Category: Back In The Day

Dream Bike: Norton Commando

I was going to do a Dream Bike bit about the Norton Commando, and then I realized that not only had I sort of done that in an earlier CSC blog, but I actually rode a vintage Norton for that piece.  Without further ado, here you go…

Walt Berkuta on his Knucklehead.

For me, it started when I was 12 years old in the 7th grade, and it started with British bikes. Triumphs, to be specific. Oh, I’d seen other motorcycles before that, and my good buddy Pauly’s father Walt had owned a Knucklehead after the war. But everything changed when the motorcycle bug bit.  It bit hard, and it did so when I was 12 years old. I remember it like it happened last week.

I grew up in a town small enough that our junior high school and high school were all in the same building. It was 7th through 12th grade, which meant that some of the Juniors and Seniors had cars, and one guy had a motorcycle. That one guy was Walt Skok, and the motorcycle was a ‘64 Triumph Tiger (in those days the Tiger was a 500cc single-carbed twin). It was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen, with big downswept chrome exhaust headers, a cool tank with a dynamite chrome rack, chrome wire wheels, and the most perfect look I had ever seen on anything. I spent every spare moment I had sneaking out into the parking lot to stare at it. Some things in the world are perfect, a precise blend of style and function (things like Weatherby rifles, 1911 handguns, C4 Corvettes, Nikon DSLRs, and 1960s Triumph motorcycles).

A ’64 Triumph Tiger, just like the one Walt Skok owned.

Back to the Triumph: One day Walt started it (I had been drooling over it for a month before I ever heard it run), and its perfection, to me, was complete. In those days, a 500cc motorcycle was enormous. When Walt fired it up, it was unlike anything I had ever heard. It wasn’t lumpy and dumpy like a Harley, it wasn’t a whiny whinny like a Honda, and it wasn’t a tinny “wing-ding-ding-ding-ding” like a Suzuki or a Yamaha (they were all two-strokes back then). Nope, the Triumph was perfect. It was deep. It was visceral. It was tough. The front wheel and forks literally throbbed back and forth with each engine piston stroke. To my 12-year-old eyes and ears it was the absolute essence of a gotta-get-me-one-of-these. It looked and sounded like a machine with a heart and a soul. I knew that someday I would own a machine like this.

Fast forward a few years, and I was old enough own and ride my own Triumphs. I’ve had a bunch of mid-‘60s and ‘70s Triumphs…Bonnevilles, Tigers, and a Daytona (which was a 500cc twin-carbed twin back then, a bike known as the Baby Bonneville). I was a young guy and those British motorcycles were (here’s that word again) perfect. They were fast, they handled well, and they sounded the way God intended a motorcycle to sound. I had a candy-red-and-gold ’78 750 Bonneville (Triumph always had the coolest colors) that would hit an indicated 109 mph on Loop 820 around Fort Worth, and I did that regularly on those hot and humid Texas nights. Life was good.

Fast forward another 50 years (and another 40 or 50 motorcycles for me). We saw the death of the British motorcycle empire, the rise and fall and rise and impending fall of Harley-Davidson, this new thing called globalization, digital engine management systems, multi-cylinder ridiculously-porky motorcycles, and, well, me writing a blog extolling the virtues of whatever.

So here we are, today.

My good buddy Jerry, the CSC service manager at the time, owned this ultra-cool Norton Commando.  And good buddy Steve, the CSC CEO, bought the bike and put it on display in the CSC showroom. We had a lot of cool bikes on display there, including vintage Mustangs, Harleys, Beemers, RX3s, RC3s, and TT250s, and more. But my eye kept returning to that Norton. I’d never ridden a Norton, but I’d heard the stories when I was younger.

A selfie, sort of. A stunning motorcycle.

Back in the day (I’m jumping back to the ‘60s and ‘70s again) guys who wanted to be cool rode Triumphs. I know because I was one of them. We knew about Nortons, but we didn’t see them very often. They had bigger engines and they were more expensive than Triumphs, and their handling was reported to be far superior to anything on two wheels. Harleys had bigger engines and cost more than Triumphs, too, but they were porkers.  Nortons were faster than Triumphs (and Triumphs were plenty fast).

But guys who rode Triumphs really wanted to ride Nortons. Nortons were mythical bikes. Their handling and acceleration were legendary. In the ‘60s, the hardest accelerating bike on the planet was the Norton Scrambler. Norton stuffed a 750cc engine into a 500cc frame to create that model, like Carroll Shelby did with the AC Cobra. I remember guys talking about Norton Scramblers in hushed and reverential tones back in the LBJ years. You spoke about reverential things softly back then.

Fast forward again, and there I was, with Steve’s 1973 Norton Commando right in front of me (just a few feet away from where I wrote the CSC blog). Steve’s Norton is magnificent. It’s not been restored and it wears its patina proudly.

“Steve,” I said, “you need to let me ride that Norton.”

“Sure,” he said. “I’ll have Gerry get it ready for you.”

Wow, I thought. I’m going to ride a Norton. I felt like the little dog who finally caught the bus. I had a mouthful of bus. What do you do when that happens?

I sat on the Norton that afternoon. It felt big. The pegs were set far to the rear and my hips hurt immediately from the bike’s racing ergos (and maybe a little from the femur and spine fractures I suffered in a motorcycle accident a few years before that; I don’t bend as easily as I used to). Maybe I shouldn’t have asked to ride this beautiful beast. Maybe my mouth had written a check my body couldn’t cash.

But I was committed. The Norton went back to Gerry so he could get it ready for me to ride. There could be no backing out now.  I was nervous, I was excited, and I was a little giddy. The only bikes I had ridden for the last 7 or 8 years were 150cc Mustangs and the 250cc Zongs. Lightweight bikes. Singles. Under 25 horsepower. Electric starters and all the amenities. Modern stuff.  I thought about riding the 850 Norton. It dawned on me that I had not even heard it run yet. I realized I liked electric starters. I hadn’t kick started a bike in probably 35 years. The Norton is an 850, and it was kick start only. No electric starter. Hmmm.

When I arrived at the plant, Steve pushed the Norton outside for me. We both tried to figure out where the ignition key went (it’s on the left side of the bike). We tried to guess at the ignition key’s run spot (it has four or five positions). We picked the second one and I tried kicking the engine. It was a complicated affair. You had to fold the right footpeg in, and when you kick the starter, you had to try to not hit the gear shift lever on the right side of the bike. We kicked it a couple of times. Hmmm again. Lots of compression. Then Steve had to run back into the plant to take a phone call. I tried kick starting the Norton a couple of times again.   Not even a cough from the engine.

I played with the key and clicked it over one more notch. Another kick, and the mighty 850 fired right up. Ah, success!

The Norton settled into an easy idle.  It was wonderful. It sounded just like Walt Skok’s Triumph. I was in the 7th grade again. I looked around to see if Steve had seen me start it, but no one was there. It was just me and the Norton. Okay, I thought, I’ll just ride around in the parking lot to get the feel of the clutch, the throttle, and the brakes.

Whoa, I thought, as I let the clutch out gingerly. That puppy had power! The Norton was turning over lazily and it felt incredibly powerful as I eased the clutch out. I tried the rear brake and there was nothing (oh, that’s right, the rear brake is on the other side). I tried the front brake, and it was strong. Norton had already gone to disk brakes by 1973, and the disk on Steve’s Commando was just as good as a modern bike’s brakes are today.

I rode the Norton into the shop so Gerry could fill the fuel tank for me. The Norton has a sidestand and a centerstand, but you can’t get to either one while you are on the bike. You have to hold the bike up, dismount on the left, and then put it on the centerstand. The side stand was under there somewhere, but I didn’t want to mess around trying to catch it with my boot. It was plenty scary just getting off the Norton and holding it upright. It was more than a little scary, actually. I’m riding my boss’s vintage bike, it’s bigger than anything I’ve been on in years, and I don’t want to drop it.

Gerry gave me “the talk” about kick starting the Norton. “I don’t like to do it while I’m on the bike,” he said. “If it kicks back, it will drive your knee right into the handlebars and that hurts. I always do it standing on the right side of the bike.”

Hmmmm. As if I wasn’t nervous enough already.

I tried the kickstarter two or three times (with everybody in the service area watching me) and I couldn’t start the thing, even though I had started it outside (when no one was around to witness my success). Gerry kicked the Norton once for me (after my repeated feeble attempts) and it started immediately. Okay. I got it. You have to show it who’s boss.

I strapped my camera case to the Norton’s back seat (or pillion, as they used to say in Wolverhampton), and then I had a hard time getting back on the bike. I couldn’t swing my leg over the camera bag. Yeah, I was nervous. And everybody in the shop was still watching me.

With the Norton twerking to its British twin tango, I managed to turn it around and get out onto Route 66. A quick U-turn (all the while concentrating intensely so I would remember “shift on the right, brake on the left”) and I rode through the mean streets of north Azusa toward the San Gabriels. In just a few minutes, I was on Highway 39, about to experience riding Nirvana.

This is what a motorcycle instrument cluster should be. The Enfield Interceptor Gresh and I tested in Baja was very similar.

Wow, this is sweet, I thought as I climbed into the San Gabriels. I had no idea what gear I was in, but gear selection is a somewhat abstract concept on a Norton.  Which gear didn’t seem to make any difference.  The Commando had power and torque that just wouldn’t quit.  More throttle, go faster, shifting optional. It didn’t matter what gear I was in (which was good, because all I knew was that I was somewhere north of 1st).

A photo stop along the East Fork Road. That’s East Fork, as in the East Fork of the San Gabriel River.

I looked down at the tach. It had a 7000-rpm redline and I was bouncing around somewhere in the 2500 zip code. And when I say bouncing around, I mean that literally. The tach needle oscillated ±800 rpm at anything below 3000 rpm (it settled down above 3000 rpm, a neighborhood I would visit only once that day). The Norton’s low end torque was incredible. I realized I didn’t even know how many gears the bike had, so I slowed, rowed through the gears and counted (the number was four).

A shot from the rear. I was shooting with a Nikon D3300 DSLR (an entry-level digital camera) and the Nikon 16-35 lens.

The Norton was amazing in every regard. The sound was soothing, symphonic, and sensuous (how’s that for alliteration?). It’s what God intended motorcycles to be. Highway 39 is gloriously twisty and the big Norton (which suddenly didn’t feel so big) gobbled it up. The Norton never felt cumbersome or heavy (it’s only about 20 lbs heavier than my 250cc RX3). It was extremely powerful. I was carving through the corners moderately aggressively at very tiny throttle openings. Just a little touch of my right hand and it felt like I was a cannon-launched kinetic energy weapon. Full disclosure: I’ve never been launched from a cannon, but I’m pretty sure what I experienced that day on the Norton is what it would feel like. Everything about the Norton felt (and here’s that word again) perfect.
I was having so much fun that I missed the spot where I normally would stop for the CSC glamour shots. There’s a particular place on Highway 39 where I could position a bike and get some curves in the photo (and it looked great in the CSC ads).  But I sailed right past it. I was enjoying the ride.

When I realized I missed the spot where I wanted to stop for photos, it made me think about my camera.  I reached behind to make sure it was still on the seat behind me, but my camera wasn’t there! Oh, no, I thought, I lost my camera, and God only knows where it might have fallen off. I looked down, and the camera was hanging off the left side of the bike, captured in the bungee net. Wow, I dodged a bullet there.

The view from above. It was a glorious day.

I pulled off and then I realized: I don’t want to kill the engine because then I’ll have to start it, and if I can’t, I’m going to feel mighty stupid calling Gerry to come rescue me.

Okay, I thought, here’s the drill.   Pull off to the side of the road, find a flat spot, keep the engine running, put all my weight on my bad left leg, swing my right leg over the seat, hold the Norton upright, get the bike on the centerstand, unhook the bungee net, sling the camera case over my shoulder, get back on the bike, and all the while, keep the engine running.  Oh, yeah.  No problem.

This is what a motorcycle should look like. Why can’t other manufacturers do this? Oh, wait, Enfield did…

Actually, though, it wasn’t that bad. And I was having a lot of fun.

I arrived at the East Fork bridge sooner than I thought I would (time does indeed fly when you’re having fun). I made the right turn. I would have done the complete Glendora Ridge Road loop, but the CalTrans sign told me that Glendora Ridge Road was closed. I looked for a spot to stop and grab a few photos of this magnificent beast.

That’s when I noticed that the left footpeg rubber had fallen off the bike. It’s the rubber piece that fits over the foot peg. Oh, no, I thought once again. I didn’t want to lose pieces of Steve’s bike, although I knew no ride on any vintage British vertical twin would be complete without something falling off.   I made a U-turn and rode back and forth several times along a half-mile stretch where I thought I lost the rubber footpeg cover, but I couldn’t find it. When I pulled off to turn around yet again, I stalled the bike.

Hmmm. No doubt about it now. I knew I was going to have to start the Norton on my own.

We (me and my good buddy Norton, that is) had picked a good spot to stop. I dismounted using the procedure described earlier, I pulled the black beauty onto its centerstand, and I grabbed several photos. I could tell they were going to be good. Sometimes you just know when you’re behind the camera that things are going well. And on the plus side of the ledger, all of the U-turns I had just made (along with the magnificent canyon carving on Highway 39) had built up my confidence enormously. The Norton was going to start for me because I would will it to.

And you know what? That’s exactly what happened. One kick and all was well with the world. I felt like Marlon Brando, Steve McQueen, and Peter Fonda, all rolled up into one 66-year-old teenager.  At that moment I was a 12-year-old kid staring at Walt Skok’s Triumph again. Yeah, I’m bad. A Norton will do that to you. I stared at the bike as it idled. It was a living, breathing, snorting, shaking, powerful thing. Seeing it alive like that was perfect. I suddenly remembered my Nikon camera had video. Check this out…

So there you have it. A dream bike, but this time the dream was real.  Good times, that day was.

If you like reading about vintage iron, check out our Dream Bikes page!

Home Page Updates, and more…

We updated the ExNotes home page to make it easier to find our blogs on Baja, Epic Rides, Berk’s magazine articles, Gresh’s magazine articles, our YouTube videos, the new CSC RX4, motorcycle resurrections, Dream Bikes, Tales of the Gun, electric motorcycles, police motorcycles, and how to advertise on the ExNotes site.   Here are the home page links and the stories behind the photos…

This is the first image on the ExhaustNotes home page, and it provides a link to the ExNotes blog. This is the Gobi Desert in northwestern China, and that’s the real deal…a camel caravan. Gresh and I rode there on our motorcycles.
The link to articles by Joe Gresh previously published in a variety of magazines. There’s good reading here! The photo? That’s Gresh entering the Gobi Desert on a Zongshen RX3.
This is at the entrance to the Forbidden City in Beijing, and it’s your link to magazine articles by Berk.
Want to know what the ExNotes site is all about? You can get the story here. That photo? Hey, Gresh and I like gladiator movies. We were actors in one filmed in central China, near the city of Liqian.
Trust me on this: You need to advertise on ExhaustNotes.us. Here’s the link to get that process started. This photo was up on the Tibetan Plateau, with the city of Aba in the background.
The best riding on the planet, and it starts just across the border! Click this link to get our stories, our guidance, our suggested itineraries, and more on this magical place.  I took this photo while riding my CSC Mustang through Baja’s Catavina boulder fields.
Yep, we’re a motorcycle site, but this is one of the busiest places in all of the ExhaustNotes empire. Click this link for our Tales of the Gun stories.  That’s me firing the mighty M1 Garand.  My daughter shot the above photo on her iPhone, capturing the cartridge case in midair!
The only thing better than our Epic Motorcycle Rides page is actually getting out and creating the adventure yourself! Enjoy our tales of the adventure riding trails here!  Oh, and that photo?  It’s Gresh on an Enfield in Mexico!
Gresh doesn’t do 100-point restorations. Nope, his deal is rustorations, not restorations. A bike is only original once. The photo is Gobi Gresh’s mighty Z1 Kawasaki at the Tinfiny Ranch. It runs now, and you can read about how Joe brought it back to life here.
The stuff of dreams, the ones that got away, and more. You can peek into our dreams here. That’s my old 1200 Triumph Daytona after a 120-mph sprint across Highway 58 in California.
Who you calling Tubby? Here’s a cool collection of our videos. The photo was taken in Qufu, the birthplace of Confucius. Gresh and others are grabbing videos during a changing of the guard ceremony.
Motors, the best job on the force. I believe it, and you should, too. We’ve recently added a page indexing our police motorcycle stuff, and you can get to it here. The photo is good buddy Jim Watson on a Honda ST1300P police motorcycle.
The RX3 is a great bike, but folks wanted more displacement. Zongshen responded with the RX4, and upsized version of their iconic RX3, and CSC is taking orders now. You can read all about the RX4 and how it compares to the RX3 and the KLR 650 here. We rode the one above in the San Gabriel Mountains, which is where we shot this photo.
It’s a new world out there, folks, and electric motorcycles are part of it. You can catch up on what’s happening here. That’s a CSC City Slicker, a phenomenal buy at just $2495!
Writers write. Hey, it’s what we do. With something north of 20 titles under our belt, yeah, we’re gonna brag a bit. Read all about it here, and get links to buy our books on this page!
Want the e-ticket ride back to the ExhaustNotes home page? It’s right here. And that photo? It’s the Bridge of the Gods, spanning the mighty Columbia River from Washington to Oregon. When I’m there, it feels like it’s a place where I belong. What could possibly be a more fitting home page link?

There you have it, my friends.   You’ll see all of the above when you open our home page, and it’s your nav system to the rest of the site.

Hey, there’s more good stuff coming your way.  We do our best to blog every day, and we’ve got great stories lined up for you:

Good buddy Steve’s Norton Commando
More vintage police motors
The continuation of our .45 ACP ammo series
The Indiana Jones aspects of riding in China

And much, much more.   Don’t miss any of it…sign up for our automatic email updates (add your name to our email list), and you’ll stay up to date!

Baja 2009: The KLR Khronicles Part II

This is a story about a 2009 Baja KLR ride.  In Part I, we covered the ride from southern California to Rosarito Beach.

The breakfast at Velero’s in Ensenada was impressive (it always is), and it was a glorious morning as we rolled south.

Two KLRs headed south in Baja.  John forgot his toothbrush, and I wasn’t going to let him use mine, so we stopped at a farmacia so he could buy a new one.

We had several offroad explorations in mind as we rode deeper into Baja that morning, but our first stop was at a farmacia.  I like Mexican pharmacies.   Here in the US in 2009, all the stories in the news media were about the drug wars in Mexico.  Right church, wrong pew, as they say: The US news media had the wrong story.  The real drug story in Mexico was (and still is) how cheap prescriptions are down there.  You don’t need a prescription in Mexico for many of the drugs that require prescriptions in the US (like penicillin, and prednisone, and Lord knows what else), and meds are trivially inexpensive.  The drugs are the same as what we get in the US (literally, the same, from the same US manufacturers in many cases).  I wish our so-called “investigative journalists” would write an expose on that topic, but they were too focused in 2009 on killing the tourism industry in Mexico with distorted news about the drug wars. Go figure.

We continued south on the Transpeninsular Highway.  There’s about a dozen miles of traffic leaving Ensenada, and then Baja switches suddenly from squalor to splendor as the road climbs into the mountains and descends into Baja’s wine country.  It really is spectacular.  If you’ve never made this ride, or if you’re idea of going into Mexico is TJ or Ensenada, you need to venture further south to start to get a feel for the real Baja.  Trust me on this.

John and his KLR on the Transpeninsular Highway in Baja’s wine country.  This is where the beauty of Baja begins to emerge.

Ah, Baja.  It was beautiful. It always is.

Our first excursion in the dirt would be to the abandoned mission in San Vincente, well into the desert and well south of mountains.  We saw a sign for the mission and took a dirt road heading west from the Transpeninsular Highway.  As it turned out, there was a lot more out there than just an abandoned mission.

The sign pointing to the Camino Real mission ruins.

We first saw a building we initially mistook for the mission. It was a private home (one of several). We were stunned. The homes were magnificent, tucked away in the hills down a rough, soft sand road.  I’d been by San Vincente on many prior Baja rides, but I had no idea the hills held such secrets.

Wow.   Who knew this was back here?

We saw a young lady and asked her for directions to the mission.  She pointed and told us to go over a hill.   We did, and the first thing we found was a well-maintained rural cemetery.

I’m in no hurry to be buried, but when it’s time, this might be nice. If there’s such a thing as elegance in a graveyard, this place had it.

There was something about the cemetery that was simultaneously captivating and tranquil. It seemed to come from another era, and after reading the headstones we saw that it did. It was meticulously maintained.  It’s always nice to see that.

Impressive. A family plot. The wife lived to be 100.  Imagine that.
Magnificent. I shot all the photos in this series with my old Nikon D200 and the first-generation 24-120 lens.  It was state-of-the-art in 2009.  I took a lot of pictures with that camera.

After the cemetery, we found the San Vincente Mission. The local folks are restoring it.  I’d seen signs for the mission on the Transpeninsular Highway, but this is the first time I’d ventured off the asphalt to see it.  John and I were the only folks out there that day.

The San Vincente Mission was built about 300 years ago.  It’s one of several that run the length of the Baja peninsula. I’ve been to several, and a few are still working churches.   What’s left of the San Vincente Mission is not.

What’s left of the San Vincente Mission.  The restoration was a labor of love. The mission’s adobe walls were being resurfaced. I need to get back there to see how it looks today.
The mission walls underneath the restoration.

We rode through the soft sand back toward the Transpeninsular Highway to the town of San Vincente’s contemporary church (which is visible from the highway).  It offered great photo opportunities and we took a bunch. We wanted to enter the church, but it was locked.

San Vincente’s church in 2009.
John relaxing in front of the San Vincente church.
John yanked on the cord, and that bell was loud. We stopped. We didn’t want the San Vincente residents to think they were being summoned.

It was fun being out in these remote areas on the KLRs.  The experience was a lot different than seeing Baja from pavement only, and John and I were enjoying it.  I’m normally not a guy who likes riding dirt, but John had talked me into getting off the highway and I’m glad he did.

Shortly after leaving San Vincente, it was time to check off another item on our wish list, and that was seeing the Isla Del Carmen shipwreck. I wanted to see it, but I didn’t know exactly where the wreck was other than that it was somewhere off the coast near San Jacinto, so we took another dirt road due west for about 8 miles and hit the Pacific coast.  Our plan was to intersect the coast several miles north of San Jacinto, follow it south, and find what was left of the Isla Del Carmen.

The dirt road along the coast was rough, and I’m being charitable when I call it a road. It was mostly soft sand.  At one point the sand was so deep it was nearly impossible to control the KLR, so I wrestled the Kawasaki up into the weeds. It was a marginal improvement. I couldn’t see where the wheel was going, but at least the sand wasn’t calling the shots anymore.  And before you tell me the trick is to get up to speed and float on top of the soft stuff, all I can say is hey, I was there.  You weren’t.

Then we encountered something we hadn’t expected:  Dogs.  A pack of dogs, actually.  And they were pissed.  At us.

Well, that’s not quite accurate.  Their anger was focused on me.  Specifically, me.  At least that’s how I felt.

In California, you almost never see a dog off a leash. In rural Mexico, you almost never see a dog on a leash. Those things are aggressive, too.  We were chased by more dogs on this trip than I have been chased by in my entire life. They weren’t just interested in scaring us or getting a good laugh. Those things wanted us for dinner.  Or rather, they wanted me for dinner.  I’ll tell you more about the angry dogs of Baja as this story progresses, but one dog story at a time for now.  And this one was enough.

I don’t like dogs. I was mauled pretty badly by one when I was kid, and I still have the scars to prove it. I know that those of you who have taken the Motorcycle Safety Foundation course or who have read about such things are thinking that being chased by a dog is no big deal. I know about slowing down, letting the dog calibrate his intercept based on your reduced speed, and then accelerating to confuse the cantankerous canine. That works on pavement if there is one dog. Try doing it in soft sand when there’s pack of four or five that are fanned out along your flank. In that situation, you are not just a motorcyclist. You are a potential meal.  And that was the situation I found myself in that fine Baja afternoon.

A tranquil scene, don’t you think? It was right after I shot this photo that the dogs descended on us.

We were approaching a rinky-dink little fishing village, eyeballing the coast for the shipwreck, when the pack of dogs came after me. I think it might have been my green fluorescent riding jacket.  Maybe they had an unhappy childhood.  Maybe someone unfriended them on Facebook.   Who knows.  Whatever the reason, they were snarling and spitting and literally smacking their jaws as I tried to fool them with the slow-down-speed-up maneuver. In soft sand. Trying to keep the motorcycle vertical.  Wondering what the hell I was doing down there.

Then it happened.  One of the dogs got me.

I felt him crash into my right leg, and when I looked down, the thing had clamped down on my motorcycle pants just above my ankle.  The dog was literally being dragged along for what seemed like an eternity.  It locked eyes with me, and if there’s such a thing as telepathic communication, or maybe interspecies body language, the dog’s eyes said it all.   It was not a pleasant message in either direction.  The dog might have thought I was a sonofabitch; I had no doubts about him being one.  I’ve known some SOBs in my life, but this bastard was the real deal.  I didn’t feel any pain, but that’s normal in a traumatic situation.  I didn’t know if the dog’s teeth broke the skin around my ankle, but I knew what it would portend if it had.

“Not good,” I thought.

I could see it all the while that miserable sonofabitch was clamped down on my leg, as he was being pulled along at 30 mph.  What I saw was me making a beeline for the border to get medical treatment. Rabies shots, and who knows what else.

To be continued…

Hey, check out our other Epic Motorcycle Rides, and watch the ExNotes blog for the next installment of the Baja KLR Khronicles!

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Ascot AMA Nationals

In San Diego I lived across the street from a Safeway food market. Man, I never ran out of anything. That Safeway is now a West Marine boat supply store. They got nothing to eat in the whole damn place. But back then, around 1980, it was a great food source.

In my pad I had a tiny refrigerator with one of those wine-in-a-carton things inside. My buddy Mark found it in the road, not far from the house. Nobody I knew drank wine, or at least that wine. There was a perforated cardboard section that you knocked out and inside was a hose that connected to the plastic sack of wine. It was practical as hell, like a battery acid container. The hose had a shut off thingy, you kind of rolled the shut off onto a ramp until it pinched the hose closed. The wine tasted bad. Maybe it got hot in the sun out in the street. No telling how long it was there before Mark found it. Whenever anyone would drop by I’d ask if they wanted some wine, that’s what adults do. It was still in the fridge a few years later when I moved away.

I’d leave my one bedroom, one bath rental house on Point Loma’s Locust Street around 5pm. My bike was a 1968 electric-start XLH Sportster converted to kick start. Because electric kickers are for Honda riders, man. From Point Loma I’d reel onto Interstate 5 and roll the throttle on, lane splitting for 15 miles to Gene’s house in Mira Mesa. Back then every subdivision in San Diego sounded like one of the wooden sailing ships that discovered America: The Nina, The Rancho Bernardo and The Santa Antiqua. I guess they still name California things that way. Streets are Calles or Avenidas. Townhouses are called Don Coryells, after a football coach.

Gene had a 1973 Sportster, the one with the crude looking steel bar bent into a U-shape to secure the top shock absorber mounts. The result of AMF cost cutting. My older Sporty had a beautiful cast part welded into the frame tubes performing the same function. You couldn’t see either one once the seat was installed but I knew it was there. Gene knew it too. Gene was my wing man, my BFF. We used to drink in bars and shoot pool after work. It was nothing to stay up late at night, I only needed a few hours sleep. In those years Harley-Davidson motorcycles had a terrible reputation. Their riders were no prize either. We liked the way the bikes sounded and the way they looked.

California traffic was just as bad in 1980 as is today. We lane split all the way to Oceanside where the northbound traffic would thin out for 30 miles or so then lane split to the 405 and past the “Go See Cal” auto dealership. Cal’s dog Spot was a lion. He was featured in Worthington Ford television ads. It was nerve wracking bumper to bumper riding all the way til dusk and the exit for Ascot park Raceway.

I saw my first Ducati Darmah in the parking lot at Ascot. It was the most beautiful bike I’d ever seen. The squared off crankcases were works of art. Our iron-head Harleys looked like civil war relics next to the Darmah. Like Genus Rattus, man. I didn’t envy the Ducati. I was still a hard core Harley guy. Pretty don’t mean nuttin’ to us. Fast, reliable motorcycles are for the weak. I still feel that way.

I may have this wrong but Ascot held two AMA Grand National races each year. Every race I went to was advertised as the final race because the track was closing to be sold. This went on for 12 years until the track really did sell. One National was a standard flat track race and one National was a TT, which is a standard FT track with a bump and a right hand turn. Usually by the time Gene and I got up there the heat races had already started.

Ascot wore its years well. The stands were uncomfortable and crowded. AMA Nationals are big deals. The restrooms were dungeons. We would eat bad food and drink beer and watch the best racing anywhere until 11pm at night. Being part of the hundreds of motorcycles leaving Ascot was a real thrill. The riders were fired up from the racing and we rolled it on to 405 and then 5 to the El Toro Road exit and the Bob’s Big Boy restaurant. Bob’s was a tradition for AMA Nationals. The burgers were small and nearly tasteless, the little triangle salads were frozen and the fries were thin as shim stock. Bob’s was a good place to feed your Genus Rattus.

Because we were riding so late, no matter what the time of year it was always cold on the way home from Ascot. Long, empty stretches of interstate 5 stuffed each gap in your leather jacket with a chilling, low hanging fog. The cold would quiet your mind. Focus on your breathing now, keep still, those iron engines loved the cold. I could see Gene’s Sportster chuffing away in the dark, tiny glints of chrome primary case flashed in sync with my wobbling headlight. Both our Sportsters ran straight pipes and Interstate 5 sounded like the back straight of Ascot. Except we never chopped the throttle.

South of La Jolla the air temperature would rise and dropping off 5 onto Rosecrans Street wrapped sea-warmth around my body. I loved that part of the ride. The shivering was over, I could smell ocean smells. My muscles relaxed. This early in the morning Rosecrans is deserted, I have to run the red lights because the sensors in the pavement cannot pick up motorcycles. The only sound is my 900cc Sportster slowly rowing through the gearbox, rumbling home.

Dropped bikes…

This is a blog I wrote maybe 15 years ago for a  friend who dropped a very expensive motorcycle while putting it on the sidestand. He was really upset with himself and I thought he might enjoy hearing about the times I dropped my bikes. I stopped writing after the fifth or sixth memory because I was laughing so hard I thought I might hurt myself.  This particular blog has made the rounds…it’s been on my original photosite (motofoto.cc, which went by the wayside a long time ago), and the CSC Motorcycles blog, and now this one.

So, here goes….

Drop Number 1 – Impromptu Stargazing

My friend Louie and I were wrapping up a hard 500-mile day through Arizona back in the 1990s. I know what you are thinking….500 miles is not that much for a solid day’s riding, but it was brutally hot in the way that only Arizona can be in the summertime. I was on my vintage Honda CBX and Lou was on his Gold Wing. We stopped for gas and Louis filled up first. While I was filling up the CBX, Lou rode over to the air hose to top off his tires. I filled my tank, fired up the CBX, and rode over to Lou, paralleling the sidewalk.  I put my kickstand down and started to lean the CBX over.

The next thing I knew I was staring at the stars. I had no idea what happened for a few seconds, and then I realized:  I had fallen off my motorcycle, and I was laying on my back looking up at the evening sky!

The first thought that went through my mind was: “Did anyone see me do this?”

I hadn’t even been drinking! How could that have happened?

Well, what happened was this: When I extended the sidestand, the sidestand hit the curb before it fully extended and it didn’t go all the way forward. And then, when I leaned the CBX over, it just kept on going.

Total damage? One turn signal lens cover, one scratched fairing, and lots of lost pride.

Drop Number 2 – Lock-to-Lock Has Meaning

This time, I was easing into my own driveway on my 2-week-old Suzuki TL1000S. Gorgeous bike. Bright red. A real rocketship. As I made the sharp turn into the driveway, I turned the forks to keep my balance. Lock-to-lock turning (you know, how far you can push the bars from one side to the other) on the Suzuki is waaaay less than any motorcycle I had ever ridden.   And as it turns out (pardon the pun), that really makes a difference when you’re trying to balance a bike at low speeds.

The bottom line? I couldn’t turn the bars far enough to keep my balance at low speed.

The results? BAM! Suddenly, the TL and I were both on our sides in my own driveway!

The first thought that went through my mind was “Did anyone see me do this?”

Total damage? One scratched fairing and lots of lost pride. Lots and lots of lost pride.

Drop Number 3 – Them Darn Sidestands Again

A couple of weeks after Drop Number 2, I was letting my now 4-week-old, slightly-scratched TL1000S warm up in the driveway. The bike was on its sidestand, facing south. Just past my garage door, the driveway slopes down ever so slightly. Really slightly. I mean, hardly any slope at all. Out of the corner of my eye, I thought I saw the Suzuki move forward a bit. Nah, I thought, it’s gotta be an optical illusion.

Two seconds later: BAM! The Suzuki was on its side!

Wow, I thought, this thing sure likes laying down in my driveway.

My next thought: “Did anyone see me do this?”

The results? I couldn’t tell. The fairing was scratched, but maybe it was the same scratch from 2 weeks ago. No lost pride this time, but lots of cussing about Suzuki engineering and lousy sidestands.

Drop Number 4 – Dismounting As An Olympic Event

This time I was winding out my 4-month old TL1000S on the road from my brother-in-law’s place. Wowee, I thought, this thing is fast. I must have hit 80 miles an hour when I realized I gotta slow down. That Suzuki slipper clutch works great, I thought…. just keep downshifting and it’s almost like an ABS system on the rear wheel. Hmmh, that curve is coming up awful fast. Maybe I’ll just give it a touch of front brake.

Uh oh, I thought as I unloaded the rear wheel when I got on the front brake. That corner is really coming up fast now, and the back end is fishtailing all over the place. I almost had that sucker stopped when the front wheel just touched the curb. Down we both went, again. I executed a precision somersault as I departed controlled flight and rolled up into a sitting position.

The first thought that went through my mind was “Did anyone see me?”

This time, the answer was yes. There was a lady in a station wagon, who stopped and asked “Are you okay?”

“Yeah, lady, I did that on purpose.” I didn’t know what else to say.

The results? I couldn’t tell. Maybe it was just the same scratched fairing. Again, lots and lots of lost pride. No injuries, though. My lucky day.

Drop Number 5 – The Prize Winner

This time I was changing the front tire on the CBX in my garage. I put the bike on the center stand and removed the front wheel. Bikes with center stands are great, I thought. Once I had the front wheel off I started thinking about the replacement tire. I used Bridgestone Spitfires on that bike and they were great. I decided I would get the raised white letter Spitfire tires this time. That would really look cool.

Well, I thought, if I do that I have to get the back tire to match. So, I thought, I might as well take the back wheel off, too. I’ll just get them both changed at the same time.

This is the point at which things took a decided turn for the worse. And, I’ll admit to having already had a few beers. What could I have possibly been thinking?

Well, I guess I was still thinking about how cool raised white letter tires would look on my pearl white CBX, and I started to remove the rear wheel. The rear axle bolt was on really tight. I decided I needed to get a bigger wrench, you know, more leverage, that sort of thing. I thought I might as well get another beer while I was up, too. I grabbed another beer, got the longer wrench, found the leverage I was looking for…and…..and…

Uh, oh, the CBX started to roll forward off the center stand, and, whoa, there was no front wheel there….funny how everything seemed to be happening in slow motion at that point.

The moral of this one? If you’re gonna screw up, screw up big time. Why just drop a bike when can find a way to drop it so that it falls over into your wife’s brand new car?  Yep, that’s what it did.  Creased it nicely.   “That won’t polish out,” I remember thinking.

The bottom line? One dinged-up sports sedan, one thoroughly upset wife, one busted and cracked CBX oil pan (an item no longer made by Honda), oil all over the garage floor, and the certain knowledge that while center stands are good, they are not that good….

So, if you’ve ever dropped your bike, don’t feel too bad. It happens to all of us.  Sometimes more than once.

If you’ve got a story about dropping your bike, please add it to the comments section.  We’d love to hear from you!

Empire of the Summer Moon

When I’m on a road trip, I sometimes know the history of the area I’m riding through, and I sometimes do not.  I’m always wondering about it, though.  I recently finished reading Empire of the Summer Moon, and it was so good it makes me want to plan another road trip through Texas.  The cover tells what the book is about; what it doesn’t do is tell just how good this book is…

Several things amazed me as I read Empire of the Summer Moon, the first being how it could have not known of it previously.   The only reason I learned of it is that I saw Empire in an airport bookstore a couple of trips ago.

They say you can’t tell a book by its cover, but the cover on Empire appealed to me greatly.  The book was even better.  Much of the action described in it occurred in Texas (and in areas where I used to live in Texas); now I want to return, ride those roads again, and pay more attention this time.  And I will.  Just how good was this book?  Hey, when I finished it, I turned back to the beginning and started reading it again.  That’s good.

A 1917 Harley

Here’s another stunning motorcycle in the Motor Museum of Western Australia.  It’s kind of wild that I am finding this exotic American iron on the other side of the planet (see our earlier blog on the 1920 Excelsior-Henderson), but hey, beauty knows no bounds!

The bike is beautiful, and the colors just flat work for me.  I guess they worked for Harley-Davidson, too…in the mid-1980s they offered a Heritage model Shovelhead with the identical “pea green” color theme.  I wish I had purchased one of those back in the day.  Lord only knows what they are going for now.

Check out the exposed pushrods, rocker arms, valve stems, and fuel tank cutouts in the photo above.   And then take a look at the leather work on the saddlebags below…

I’ll let the Motor Museum’s words do the talking here, folks…check out the distances covered on this bike, too!

Like what you see above?  Check out our other Dream Bikes, and don’t forget to sign up for our automatic email blog updates.  You’ll automatically be entered in our quarterly advbook giveway!

Silver and Red

Most all of the fun things we did as little kids were instigated by my Grandparents. Between raising four kids and working constantly to pay for the opportunity our parents were left spent, angry and not that into family-time trips. We did try it a few times but it seems like the trips always ended with someone crying, my parents arguing or a small child missing an arm. With only 16 limbs between us we had to be careful and husband our togetherness for fear of running out.

Things were very different with Gran and Gramps. We were allowed to sleep over every weekend during which we attempted to destroy their house and any of their valuable keepsakes not made from solid iron. Maybe because of our destructiveness they acted as if they liked taking us on adventures. Camping with one hundred million mosquitos at Fish Eating Creek, going to The Monkey Jungle where the people are in cages and the apes run free, and picnics at Crandon Park beach were commonplace events. We had it made.

Twice a year Gramps would take us to Daytona for the stock car races. This was back when the cars resembled production models and ran modified production engines. There was none of this Staged racing or Playoffs. We went to Daytona to see the race. It didn’t matter to us who had the most points or won the season championship because Daytona was a championship all by itself. If you asked the drivers of that era to choose between winning the Daytona 500 or winning all the other races on the schedule I bet you’d have some takers for the 500.

We always bought infield tickets. Camping at the Daytona Speedway was included with infield tickets so we immersed ourselves in the racing and never had to leave. Gramps had a late 1960’s Ford window van with a 6-cylinder, 3-on-the-tree drivetrain. The van was fitted out inside with a bed and had a table that pivoted off the forward-most side door. To give us a better view of the racing Gramps built a roof rack out of 1” tubing. The rack had a ¾” plywood floor and was accessed via a removable ladder that hung from the rack over the right rear bumper.

At each corner and in between the corners of the roof deck were short tubes that a rope railing system fitted inside. Metal uprights slid into the short tubes and were secured by ¼-20 nuts and bolts. Rope was strung through the uprights and snugged making for a passable handrail. The railing was an attempt to keep little kids from falling off the roof of the van. Once the ladder was in place and the railing installed we would bring up chairs and a cooler. A portable AM radio provided a running commentary of the race progress. We took turns listening. It was a wonderful way to watch the races.

Back then Gramps was in what we call his silver and red period, not to be confused with his red and green period. Everything he built in that era was painted either silver or red. For some reason Gramps preferred a bargain basement silver paint that dried into a soft, chalky coating that never really hardened. The whole roof deck was painted silver except for the sockets that the uprights fitted into. Those were painted red. The stark contrast made it easy to locate the sockets.

When you would climb the ladder to the upper deck your hands would pick up silver paint. If you sat on the deck your pants would turn silver. If you rubbed your nose like little kids do your nose would turn silver. It was like Gramps painted the deck with Never-Seez. After a full day of racing we looked like little wads of Reynolds Wrap.

Our camp stove was a two-burner alcohol fueled unit that, incomprehensibly, used a glass jar to contain the alcohol. Even to my 10 year-old eyes the thing looked like a ticking time bomb so I kept my distance while gramps lit matches and cussed at the stove.

The alcohol stove took forever to light, requiring just the perfect draft. The slightest breeze would extinguish the flame. Once lit it didn’t make much heat. Our eggs were always runny and cold. It took 3 hours to cook bacon. The plates Gramps passed out to our tiny silver hands were made from aluminum. Any residual background heat remaining from the Big Bang was quickly transferred from the food to plate ensuring everything was uniformly gross.

Gramps found great pleasure in our complaints about his food. He would smile and chuckle at us if we asked for our eggs hot. When we wished aloud for Granny to be there to make the food he really got a belly laugh. He prided himself on cooking poorly. I never understood why we had the stove in the first place. Peanut butter and jelly sandwiches would have been a lot easier and way more appetizing.

After the races were over it took forever to clear the infield. We took our time breaking down the upper deck, putting away the camping chairs and the stove and coating every surface we came in contact with a fine, silver dusting of color. I don’t know why I remember these things so clearly. It must be that silver paint, that chalky texture. I can close my eyes and feel the dry, talc-like residue on my hands even now.

Dream Bike: 1920 Excelsior-Henderson

A cool story, this is:  An American (that would be me) goes to Western Australia to find vintage American motorcycles in a fabulous motor museum…or something along those lines.

I haven’t spotted any kangaroos yet (although eight of them did run across the front lawn of the Motor Museum of Western Australia while I was photographing this stunning 1920 Excelsior-Henderson).  I missed my chance to photograph the ‘roos…but you can always get photos of kangaroos.  How often do you encounter a 1920 Excelsior-Henderson?

The short story here is that Excelsior-Henderson made motorcycles from 1907 to 1931 in Chicago, they made the first motorcycle that could hit 100 mph, and they were done in by the Great Depression.  Beyond that, I’ll let the photos of this magnificent motorcycle do my talking…

I am enjoying Australia immensely.  Joe Gresh, you got it right…this is an awesome place.   The western shore along the Indian Ocean, the food, the people, the scenery…it’s all amazing, and it’s not that different in feel, look, and climate than southern California.   But the vintage motorcycles at the Motor Museum of Western Australia:  Wowee!