coast and then turns inland at El Rosario. Mama Espinoza’s is a classic Mexican restaurant known for their lobster burritos. I had a chicken burrito for lunch and, as always, it was the best one I ever had. I made it a point to stop there on the way back the next day and I had the same thing.

We always feel welcome at Mama Espinoza’s.

South of El Rosario, it gets real desolate real fast. That’s the Valle de los Cirios, and it’s one of the prettiest spots on the peninsula. The roads are spectacular. Fast sweepers, long straights, and no traffic. There’s just the odd cow or wild burro in the road.

A typical view in the Valle de los Cirios.

Another stop along the Transpeninsular Highway. The Triumph Tiger was a great machine for this kind of riding, especially with its comfortable riding position and a range exceeding 200 miles.

After the Valle de Los Cirios, it was desert down to Catavina and beyond. There are remote truck stops, lots of desert, and just great riding. I’ve got to get back down there again sometime soon.

A truck stop out in the middle of nowhere.

We stopped briefly in Catavina, where John couldn’t tear himself away from this rather talkative guy. John and I have put a lot of miles on our motorcycles in Mexico. The scenery is great. The people you might are even more fun.

At Punta Prieta, after traveling on Highway 1 for about 360 miles, we made a left turn and headed east across the Baja peninsula.

This was our destination…Bahia de Los Angeles.

Triumph called the Tiger’s color Caspian Blue, presumably named after the Caspian Sea. This wasn’t the Caspian Sea (it’s the Sea of Cortez), but I’d say the color match is pretty good.

John’s house on the Sea of Cortez. John picked a moonless weekend so that we could take in the stars, and the night sky was awesome.

Every motorcycle trip needs an obligatory artsy fartsy shot. This was mine from our 2006 Bahia de Los Angeles ride.

John’s house is literally right on the Sea of Cortez. It’s a pretty cool place.

Casa de Welker, on Bahia de Los Angeles.

John telling a fish story in his front yard.

Our dinner choice that Saturday night. The fish tacos were impressive, as was the Tecate. Life is good down there in Baja.

John keeps an old VW microbus in Bahia de Los Angeles that came with the house when he bought it. The lights on the VW didn’t work back in 2006 (I imagine John has them working now). We had dinner in town and realized the sun had set. No lights. No moon. Dirt roads through the Baja desert. We realized we were in a pickle. But, John had an idea. And a flashlight. Annie hung out the window with that flashlight and sort of lit the way. It was an old flashlight with a limp battery, and it didn’t really light up anything. But we didn’t care. It was a fun evening.

The original Baja bug. LIghts? We don’t need no stinkin’ lights!

Candy, the Chihuaha from Peru. In Mexico. That little pup ran the show.

There’s no light pollution down there in Bahia de Los Angeles. I slept on the roof and it was magnificent. I’ve never seen stars as vivid nor as plentiful as they were that night. And the next morning, I was up before sunrise, so I was able to set up my camera and get a cool photo of the sun rising over the Sea of Cortez.

A shot from John’s roof looking east over the Sea of Cortez.

I rode back the next morning by myself…John was staying at his place a couple of extra days, but I had to get back for work. Work. Man, those days seem so far in the past now.

The ride back was a good one. It’s nice to ride with friends; it’s also nice to ride on your own. I do some of my best thinking when I’m riding by myself. I need to do more of it.

I grabbed this shot in one of the agricultural towns along Highway 1 on the way back to the US.

I shot all of the photos on this page with my F5 Nikon, and the 24-120 Nikon and 17-35 Sigma lenses. Back in the day, as film cameras went the Nikon F5 was a good as it ever got, and I got a lot of great shots with that camera. The thing was a tank and I don’t think I would want to lug it around today, but back then it was really something.

So there you have it. I’ve got a standing invitation from Baja John to ride down to Bahia de Los Angeles, and as I put this blog together and looked at these photos again, I think that’s what I’m going to do.

Want more Baja? Check out our Baja page!

Don’t miss anything from ExNotes!

Book Review: The Arsenal of Democracy

We watch our Google Analytics regularly, and one of the things that impresses us is what impresses you. You might be surprised to learn that our most frequently visited pages and blogs are the product reviews, and in particular, the book reviews. That’s one of the reasons why I want to get the word out to our readers about one of the best books I’ve read this year: A.J. Baime’s The Arsenal of Democracy.

I first read A.J. Baime’s work in The Wall Street Journal, where he does a weekly piece on interesting cars. You know, cars with a story behind them. Cars that are still driven regularly. I’d subscribe to The Journal just for those stories, although that newspaper has much more going for it than just Mr. Baime’s car stories. (The WSJ has objective reporting, something sorely missing in The Los Angeles Times and The New York Times, two papers that lean so sharply left it’s amazing they’re still standing.) I like A.J. Baime’s WSJ articles, and when I learned he also writes books, I was in.

In a word, The Arsenal of Democracy is great. It’s a wonderful book weaving together the stories of World War II, the Ford family, Detroit’s wholesale conversion to war production, the application of mass production to weapons manufacturing, the logistics of building major manufacturing facilities in the middle of nowhere, and Ford’s production of the B-24 Liberator. Ford built B-24 bombers at the rate of one an hour (actually, they did slightly better than that by the end of the war), and there’s no question Ford was a major factor in our military success. Baime made it all read like a novel, but all of it actually happened.

Folks, trust me on this: The Arsenal of Democracy is a great book. I think it’s one you should consider adding to your list if you haven’t read it already. You can thank me later.

Take a look at our other product and book reviews here.

Never miss one of our blogs…sign up here!

Dream Bike: Honda CBX

I’d always wanted a CBX, ever since they were introduced by Honda in 1979. I bought a new Honda 750 Four when that bike first came out, and the CBX seemed a logical extension of the kind of engineering pioneered by the Honda 750. It was engineering excess raised to an exponent, the CBX was, I was a guy in my 20s, and in those days, dealers would let you take a bike out for a test ride. I’m the kind of guy that caused them to stop doing that. I lived in Fort Worth, the Honda dealer there gave me the keys to a new silver CBX with less than 20 miles on the odometer, and I tried to bury the needle on Loop 820 back in ’79. As I recall, I touched something north of 140 miles per hour, and when I returned to the dealer and put the bike on its sidestand, the cam covers were ejaculating oil. The bike’s honey-colored lifeblood was squirting out in an almost arterial fashion.

“What do you think?” the sales guy asked, hoping for a quick sale.

“It’s not for me,” I answered. “I mean, look at the thing…it leaks oil worse than my Harley.”

Still, I wanted a CBX. Always did, and in ’92, I finally scratched that itch.

The mighty Six. My old 1982 Honda CBX. Those film cameras that I had 30 years ago did a nice job, and this photo brings back memories of one my more memorable motorcycles.

I bought the CBX you see above in 1992 (when it was already 10 years old), but the bike only had 4500 miles on it and it was in pristine condition. The price was $4500, perfectly matching the odometer mileage. Everything was stock, and everything was in perfect shape (other than the tires, which were cracking with age).

I must have gone back to Bert’s dealership in Azusa four times drooling over that bike, and when I finally made up my mind to buy it and went back for a fifth time, it was gone. I’d lost my opportunity. Ah, well, I could bounce around for a while longer on my Harley. It was a different Harley than the one I mentioned above. That earlier one was a ’79 Electra-Glide and I called it my optical illusion because it looked like a motorcycle. The Harley I owned when I bought the ’82 CBX was a ’92 Softail, but that one was a real motorcycle. You could ride it without things breaking.

Bert’s was a magnet to me, and lots of times after work I’d stop there just to look at the motorcycles. The place was like an art gallery. I just enjoyed being there and taking it all in. Motorcycles can be art, you know. That bit of art that I had fallen in love with, the pearlescent white ’82 CBX, was gone. I had let it escape.

So, you can imagine my surprise a month or two later when I stopped in again and the CBX was back on the floor. The bike had been sold to a Japanese collector, I was told, and the deal fell through. Opportunity didn’t need to knock twice. I bought the CBX on the spot.

The CBX was an amazing motorcycle. 1050cc. Six cylinders. Six carbs. 24 valves. Double overhead cams. Actually, it was quadruple overhead cams. The cylinder head was so long each cam was split in two, and the two halves were joined in the middle of their vast reach across those six cylinders by what engineers call Oldham couplers. I didn’t know exactly what an Oldham coupler was or how it worked, but it sounded cool. I owned a motorcycle with Oldham couplers. How many people can say that?

The CBX didn’t have much bottom end, but once the engine got going, the thing was amazing. And the sound! Wow! It sounded like a Formula 1 race car. I read somewhere that the Japanese engineers actually spent time on a US aircraft carrier listening to fighter jets take off, and their objective was to make the CBX sound like that. When conditions were right, I convinced myself I could hear the F-14 in my CBX. Top Gun. Maverick. That was me.

The CBX was fun, and it drew looks wherever I rode it. Honda only made the CBX for 4 years (1979 through 1982). They were expensive to manufacture (it seemed like every fastener on the thing was a custom design) and they didn’t sell all that well. But it was an awesome display of technology. I’m a mechanical engineer, and the design spoke to me.

I never had any regrets with that old CBX. I rode it hard for the next 10 years, and other than dropping it a couple of times in 0-mph mishaps, it served me well. I rode it all over the Southwest and it never missed a beat. When I first bought it, I could walk into any Honda dealer and buy new parts (even though it was 10 years old). Ten years later (when the bike was 20 years old) that was no longer the case, and that scared me. The CBX was years ahead of its time and it was complicated. If something broke and I couldn’t find parts, I’d have a $4500 paperweight.

In those days, I was on a CBX Internet mailing list. I put a note on the list advising folks that I wanted to sell the bike and it sold that day. I got a fair price for it, and the mighty Six was gone. I have no regrets, folks…I had lots of fun and it was time to move on. But I miss that bike. It was fun, it was fast, it was different, and it was everything a motorcycle should be.

MC’s Latest Destination: Princeton Battlefield State Park

A road that dates back to before the Revolutionary Way, and one used by our Continental Army to defeat the Brits.

Last August I was back in New Jersey for my 50th high school reunion. I visited and wrote a short blog about the Princeton Battlefield State Park, and that turned into a Destinations piece for Motorcycle Classics magazine. It’s in print and online, and you can read it here. Better yet, buy a copy of the January/February 2020 issue. You’ll like it.

You know, New Jersey is not a state that springs to mind when considering great motorcycle rides, but they are there. I grew up in that part of the world, and it has resulted in three pieces in Motorcycle Classics about rides in and through different parts of New Jersey. Even in the highly-developed central Jersey region, there are more than a few rural roads and great riding if you know where to look for it. I used to love riding those roads when I lived back there. The New Jersey seafood and the pizza are beyond comparison, too. It’s the best in the world.

I guess that brings me to my first motorcycle, which was a modified Honda Super 90. I wasn’t old enough to drive yet, but that didn’t slow me down. I rode that thing all over no matter what the weather.

A 1965 Honda Super 90, and yours truly at age 14. Nothing slowed us down in those days.

How about you? What was your first bike, and where did you ride it? Got a photo? Send it in and tell us about it, and we’ll publish it here on ExNotes. Email it to us at info@ExhaustNotes.us!

Movie Review: The 24 Hour War

Gresh’s review of Ford versus Ferrari had my attention, and SWMBO wanted to see the movie, so off to the theatre we went. My take on it was pretty much identical to Joe’s: Grand entertainment, lots of grimaces and Hollywood liberties with the facts, but overall, an entertaining if not entirely accurate flick.

Later that evening, we were channel surfing and we flopped over to Netflix, and what do you know, a documentary titled The 24 Hour War popped up. I know Amazon, Facebook, and others use all kinds of spyware to figure out what to pitch to us next, but wow, this was amazing. That very day, and a pop up for another movie about the great Ford versus Ferrari war and Le Mans. Hey, in for a penny, in for a pound, so we watched The 24 Hour War.

Unlike Ford v. Ferrari, The 24 Hour War took no liberties with the truth, the facts, the timelines, or the vehicles themselves. It was a damn fine bit of actual, factual reporting, and I enjoyed it more than the movie we had seen earlier that day. If you get Netflix, it’s free, and if you own a microwave and a refrigerator, you won’t have to pay $15 for popcorn and a couple of Cokes (like Gresh did).

A few more good things about The 24 Hour War: It went into much more detail about Henry Ford and Enzo Ferrari (I found that interesting), and portions of the show were narrated by A.J. Baime. Mr. Baime does a series on interesting cars people still drive in The Wall Street Journal and I love his writing. I’m just finishing up a book by Baime about our industrial mobilization prior to and during World War II, and it, too, focuses heavily on the Ford family. The guy is a great writer, and I’ll have a review here on Baime’s book, The Arsenal of Democracy, in the near future.

One more thing regarding the cars themselves: To me, it’s not really a contest and I don’t much care who won Le Mans. Given the choice between owning a Ford GT or a Ferrari, to me the answer is obvious: It’s Ferrari all day long.

But I digress. Back to the review. The bottom line? Ford versus Ferrari was an entertaining movie, but the The 24 Hour War is an absolutely outstanding documentary. I think you’ll enjoy it.

The Perfect Bike?

This was a blog I wrote for CSC about 6 years ago, and it’s still relevant. Earlier this year I posted a photo showing my Harley in Baja and Gresh made a good comment: Any motorcycle you take a trip on is an adventure motorcycle. I agree with that. The earlier blogs on my Harley Softail had me thinking about this question again: What is the perfect motorcycle?

Cruisers. Standards. Sports bikes. Dirt bikes. Dual sports. Big bikes. Small bikes. Whoa, I’m getting dizzy just listing these.

The Good Old Days

In the old days, it was simple. There were motorcycles. Just plain motorcycles. You wanted to ride, you bought a motorcycle. And they were small, mostly. I started on a 90cc Honda (that’s me in that photo to the right). We’d call it a standard today, if such a thing still existed.

Then it got confusing. Bikes got bigger. Stupidly so, in my opinion. In my youth, a 650 was a huge motorcycle, and the streets were ruled by bikes like the Triumph Bonneville and the BSA Lightning. Today, a 650 would be considered small. The biggest Triumph today has a 2300cc engine. I don’t follow the Harley thing anymore, but I think their engines are nearly that big, too. The bikes weigh close to half a ton. Half a ton!

I’ve gone through an evolution of sorts on this topic. Started on standards, migrated into cruisers after a long lapse, went to the rice rockets, then morphed into dual sports.

Cruisers and Adventure Bikes

The ADV bug hit me hard about 15 years ago. I’d been riding in Baja a lot and my forays occasionally took me off road. Like many folks who drifted back into motorcycles in the early 1990s, the uptick in Harley quality bit me. As many of us did, I bought my obligatory yuppie bike (the Heritage Softail) and the accompanying zillion t-shirts (one from every Harley dealer along the path of every trip I ever took). I had everything that went along with this kind of riding except the tattoo (my wife and a modicum of clear thinking on my part drew the line there). Leather fringe, the beanie helmet, complimentary HOG membership, and the pot belly. I was fully engaged.

Unlike a lot of yuppie riders of that era, though, I wasn’t content to squander my bucks on chrome, leather fringe, and the “ride to live, live to ride” schlock. I wanted to ride, and ride I did. All over the southwestern US and deep into Mexico. Those rides were what convinced me that maybe an 800+ lb cruiser was not the best bike in the world for serious riding…

The Harley had a low center of gravity, and I liked that. It was low to the ground, and I didn’t like that. And it was heavy. When that puppy started to drift in the sand, I just hung on and hoped for the best. Someone was looking out for me, because in all of that offroading down there in Baja, I never once dropped it. As I sit here typing this, enjoying a nice hot cup of coffee that Susie just made for me, I realize that’s kind of amazing.

The other thing I didn’t like about the Harley was that I couldn’t carry too much stuff on it without converting that bike into a sort of rolling bungee cord advertisement. The bike’s leather bags didn’t hold very much, the Harley’s vibration required that I constantly watch and tighten their mounting hardware, and the whole arrangement really wasn’t a good setup for what I was doing. The leather bags looked cool, but that was it. It was bungee cords and spare bags to the rescue on those trips…

Sports Bikes

The next phase for me involved sports bikes. They were all the rage in the early 90s and beyond, but to me they basically represent the triumph of marketing hoopla over common sense. I bought a Suzuki TL1000S (fastest bike I ever owned), and I toured Baja with it. It would be hard to find a worse bike for that kind of riding. The whole sports bike thing, in my opinion, was and is stupid. You sit in this ridiculous crouched over, head down position, and if you do any kind of riding at all, by the end of the day your wrists, shoulders, and neck are on fire. My luggage carrying capacity was restricted to a small tankbag and a ridiculous-looking tailbag.

I was pretty hooked on the look, though, and I went through a succession of sports bikes, including the TL1000S, a really racy Triumph Daytona 1200 (rode that one from Mexico to Canada), and a Triumph Speed Triple. Fast, but really dumb as touring solutions, and even dumber for any kind of off road excursion.

Phase III for me, after going through the Harley “ride to live” hoopla and the Ricky Racer phases, was ADV riding and dual sport bikes. The idea here is that the bike is equally at home on the street or in the dirt. Dual purpose…dual sport. I liked the idea, and I thought it would be a winner for my kind of riding.

A BMW GS versus Triumph’s Tiger

The flavor of the month back then was the BMW GS. I could never see myself on a Beemer, but I liked the concept. I was a Triumph man back in those days, and the Triumph Tiger really had my attention. A couple of my friends were riding the big BMW GS, but I knew I didn’t want a Beemer. In my opinion, those bikes are overpriced. The Beemers are heavy (over 600 lbs on the road), they have a terrible reputation for reliability, and I think they looked goofy. The Tiger seemed to be a better deal than the Beemer, and it sure had the right offroad look. Tall, an upright seating position (I had enough of that sports bike nonsense), and integrated luggage. So, I bit the bullet and shelled out something north of $10K back in ’06 for this beauty…

The Triumph had a few things going for it…I liked the detachable luggage, it was fast, it got good gas mileage (I could go 200+ miles between gas stations), and did I mention it was fast?

The Tiger’s Shortfalls

Looks can be deceiving, though, and that Tiger was anything but an off-road bike. It was still well over 600 lbs on the road with a full tank of gas, and in the soft stuff, it was terrifying. I never dropped the Triumph, but I sure came close one time. On a ride out to the Old Mill in Baja (a really cool old hotel right on the coast a couple hundred miles south of the border), the soft sand was bad. Really bad. Getting to the Old Mill involved riding through about 5 miles of soft sand, and it scared the stuffing out of me. I literally tossed and turned all night worrying about the ride out the next morning. It’s not supposed to be like that, folks.

And the Tiger was tall. Too tall, in my opinion. I think all of the current dual sport bikes are too tall. I guess the manufacturers do that because their marketing studies show a lot of basketball players buy dual sports. Me? I don’t play basketball and I never cared for a seat that high. Just getting on the Tiger was scary. After throwing my leg over the seat, I’d fight to lean the bike upright, and not being able to touch the ground on the right side until I had the thing upright was downright unnerving. I never got over that initial “getting on the bike” uneasiness. What were those engineers thinking?
The other thing that surprised me about the Tiger was that it was uncomfortable. The seat was hard (not comfortably hard, like a well designed seat should be, but more like sitting on small beer keg), and the foot pegs were way too high. I think they did that foot peg thing to make the bike lean over more, but all it did for me was make me feel like I was squatting all day. Not a good idea.

Kawasaki’s KLR 650

I rode the Tiger for a few years and then sold it. Even before I sold it, though, I had bought a new KLR 650 Kawasaki. It was a big step down in the power department (I think it has something like 34 or 38 horsepower), but I had been looking at the KLR for years. It seemed to be right…something that was smaller, had a comfortable riding position, and was reasonably priced (back then, anyway).

I had wanted a KLR for a long time, but nobody was willing to let me ride one. That’s a common problem with Japanese motorcycle dealers. And folks, this boy ain’t shelling out anything without a test ride first. I understand why they do it (they probably see 10,000 squids who want a test ride for every serious buyer who walks into a showroom), but I’m old fashioned and crotchety. I won’t buy anything without a test ride. This no-test-ride thing kept me from pulling the trigger on a KLR for years. When I finally found a dealer who was willing to let me ride one (thank you, Art Wood), I wrote the check and got on the road…and the off road…

My buddy John and I have covered a lot of miles on our KLRs through Baja and elsewhere. I still have my KLR, but truth be told, I only fire it up three or four times a year. It’s a big bike. Kawi says the KLR is under 400 lbs, but with a full tank of gas on a certified scale, that thing is actually north of 500 lbs. I was shocked when I saw that on the digital readout. And, like all of the dual sports, the KLR is tall. It still gives me the same tip-over anxiety as the Tiger did when I get on it. And I know if I ever dropped it, I’d need a crew to get it back on its feet.

That thing about dropping a bike is a real consideration. I’ve been lucky and I haven’t dropped a bike very often. But it can happen, and when it does, it would be nice to just be able to pick the bike up.

Muddy Baja

On one of our Baja trips, we had to ride through a puddle that looked more like a small version of Lake Michigan. I got through it, but it was luck, not talent. My buddy Dave was not so lucky…he dropped his pristine Yamaha mid-puddle…

The fall broke the windshield and was probably a bit humiliating for Dave, but the worst part was trying to lift the Yamaha after it went down. Slippery, muddy, wet…knee deep in a Mexican mudbath. Yecchh! It took three of us to get the thing upright and we fell down several times while doing so. Thinking back on it now, we probably looked pretty funny. If we had made a video of it, it probably would have gone viral.

The Perfect Bike: A Specification

So, where is this going…and what would my definition of the perfect touring/dual sport/ADV bike be?

Here’s what I’d like to see:

Something with a 250cc to 500cc single-cylinder engine. My experience with small bikes as a teenager and my more recent experience has convinced me that this is probably the perfect engine size. Big engines mean big bikes, and that kind of gets away from what a motorcycle should be all about. Water cooled would be even better. The Kawi KLR is water cooled, and I like that.

A dual sport style, with a comfortable riding position. No more silly road racing stuff. I’m a grown man, and when I ride, I like to ride hundreds of miles a day. I want my bike to have a riding position that will let me do that.

A windshield. It doesn’t have to be big…just something that will flip the wind over my helmet. The Kawi and the Triumph got it right in that department.

Integrated luggage. The Triumph Tiger got that part right. The KLR, not so much.

Light weight. Folks, it’s a motorcycle…not half a car. Something under 400 lbs works for me. If it gets stuck, I want to be able to pull it out of a puddle. If it drops, I want to be able to pick it up without a hoist or a road crew. None of the current crop of big road bikes meets this requirement.

Something that looks right and is comfortable. I liked the Triumph’s looks. But I want it to be comfortable.

Something under $5K. Again, it’s a motorcycle, not a car. My days of dropping $10K or so on a motorcycle are over. I’ve got the money, but I’ve also got the life experiences that tell me I don’t need to spend stupidly to have fun.

It was maybe a year after that blog that the RX3 came on the scene, and it answered the mail nicely. A year or two after the RX3 hit the scene, BMW, Kawasaki, and one or two others introduced smaller ADV motorcycles. I commented that these guys were copying Zongshen. One snotty newspaper writer told me I was delusional if I thought BMW, Kawi, and others copied Zongshen. I think that’s exactly what happened, but I don’t think they did as good a job as Zongshen did.

If you’ve got an opinion, please leave a comment. We’d love to hear from you!

Never miss an ExhaustNotes blog! Sign up here…

The Original Exhaust Notes

Churchill Clark in 1969. Our graduation yearbook was dedicated to him. I saw Mr. Clark again at our 20th reunion. He was one of the greats and the creator of the Exhaust Notes name. Sadly, he is no longer with us.

The year was 1968, I was a 17-year-old pup, and Churchill Clark approached me with an idea for the Viking Press. We were the Vikings (no one is quite sure how we got that name, as there were very few Scandinavians in South Brunswick), and the Viking Press, you see, was our high school newspaper. Mr. Clark was an English teacher (a great one), and he was the Viking Press faculty advisor.

A bit more background: There were several cliques in our high school (there were, are, and always will be in any high school, I guess), and I belonged to the greasers. You know, the gearheads. We lived and breathed GTOs, Camaros, Hemis, motorcycles, street racing, and anything that ingested fossil fuel. We were in the middle of the muscle car era, maybe one of the best times ever to be a teenager in America. Old Mr. Clark wanted to get our crowd reading the high school newspaper (he was a bit of a greaser himself), and as I was one of the more literate greasers, he asked me to write a column about cars.

“What do you want me to say?” I asked.

“Whatever you want,” Mr. Clark answered.

So I did, and I have to admit, it was a heady experience seeing something I wrote appear in print for the first time. My idea was to have a little fun with the war stories and poke at the ridiculousness of it all. Mr. Clark titled the column Exhaust Notes and he drew the little car that appeared at the top of every article. I liked both, and the Exhaust Notes name stuck. When Joe Gresh and I started the blog, there was no question about what it was going to be called.

A few months ago my high school class, South Brunswick’s Class of 1969, held its 50th reunion. My good buddy and friend since kindergarten, Kathy Leary, told me she had saved a few of the old Viking Press newspapers, and she scanned a couple of the articles for me.

Those were great times, folks, and great memories. I’m glad Kathy had the foresight to hang on to those old papers, and I’m grateful she scanned and sent a couple of the articles to me. And I’m glad old Mr. Clark trusted me to run with the idea.

Product Review: MY Construction Supply Rebar Caps

We never used re-bar caps back when I was doing construction. I don’t think they had been invented yet. It was a different time: You had to be tough, man and I was. If you tripped and fell onto an exposed re-bar the thing would go clean through you and out the other side. The jobsites I worked on were grisly with dead men impaled on rusting steel. I’ll never forget that smell. In the hot Florida sun the bodies bloated fast, seemingly still alive as they twitched and waved a stiff, blackened hand each time a bubble of gas escaped.

Guys getting skewered on re-bar was so prevalent we didn’t bother to pull them off until it was time to pour the concrete. Why bother, another man will just come along and land on the thing.

I never fell onto a rebar myself. I’ve come close but managed to avoid spearing the bar, because I didn’t run up a bunch of debt going to college or paying exorbitant hospital bills for puncture remedies. Back then people took responsibility for their actions, not like now. Those guys stuck on the rebar? Maybe they should have eaten less fast food or bought a cheaper car. Today you see rebar covers all over construction jobs. It’s all part of the dumbing down of America.

Back to the rebar covers, I’m reinforcing the ground surrounding The Carriage House and there are a bunch of re-bars sticking up from the retaining wall. I’m not so worried about falling onto them (because I made wise life choices) but the damn things are sharp. The bars will eventually be bent down into the formwork and covered with concrete, until then I’m getting cut to ribbons. A good-sized gash to the elbow was the final straw.

At first I was going to use empty beer cans to cap the bars. That visual might be too much for my wife to handle and anyway I’d have to drink like 75 beers to get the job done. I’ve been trying to lose weight by drinking gin and tonics as a calorie saving measure. Processing that many beers through my gastrointestinal system was a non-starter. I found the MY caps online for 50 cents apiece.

The caps fit rebar from 3/8” to ¾”, inside the cap are 4 vanes that conform to the different sizes. It’s a good set up. The bright orange color alerts you to the bar so there’s less tripping and zero cutting on my jobsite.

They’ve been out in the sun for a few weeks and the color hasn’t faded yet. Kind of funny that the packaging says “Does not protect against impalement.” Which is the main reason you buy the damn things. I suspect some cell-phone owning construction worker fell 13 floors onto the MY cap and managed to sue the company.

Go ahead and call me a nanny-state mason. I deserve it. I guess you could say I’m getting soft in my old age. Seeing all those orange caps sitting atop the rebar makes me sad. I miss the old ways. I miss personal responsibility. And, funnily enough, I miss that smell.

On being a Gym Rat, the RX3, Yoo-Hoo, and Lucas Fuel Treatment

I’ve been drinking my stash of Yoo-Hoo (the review is in the works), but wouldn’t you know it, each of those little containers is 100 calories. To a male model like myself, that means more time at the gym, and that’s what I’ve been doing. Usually I roll over there in the Subie, but today was a bit different. I rode to the gym on my old RX3.

It sounds funny to refer to the RX3 as old. Four years ago, it was the hottest thing since sliced bread, and news of an inexpensive, fully-equipped, adventure touring machine was big news indeed. The RX3 price has gone up since then, but the RX3 is still a hot smoking hot deal. Mine came in on the very first shipment from Chongqing, it has about 20,000 miles on it, and it’s still going strong. I don’t ride my RX3 much these days because I’m usually on someone else’s motorcycle for an ExNotes blog (the RX4, the Royal Enfields, the Janus bikes, the Genuine G400c), but every time I get on my bike I still feel the excitement I first felt when I rode an RX3 for the first time. That was in China. You can badmouth small bikes and Chinese bikes all you want, but I know better. The RX3 is one of the world’s great motorcycles.

I’m going to do a trip on my RX3, most likely up the Pacific Coast, in the next couple of months. I’m thinking something leisurely, around 200 miles each day, with stops at the La Purisima Mission, Jocko’s in Nipomo (best barbeque on the planet), a run up the Pacific Coast Highway to Carmel, and then a jaunt east through Hollister to Pinnacles, Highway 25, and the 198 down the center of California. I’ll probably swing further east for a Del Taco burrito in Barstow (it’s the location of the original Del Taco, and if I had to explain why that’s significant, you might not get it). Yeah, that could work. Lots of photos, lots of meeting new people, and lots of fun.

What would be particularly cool on a trip like that is the RX3’s fuel economy. We’re up around $4 per gallon here in the Peoples Republik of Kalifornia (about a dollar of that is taxes), and being on a bike that sips fuel always makes me feel like I’m getting away with something. I consistently get better than 70 mpg on my RX3. That’s a good thing. Gresh seems to have stumbled on to something on his B0nneville adventure using Lucas fuel treatment in his Husky. His fuel economy improved significantly after adding Lucas. I’ve always used Lucas fuel treatment in my bike, and I’m wondering if that’s part of the reason I’ve always had great fuel economy.

Anyway, lots more coming up, folks. Stay tuned.

Read about some of our other adventures on the ExhaustNotes Epic Rides page!

The Best Boss I Ever Had

Gresh and I have done a couple of blogs about great guys for whom we’ve worked, and in thinking about that last night I asked myself: Who’s the best boss I ever had? The answer was both immediate and easy: Captain Omer McCants. I was a young lieutenant in Korea and Captain McCants was an old man (he was a 28-year-old Captain). Captain McCants was my battery commander and he was a major influence on my approach to work, leadership, and life in general. While remembering those good old days, I did a Google search and this appeared:

Nah, can’t be, I thought. But it was. Captain McCants retired as a Lt. Colonel and went on to do other great things. Watching the video above instantly took me back 45 years, and listening to the “old man” was about as enjoyable an experience as I’ve ever had. I think you’ll enjoy it, too. There are several videos about Colonel McCants (check the link below the video when you go to the page) and my advice is to listen to them all. I did. You can thank me later.

Gresh and I have talked about adding an ExNotes page with links to our “Back in the Day” stories about the great guys we’ve known, and we’ll get around to that in the near future. I’ve been around some great leaders. Do you remember the movie Apocalypse Now and the guy Robert Duvall played, Colonel Kilgore? There actually was a Colonel Kilgore in the US Army and I reported to him (he was nothing like the guy Robert Duvall portrayed). I worked for a couple of company presidents in the aerospace business who changed the way that industry worked, and I’ll tell you about them at some point. I know Gresh has amazing stories, too. I’ve heard them. Stay tuned, folks. There’s more good stuff coming.