The $100 hamburger: It’s aviation slang for any hamburger that requires flying in to a local airport for a burger. I first heard the term from good buddy Margit Chiriaco Rusche when researching the story on the General Patton Memorial Museum. You see, there’s still an airport at Chiriaco Summit, left over from General George Patton’s Desert Training Center. Margit told me about pilots flying in for the mythical $100 hamburger at the Chiriaco Summit Café, and I knew I had to have one as soon as she mentioned it. The Café doesn’t actually charge a hundred bucks (it was only $15.66 with a giant iced tea, fries, and a side of chili); the $100 figure pertains to what it would cost a pilot to fly your own plane to Chiriaco Summit, enjoy the General Patton Burger, and fly out.
Even though bloggers like Gresh and me are rolling in dough, we don’t have our own airplanes. But we have the next best thing. Gresh has his Kawasaki Z1 900, and I have my Royal Enfield Interceptor.
Good buddy Marty (a dude with whom I’ve been riding for more than 20 years) told me he needed to get out for a ride and I suggested the Patton Museum. It’s a 250-mile round trip for us, and the trip (along with the General Patton Burger, which is what you see in the big photo above) would be just what the doctor ordered. I’d have my own hundred dollar burger, and at a pretty good price, too. Two tanks of gas (one to get there and one to get home) set me back $16, and it was $18 (including tip) for the General Patton Burger. I had my hundred dollar burger at a steep discount. And it was great.
I’ll confess…it had been a while since I rode the Enfield. In fact, it’s been a while since I’d been on any ride. I didn’t sleep too much the night before (pre-ride jitters, I guess) and I was up early. I pushed the Enfield out to the curb and my riding amigos showed up a short time later. There would be four of us on this ride (me, Marty, and good buddies Joe and Doug). Marty’s a BMW guy; Joe and Doug both ride Triumph Tigers.
As motorcycle rides go, we had great weather and a boring road. It was 125 miles on the 210 and 10 freeways to get to the Patton Museum and the same distance back. Oh, I know, there were other roads and we could have diverted through Joshua Tree National Park, but like I said, I hadn’t ridden in a while and boring roads were what I wanted.
The Patton Museum was a hoot, as it always is. I had my super fast 28mm Nikon lens (which is ideal for a lot of things), and I shot more than a few photos that day. You can have a lot of fun with a camera, a fast lens, a motorcycle, and good friends. A fast 28mm lens is good for indoor available light (no flash) photography, and I grabbed several photos inside the Patton Museum.
It was a bit strange looking at the photos of the World War II general officers, including the one immediately above. I realized that all of us (Marty, Joe, Doug, and I) are older than any of the generals were during World War II. War is a young man’s game, I guess. Or maybe we’re just really old.
You can see our earlier pieces on the Patton Museum here and here. It’s one of my favorite spots. If you want to know more about Chiriaco Summit, the Chiriaco family, and the General Patton Memorial Museum’s origins, I highly recommend picking up a copy of Mary Gordon’s Chiriaco Summit. It is an excellent read.
We rode the same roads home as the ride in, except it was anything but boring on the return leg. We rode into very stiff winds through the Palm Springs corridor on the westward trek home, and the wind made for a spirited ride on my lighter, windshieldless Enfield Interceptor. My more detailed impressions of the Enfield 650 will be a topic for a future blog, so stay tuned!
Never miss an ExNotes blog! Sign up for free here:
Sometimes a motorcycle is so beautiful, so perfect, it just stops you in your tracks. The red Janus Gryffin in these photos does that for me.
Our good buddies at Janus Motorcycles make stunning motorcycles. I rode their olive green Gryffin across northern Baja and it was a perfect machine, one I thought could not be topped. Then I saw this red Gryffin that my good friend Richard posted on Facebook. Folks, this is how a motorcycle is supposed to look. This machine is more than a motorcycle. It evokes emotion. It’s art.
The motorcycle you see here is Gryffin No. 69 and it is magnificent. Janus GM Richard tells us that “No special detail was left untouched…from the red painted side panels, red wheel pinstripes, and black handlebars, this Gryffin just hits different.” Indeed it does.
For more information on Janus Motorcycles, check them out at JanusMotorcycles.com. If you’d like to read about our Baja ride with the Janus boys, give a click here.
I think CSC gets $3995 for a new RX3 these days, and that’s with all the goodies…skid plate, luggage, ABS, 300W alternator, auxiliary accessory switches, the 19-inch front wheel, and probably a few more things I don’t know about. That’s my RX3 in the photo above. I’ve been riding it for more than 5 years. For the Sinophobic haterbators out there, I’ve never found any fish oil in it, I’ve spent substantial time in the factories where they make the RX3 and there are no children chained to the manufacturing equipment, and the Zong techs are most definitely not slave labor. My RX3 has been and still is a good motorcycle.
Looking over the windshield, on the road in Baja.
I know you can buy a used Sportster for what a new RX3 costs if you shop around; the topic comes up nearly every time I mention the price of an RX3. It’s a silly thought, actually, because I’m still looking for that prospective buyer who is trying to decide between a used Sportster and a new RX3. I’ve been on that quest ever since I started writing about the RX3 six years ago, when the keyboard commandos first started pushing the used-Sportster-in-lieu-of-an-RX3 argument.
Here’s a hot flash: That person (the dude or dudette struggling with such a decision) doesn’t exist. You either want an ADV motorcycle, or you want a used bar-hopper with “much chrome” (as the Sportster ads often highlight). I have never met, or even heard of, somebody pondering whether they should buy a used Sportster or an RX3.
Behold: The financial equivalent of a new RX3.
I hear the same kind of keyboard drivel when Janus motorcycles are mentioned. They’re stunning motorcycles, and I’ve had good times riding them through northern Baja. Invariably, though, the used Sportster financial comparison will emerge. Janus is always polite in their responses. Me? I’m a noncombatant and I don’t respond to such Internet drivel. If you want a used Sportster, it’s a free country. Go for it.
To listen to the keyboard commandos, there must be a lot of folks out there dreaming about used Sportsters. Maybe that’s the answer to Harley’s problem. Even though motorcycle sales in general are up sharply since the pandemic started, Harley’s sales most definitely are not. In fact, to read The Wall Street Journal, Harley is circling the drain. Not to worry, though, because I think I have the answer: Rather than rewiring or hardwiring or screwing around with $30K electric motorcycles, or hiring high-priced executives with zero motorcycle experience (as they seem to love to do), Harley should simply stop production and only traffic in used Sportsters. There would be no need for a factory; that’s a huge savings right there. More savings? Harley wouldn’t need to spend anything on advertising; there’s a potful of worldwide web wannabe wizards pushing used Sportsters already doing that for free.
Used Sportsters. Who knew?
Back to my RX3: I’ve covered a lot of miles on it here and overseas. I had it out this Sunday charging through the smoke we call breathable air here in the Peoples Republik of Kalifornia. I hadn’t ridden the RX3 in a couple of months, but it started right up (like it always does) and it’s still running strong (like it always has).
Good buddy Greg on the road to the cave paintings in Sierra San Francisco, Baja California Sur.
It’s kind of a funny story about how the RX3 came to America. I was in China on a consulting gig for another client when CSC asked me to poke around for a 250cc engine for its line of Mustang replicas. It’s funny in the sense that a lot of Internet people told us they’d buy the Mustang if only the bike had a 250cc engine (instead of its 150cc engine). I found a source for the 250cc engine (Zongshen; they weren’t very hard to find). CSC put the 250cc Zong engine in the Mustang and sales…well, they remained essentially the same. All those yahoos who said they’d buy one if the bike had a 250cc motor? They went MIA. I don’t know what they did after CSC introduced the 250cc engine, but they sure didn’t buy a new Mustang. Ah, I take that back…I do know what they did…they posted more comments on Facebook. It’s hard work being a keyboard commando, I guess, and it’s lonely down there in those basements. But they kept at it. Why buy a CSC Mustang, they said. You could buy a used Sportster for that kind of money, they said. Actually, most of the CSC Mustangs were optioned up by their customers so much that their cost approached and sometimes exceeded what a new Sportster would cost, but that’s neither here nor there.
A 250cc CSC Mustang, accessorized to the max.
The arrangement with the Big Z was a good one, and it led directly to things like the RX3, the RX4, the City Slicker, the TT250, the SG250, and more. It’s how I came to own my RX3, and like I said above, I am still riding and enjoying it. Even though I could have bought a used Sportster.
Good buddy Kyle from China, somewhere in South Dakota’s Black Hills. Don’t worry; he’s not armed (and if you’re wondering what that’s all about, you can read that story here).
I’ve been up and down Baja lots of times with lots of RX3 riders. I’ve been across China, including the Gobi Desert and the Tibetan Plateau, and I’ve ridden around the Andes Mountains in Colombia. I’ve ridden to Sturgis, then back across the top of the US, and down the Pacific Coast with a bunch of guys from China. Gresh rode with me on a lot of of those rides. I know, I know, he didn’t get invited on the Colombia adventure, but hey, he didn’t invite me on the Russia ride, either. But to stay on topic: It’s all been on the RX3.
Riding into the Gobi Desert with Joe Gresh as my wingman. Or was I his? In 6000 miles and 40 days of riding across China, we did not see a single Sportster, used or new.
Those early RX3 rides were marketing demos, basically, designed to show a few guys having the time of their life and demonstrating to everybody else that the RX3 had real chops as an ADV bike. But don’t think I wasn’t nervous. We took 14 guys and one gal on a 1700-mile ride through Baja literally the same week the first RX3s arrived in the US from China (I was sweating bullets on that one), and then we immediately took another 12 or 15 guys from China and Colombia (and one motojournalist from Motorcyclist) on a 5000-mile ride from southern California to Sturgis, back across the top of the US, and down the Pacific coast on what was arguably one of the most highly-publicized (in real time, too) motorcycle publicity stunts ever. I was scared the entire time, thinking something might break and generate a lot of bad press. I guess I didn’t realize how well things were going until the last night of the trip, 4700 miles into it, when Gresh told me to relax. “You won, man,” he said. He was right. But just think: I coulda had that used Sportster.
ExhaustNotes prides itself on our thorough reviews. We are not like those lame, ex-paper-magazine websites that actually have the product to hand. At ExNotes we are so professional, so talented in the art of bedazzlery we don’t need to see the review subject to make a good job of it. Which makes this 2-bike comparo an outlier in that I actually rode both these bikes back to back for 10 minutes. That’s more than enough time for me to reach an erroneous conclusion.
The Triumph Scrambler and Moto Guzzi TT850 in this comparo belonged to ExNotes buddies Robert and Phillip, who stopped by for Tinfiny Ranch’s annual West Side Road Rally. The West Side Road Rally is an invitation-only off-road adventure similar to the Colorado 500 except with 470 fewer miles.
The first thing you notice about these big, heavy ADV bikes is how big and heavy they are. They’re even heavy for a street bike. The Triumph seems a wee bit smaller than the Guzzi but from the saddle feels a bit heavier. I didn’t weigh the motorcycles on ExNotes’ USDA-calibrated scale because I don’t want to unduly influence your opinion of either bike with verified facts.
The Guzzi was new, as-delivered stock and it felt softly sprung. I didn’t try adjusting anything because unless a motorcycle is weaving out of control I really don’t care about suspension. In a perfect world we’d all be riding hardtails. The non-Paralever shaft drive gently lifted the rear of the bike under acceleration but it was so smooth and quiet no one noticed. In general the Moto Guzzi behaved like a faster, tighter version of the last Moto Guzzi I rode: a mid 1970’s Eldorado 750.
Suspension on the rear of the TT is a single right-side shock while the industry standard upside down forks hold up the front end. The suspension was so unobtrusive I never bothered to look for who built them. A brace of shut-off-able-ABS disc brakes did a fine job of slowing the weight down. I found the Moto Guzzi a tad bit boring. At 850cc the power was not overwhelming or delivered in any way that could be described as exciting. Maybe a loud, life saving exhaust system would add a sense of urgency to the motorcycle. As is, I think it would make a great long distance touring bike for the asphalt.
Phillip’s Triumph was also new but had been lowered by using shorter twin shocks. It had upside down forks and disc brakes were bolted on all over the place. The triumph at 1200cc felt much stronger than the Guzzi everywhere. The torque was enjoyable as I could leave the bike in top gear through the twisty mountain roads above Alamogordo, New Mexico. Riding the Guzzi I had to row the gearbox a bit.
Everything about the Triumph was harsher than the Guzzi. The suspension felt shorter and stiffer, the seat was harder and smaller, even the Triumph’s cycle parts seemed dangerous, like they were ready to cut you or burn you. So of course I liked it a lot better than the Guzzi. Unlike the Guzzi’s bright display the instrument display on the Triumph was invisible looking through a dark face shield but it didn’t matter as the important stuff was happening between my legs and on the road ahead. I don’t spend much time looking at gauges when I ride a motorcycle.
It’s interesting how these two motorcycles have a corporate-family feel that can be traced back to their earlier models. The Triumph was harsh like my old 750 Triumph. The Guzzi was slushy like that 1970’s Eldorado I rode 40 years ago. The new versions are modern, faster and more refined but the relative feel of the bikes remains unchanged. That old personality is still there.
And that’s why you buy a motorcycle: to feel. Motorcycles are not appliances, something Honda has forgotten. Both these bikes are aiming at the same ADV target audience but their differences and imperfections make them enjoyable. I liked the styling and rorty-ness of the Triumph best and could see buying one if I had any money. The Guzzi was a good bike, better functionally than the Triumph but it didn’t light any fires in me. If I’m going to risk my life on a motorcycle I want the bike to be involved in the process. Even though they look the business, I wouldn’t take either one of these motorcycles off road. The bikes are simply too big and heavy for me to enjoy on dirt.
The thought came to me easily: The Patton Museum. We’d been housebound for weeks, sheltered in place against the virus, and like many others we were suffering from an advanced case of cabin fever. Where can we go that won’t require flying, is reasonably close, and won’t put us in contact with too many people? Hey, I write travel articles for the best motorcycle magazine on the planet (that’s Motorcycle Classics) and I know all the good destinations around here. The Patton Museum. That’s the ticket.
General George S. Patton, Jr., and his faithful companion, Willie, at the General Patton Memorial Museum in Chiriaco Summit, California.
I called the Patton Museum and they were closed. An answering machine. The Pandemic. Please leave a message. So I did. And a day later I had a response from a pleasant-sounding woman. She would let me know when they opened again and she hoped we would visit. So I called and left another message. Big time motojournalist here. We’d like to do a piece on the Museum. You know the drill. The Press. Throwing the weight of the not-so-mainstream media around. Gresh and I do it all the time.
Margit and I finally connected after playing telephone tag. Yes, the Patton Museum was closed, but I could drive out to Chiriaco Summit to get a few photos (it’s on I-10 a cool 120 miles from where I live, and 70 miles from the Arizona border). Margit gave me her email address, and Chiriaco was part of it (you pronounce it “shuhRAYco”).
Wait a second, I thought, and I asked the question: “Is your name Chiriaco, as in Chiriaco Summit, where the Museum is located?”
“Yes, Joe Chiriaco was my father.”
This was going to be good, I instantly knew. And it was.
The story goes like this: Dial back the calendar nearly a century. In the late 1920s, the path across the Colorado, Sonoran, and Mojave Deserts from Arizona through California was just a little dirt road. It’s hard to imagine, but our mighty Interstate 10 was once a dirt road. A young Joe Chiriaco used it when he and a friend hitchhiked from Alabama to see a football game in California’s Rose Bowl in 1927.
Chiriaco stayed in California and joined a team in the late 1920s surveying a route for the aqueduct that would carry precious agua from the mighty Colorado River to Los Angeles. Chiriaco surveyed, he found natural springs in addition to a path for the aqueduct, and he recognized opportunity. That dirt road (Highways 60 and 70 in those early days) would soon be carrying more people from points east to the promised land (the Los Angeles basin). Shaver Summit (the high point along the road in the area he was surveying, now known as Chiriaco Summit) would be a good place to sell gasoline and food. He and his soon-to-be wife Ruth bought land, started a business and a family, and did well. It was a classic case of the right people, the right time, the right place, and the right work ethic. Read on, my friends. This gets even better.
Fast forward a decade into the late 1930s, and we were a nation preparing for war. A visionary US Army leader, General George S. Patton, Jr., knew from his World War I combat experience that armored vehicle warfare would define the future. It would start in North Africa, General Patton needed a place to train his newly-formed tank units, and the desert regions Chiriaco had surveyed were just what the doctor ordered.
Picture this: Two men who could see the future clearly. Joe Chiriaco and George S. Patton. Chiriaco was at the counter eating his lunch when someone tapped his shoulder to ask where he could find a guy named Joe Chiriaco. Imagine a response along the lines of “Who wants to know?” and when Chiriaco turned around to find out, there stood General Patton. Two legends, one local and one national, eyeball to eyeball, meeting for the first time.
A Sherman tank, the one Patton’s men would go to war with in North Africa and Europe, on display at the General Patton Memorial Museum.
Patton knew that Chiriaco knew the desert and he needed his help. The result? Camp Young (where Chiriaco Summit stands today), and the 18,000-square-mile Desert Training Center – California Arizona Maneuver Area (DTC-CAMA, where over one million men would learn armored warfare). It formed the foundation for Patton defeating Rommel in North Africa, our winning World War II, and more. It would be where thousands of Italian prisoners of war spent most of their time during the war. It would become the largest military area in America.
General Patton and Joe Chiriaco became friends and they enjoyed a mutually-beneficial relationship: Patton needed Chiriaco’s help and Chiriaco’s business provided a welcome respite for Patton’s troops. Patton kept Chiriaco’s gas station and lunch counter accessible to the troops, Chiriaco sold beer with Patton’s blessing, and as you can guess….well, you don’t have to guess: We won World War II.
World War II ended, the Desert Training Center closed, and then, during the Eisenhower administration, Interstate 10 followed the path of Highways 60 and 70. Patton’s troops and the POWs were gone and I-10 became the major east/west freeway across the US. We had become a nation on wheels and Chiriaco’s business continued to thrive as Americans took to the road with our newfound postwar prosperity.
Fast forward yet again: In the 1980s Margit (Joe and Ruth Chiriaco’s daughter) and Leslie Cone (the Bureau of Land Management director who oversaw the lands that had been Patton’s desert training area) had an idea: Create a museum honoring General Patton and the region’s contributions to World War II. Ronald Reagan heard about it and donated an M-47 Patton tank (the one you see in the large photo at the top of this blog), and things took off from there.
I first rode my motorcycle to the General Patton Memorial Museum in 2003 with my good buddy Marty. It was a small museum then, but it has grown substantially. When Sue and I visited a couple of weeks ago, I was shocked and surprised by what I saw. I can only partly convey some of it through the photos and narrative you see in this blog. We had a wonderful visit with Margit, who told us a bit about her family, the Museum, and Chiriaco Summit. On that topic of family, it was Joe and Ruth Chiriaco, Margit and her three siblings, their children, and their grandchildren. If you are keeping track, that’s four generations of Chiriacos.
The Chiriaco Summit story is an amazing one and learning about it can be reasonably compared to peeling an onion. There are many layers, and discovering each might bring a tear or two. Life hasn’t always been easy for the Chiriaco family out there in the desert, but they always saw the hard times as opportunities and they instinctively knew how to use each opportunity to add to their success. We can’t tell the entire story here, but we’ll give you a link to a book you might consider purchasing at the end of this blog. Our focus is on the General Patton Memorial Museum, and having said that, let’s get to the photos.
The Patton Museum’s new Matzner Tank Pavilion. When we were there, one of the two M60 tanks you see in front was running. If you think a motorcycle engine at idle makes music, you will love listening to an M60’s air-cooled, horizontally-opposed, 1790-cubic-inch, 12-cylinder diesel engine. I drove an M60 once when I was in the Army. Yeah, I still want one.The business end of an M60’s 105mm main gun. This one has been out of service for a long time; hence the rust. Firing one of these settles disagreements quickly.The M4 Sherman, our main battle tank in World War II, on the right, with an M5 Stuart tank on the left.Don’t tread on me, or so the saying goes. Everything on a tank is big. You don’t realize how big until you stand next to one.When Patton’s men trained at the DTC-CAMA, they used mockup aggressor vehicles (jeeps fitted with frames and canvas) to simulate the bad guys.M60 main battle tanks parked behind the Museum. This was a shot I could not resist. If Joe Gresh was into tanks, this is what Tinfiny Ranch would undoubtedly look like. The Patton name was attached to the M47, M48, and M60 tank series. I asked Margit about these tanks, and she told me that when the Museum raises enough money, they’ll be made operational and put on display. For now, Margit said, “they stand as silent ghosts with General Patton at the helm.” I like that.The General Patton Memorial Museum outdoor chapel. The chapel was built using desert rocks. If someone is looking for a unique wedding venue, this is it.
When I first visited the Patton Museum nearly 20 years ago, there were only three or four tanks on display. As you can see from the above photos, the armored vehicle display has grown dramatically.
Like the armored vehicle exhibits, the Museum interior has also expanded, and it has done so on a grand scale. In addition to the recently-built Matzner Tank Pavilion shown above, the exhibits inside are far more extensive than when I first visited. Sue and I had the run of the Museum, and I was able to get some great photos. The indoor exhibits are stunning, starting with the nearly 100-year-old topo map that dominates the entrance.
The Metropolitan Water District’s scale map of southern California, Arizona, and Nevada. MWD brought this model to the US Congress in 1927 to secure funding for the California Aqueduct, then they stored and forgot about it for decades. An MWD executive overhead Margit talking about the planned Patton Museum in the Chiriaco Summit coffee shop one day, he remembered the map, and one thing led to another. MWD donated the map to the Patton Museum in 1988. The Big Map (as it is known) covers the area used by Patton’s Desert Training Center and the California Arizona Maneuver Area. It’s a visually-arresting display that is truly something special.Generals Patton and Rommel, the two key players in North Africa. If you’ve never seen the movie, Patton, you need to fix that oversight. It is a great movie.George S. Patton: The early years. Patton attended the Virginia Military Institute and the United States Military Academy at West Point. His family was from San Marino, California. Patton was born into wealth and could have done whatever he wanted. He chose a career in the US Army.One of the display rooms inside the Patton Museum. I could have spent the entire day in just this room. That’s an A-10 Warthog model in the foreground. It’s the airplane we used to take out Iraq’s Republican Guard tanks in Operation Desert Storm. I worked for the company that manufactured the A-10’s 30mm Gatling Gun ammo and Combined Effects Munitions cluster bombs that did most of the heavy lifting in that war.Another view inside the Patton Museum. A tripod, a Nikon, a wide angle lens, and having the room to myself. It was a grand day.A model of Patton’s command vehicle. Patton lived in a trailer and moved with his troops during most of World War II, unlike other US generals who mostly stayed in hotels. Patton was an RVer before there were RVs.The Patton Museum has an extensive World War II small arms display. I could have spent half a day just viewing this part of the Museum. I’ll be back.The Patton Museum’s small arms display included this beautiful Model 1917 Colt .45 ACP revolver. Most of the surviving specimens you see today (when you see them at all; they are not very common) have a Parkerized finish. This one has the original blued finish. I own a Colt 1917; mine has the original finish, too. There’s quite a story behind these revolvers.A beautiful British Infantry Lee Enfield No. 4 rifle. I grabbed a photo of this one because it had an unusually attractive stock, something you don’t often see on infantry rifles.A replica of General Patton’s ivory-handled Colt Single Action Army revolver. Patton carried different sidearms during World War II, including this Colt SAA and a Smith and Wesson .357 Magnum (also equipped with ivory grips). Patton’s Colt SAA had two notches carved in the left grip. Then Lieutenant Patton was part of the Pershing expedition that chased Pancho Villa in Mexico from Fort Bliss (my old stomping grounds). Patton personally killed two men in a gunfight during that action. There’s no doubt about it: Patton was the real deal, a genuine warrior.
In addition to the General Patton Memorial Museum, there are several businesses the Chiriaco family operates at Chiriaco Summit, and the reach of this impressive family is four generations deep. As we mentioned earlier, it’s a story that can’t be told in a single article, but Margit was kind enough to give us a copy of Chiriaco Summit, a book that tells it better than I ever could. You should buy a copy. It’s a great read about a great family and a great place.
I enjoyed Chiriaco Summit immensely. That’s Joe Chiriaco in the lower left photo, and Ruth Chiriaco in the upper right inset. Margit Chiriaco Rusche, their daughter, is seated in the 1928 Model A. Fourth-generation Victor (whom we met) runs a vintage car header company at Chiriaco Summit. Victor is the young man standing behind Margit.
So there you have it: The General Patton Memorial Museum and Chiriaco Summit. It’s three hours east of Los Angeles on Interstate 10 and it’s a marvelous destination. Keep an eye on the Patton Museum website, and when the pandemic is finally in our rear view mirrors, you’ll want to visit this magnificent California desert jewel.
I’ve dropped a lot of usable content on Facebook without thinking about it. Good stories that would have made excellent topics for an ExhaustNotes.us blog post and I’ve screwed around and published them on Facebook’s Anti-Social Network. To what end? All it does is supply the buoyant pontoons that support a miserable, never-ending political tussle on my Facebook feed. My Chase Harper magnetic tank bag is a perfect example. Why haven’t I written a product review on this thing?
Until John Burns over at Motorcycle.com brought up tank bags I had completely forgotten I had one. I bought the Chase Harper 650 the day Berk and I left for our 650/500 Royal Enfield Baja trip. Neither Royal Enfield was set up with luggage so we strapped our gear on the bikes as best we could. I started out on the 500cc Bullet and I had so much junk to carry I used a backpack to hold some of it.
I’m a proponent of letting the motorcycle carry as much weight as possible. Slinging 20 pounds of junk onto your back and then pounding on city streets is not smart or sexy. My back was already hurting. We were working our way south to pick up a freeway when I called out to Berk, “Is there a motorcycle shop around here? I need to get a tank bag.”
“Yeah, follow me.” I followed Berk through the nondescript Californian sprawl and we arrived at a motorcycle accessory shop that was not named CycleGear. The shop guys came out and ogled the (at the time a new model not yet sold) Royal Enfield 650. We shot the breeze for a bit and then went inside to look at tank bags. Which didn’t take long because they only had one in stock: the Chase Harper 650.
The Model 650 is as plain as you can make a tank bag. It has a few zipper compartments and four strong magnets to hold the thing to your tank. Nothing expands or is special. Chase Harper is proud of their motorcycle products and prices them accordingly. The thing was like 90 dollars! As it was the display model, kind of dusty and missing the box and paperwork I asked the guys for a discount. No deal.
Berk started telling them how we were famous motojournalists. The clerks shook their heads, neither having heard of or read our stuff. I showed them a few tired old Motorcyclist Magazine stories on my cell phone and they seemed really interested but would not budge on the price. “We’ve already reduced the price on that bag, we can’t go any lower.” I bet Peter Egan could have gotten the price down. The fastest way to end this ego shattering indignity was to fork over the money and haul ass as fast as we could.
The bag was a great relief for my back. It held my camera, wallet, phone and enough stuff that I could survive a day or two on the hoof. Whenever Berk and I went into a store or restaurant I took the bag with me. The magnets make that so easy. I didn’t like that the bag had no rain cover. Those soulless misers at the motorcycle shop not called CycleGear said it was rain resistant. Whenever a motorcycle gear manufacturer says a product is resistant to rain you can take that to mean the damn thing is a sponge. I mean, anything that doesn’t dissolve like sugar when it gets wet could be described as resistant to rain.
As it turns out we didn’t hit any rain on our ride through Baja and the tank bag worked out perfectly fine. I got the 650 Royal Enfield up to an indicated 115 miles per hour and it stayed put like it was made to do 115.
In all the time I have owned the C-H bag I never really looked it over too closely. I didn’t see any straps for using the bag like a backpack. This is a common feature on tank bags. It wasn’t until Burns’ brought up tank bags on Facebook that Steve, another C-H 650 user told me that the straps were hidden in a zipper compartment under the grab handle.
And they were! Well hidden, I wonder if I the shop not named CycleGear had given me the original paperwork for the 650 would I have found the straps sooner? Probably not: I would have tossed the paperwork anyway. I’m a rebel, man.
The interior of the C-H 650 is plush, deep red. I feel like I have a bordello between my legs whenever I open the lid. Well padded, my camera gear survived Baja’s bumpy roads unscathed.
The lid of the 650 has quite a few features. There’s a bungee cord crisscrossing the top to hold odd shaped bits. Behind the mesh map holder there is yet another zipper for papers and what not.
Finally, there is a front-opening pouch with a red plastic liner that might keep something dry depending on how much the zipper leaks. I haven’t used any of these little hidey-holes so I can’t say if they are worthwhile. I toss everything into the main compartment.
The backside of the C-H 650 is not covered in super soft material. It’s more like vinyl. I had no tank scratches using the 650. There is one clip on the front and two clips on the back that I imagine could be used for strapping the bag to non-metallic gas tanks. I did not get the parts that would affix the bag to a non-metallic tank. They might be an extra cost item or you-know-who lost them at that shop not named CycleGear.
Overall I’m happy if not ecstatic with the Chase Harper tank bag. Just remember to bring plastic bags to protect your stuff in the rain. It did the job I needed it to do for much more money than I thought it should. For only having one, dusty tank bag the shop not named CycleGear did ok. My last tank bag lasted 10 years. This one looks sturdy enough to go the same distance.
Janus Motorcycles has a series of videos on their motorcycles, and this is the latest with Jordan and Josiah. There are few things that sound as good as a single-cylinder motorcycle accelerating, and that comes across loud and clear in the video. Enjoy, my friends.
Watching the Janus video reminded me of the Baja ride I took with Jordan and Devin (you can read about that adventure here). It was cool, riding the jewel-like, CG-engined, Janus motorcycles across northern Baja. We may do that again at some point in the Covid-free future and that would be fun. We sure had a great time on our Janus Baja adventure.
You can read about our other rides here, and more on things to see and do in Baja here.
Every once in a while we do a blog that covers a bunch of topics, and this is one of those times.
Good buddy Mike Huber and his friend Bobbie motorcycled Mexico (Baja, to be specific, almost another country all by itself), and he most recently published an excellent story about being stranded down there by the Covid 19 pandemic. It’s not often that we recommend another blog, but hey, Mike’s writing is outstanding and it’s a great story. Take a look; it’s very good.
My favorite motorcycle magazine (that would be Motorcycle Classics) sends out marketing emails on a regular basis, and in those emails they include links to past (and sometimes recent) articles. I write for MC, and the most recent email that slipped into my inbox included a link to my Destinations piece on Hearst Castle. You might want to read that story; I love Hearst Castle. It’s closed for the pandemic, but the pandemic won’t last forever. Hearst Castle will be there when it’s over.
We’re having a heat wave (both here in the Peoples Republik of Kalifornia and at Tinfiny Ranch). That prompted us to start a piece on riding in extreme heat. My first recommendation would be: Don’t. But things don’t always work out the way you want them to. I once rode the length of Baja on a Mustang replicas with several friends, and due to a lack of research on my part we did the ride in Baja’s hottest month (and that’s September). You can read about the 150cc Baja ride through Hell here. Do you have any advice for riding in high temperatures? Please share them with us (info@exhaustnotes.us) and we’ll include your recommendations here on the blog.
We have more motorcycle, gun and other stuff coming up, including info on Ruger’s new Custom Shop and their Super GP100 .357 Mag revolver, favored loads in the Henry .45 70 Single Shot, a piece on Turnbull’s iconic color case hardening and restoration services, a stunning (and tack-driving) Kimber with exhibition grade French walnut, the wrap-up of our ride through the Andes Mountains in Colombia, the Canton Fair, and for you fans of The Ten Commandments, making bricks without hay and mortar. And a whole lot more.
Skip Duke lived in New Mexico and died before I got the chance to meet him. I don’t know the exact date he shuffled off. Judging from the condition of Tinfiny Ranch when we first bought it from his daughter I’m guessing five or more years had elapsed between our purchase of Skip’s run-down mountain property and his death.
I never met Skip Duke but I get a strong sense of the man from the junk he left behind. I found boxes of mixed fasteners and some really nice ¼-inch by 8-inch screws with flat-topped heads. The heads are 5/8-inch wide and made so that the fastener countersinks itself like a giant deck screw. These screws are so nice I want to build something just to use them. Skip left behind two really nice red-painted, bottle jacks; one of them must be a 50-ton model. It’s a bruiser, like a foot tall and weighs 40 pounds. Skip was into radios: he was a Ham operator I’m guessing. Tinfiny had several antenna wires strung over the trees and arroyos. In his broken down shop I found a signal generator, watt meter and some other radio test gear that I couldn’t identify. That’s some old school radio stuff, man.
I never met Skip Duke but I think I would have liked him. Skip Duke had multiple uncompleted projects running in parallel when he died and that’s the same way I work. I get bored with one project and switch over to another, never finishing any of them. The 1975 Kawasaki 900 I call Zed was one of Skip’s unfinished projects. In the scattered debris of Skip’s life I found motorcycle magazines from the 1970’s featuring the new Z1900. The bike got universally rave reviews in the magazines, and rightfully so: the 900cc Z1 Kawasaki was a landmark motorcycle.
From reading old correspondence I found that Skip was having trouble with a Dyna III electronic ignition system he bought for the old Kawasaki. A melted wiring harness on Zed and no sign of the electronic ignition leads me to believe Skip sent the rotor and pick up coils back for a refund or tossed them in the bushes. One day I’m going to look for it with a metal detector. I found the original points plate in a box of MG car parts and after I cleaned them up the bike ran fine. I remember when electronic ignitions were novel, high tech stuff. I didn’t like them back then either.
Abandoned for years, Skip Duke’s house was overrun by rats when we looked at it with Ronnie, our real estate agent. A converted garage, the house had one bedroom, a living room, a kitchen and a bathroom. Maybe 500 square feet under roof. On the right side of the house was a small garage where Skip kept his tools and his motorcycles. I found a working 4-inch Makita belt sander in there. The bottom garage door panel was broken and the door hung off its track. You could walk inside. Ronnie looked around and said, “There used to be more motorcycles in here.” Next to the garage Zed was sitting outside in the weather, leading me to believe thieves had made off with Skip’s better motorcycles. As if there ever was a motorcycle better than a Z1.
We gutted Skip’s house. Every night after work I would put down 5 of those green rat poison blocks. Every morning they would be gone. Eventually the pace slowed until one day I found the poison untouched. The rats ate a total of 3 gallon-size buckets of poison but I won the war. I spent a pleasant two weeks hauling out dead rats and disinfecting the entire place with a solution of 50/50 bleach and water. My lungs burned and my vision blurred but at last the place was clean and rodent free inside.
We replaced the siding, drywall and insulation, and rewired most of the the electrical system. Skip’s little garage area is now my wife CT’s walk in closet. The concrete ramp leading to the garage has been leveled off and is a 5’ X 14’ office and storage room. We re-plumbed the bathroom and redid the kitchen eliminating any appliance that hinted at being a stove. We named the little house in the arroyo “The Carriage House” hoping to boost the little shack’s confidence. New paint and tile made The Carriage House look fresh inside. Skip’s old fiberglass shower stall was hard to remove and we were running out of time so it still serves, the last remnant of a bygone owner.
Skip Duke was not satisfied with the little Carriage House and had bigger plans in the works. Further up the property there was a graded area where Skip was going to build a structure. Two large, wooden sawhorses held 8-foot x 20-foot sheets of a composite material consisting of 6” white Styrofoam sandwiched between two layers of glued-on, exterior grade, 1/2’’ oriented strand board. There was enough paneling to build a 20 X 40 insulated building. Unfortunately, death has a way of messing up the best of plans. The 20’ X 40’ structure never got built. White plastic sheeting covered the composite panels but the relentless New Mexico sun crystallized the plastic. The sheet lay in tatters and it would crumble when you tried to pick it up. Without protection the panels fell victim to the elements.
Oriented strand board is fairly weather resistant but you can’t let it remain wet for long. Stacked horizontally on the sawhorses, the panels couldn’t shed water and the pooled moisture between the panels rotted the OSB. I’m sure if Skip Duke knew he was going to die he would have stacked them vertically allowing water to run out from between the panels. I managed to salvage enough panel material to build the walls for another of Skip’s unfinished projects: the pump house.
The original pump house was a 55-gallon metal drum over the wellhead. Inside the living room was a 40-gallon pressure tank to smooth out the cycling of the well pump. I can’t figure why anyone would want a gigantic pressure tank in their living room but Skip was not a man who trifled with cosmetics. The amount of paneling I could salvage determined the size of the well house so I poured a 6’ X 10” slab with a central drain and built a small shed over the well. I moved the 40-gallon pressure tank to the new well house and installed a water softener next to the pressure tank. With 6” thick Styrofoam walls the pump house is so well insulated a 150-watt chicken coop heater keeps the pipes nice and toasty in winter. Too bad so much composite paneling was ruined; it would have made for a super energy efficient house.
When Skip Duke died he left behind a 24-foot motorhome without an engine, an 18-foot Hobie Cat sailboat on a trailer, a 1974 MGB-GT hardtop 4-seater, a 4-person Jacuzzi with seized air and water pump motors, two large dog houses and a backyard chicken coop with camouflage netting over the top. Skip was a man who was into everything cool. I got rid of the junk except for the MG. Those hardtops with their Italian, Pininfarina-designed hatchbacks are rare. I might get it running one day.
Life is funny. I have an Internet buddy also named Skip Duke. He is very much alive and a Kawasaki Z1 guru. The living Skip Duke’s Kawasaki advice has saved me untold woe in the long restoration process of dead Skip Duke’s motorcycle. I bet the two Skips would get along famously (either that or they’d kill each other).
I never knew Skip Duke. We’ve remodeled and reused his vast pile of junk in ways he could not have foreseen. I wish he had left details of his future plans, like notes stuck to each project describing what he saw as success. I hope he’s looking down (or up as the case may be; Skip might have been a real jerk) and smiling as he sees his old Kawasaki motorcycle (now my old Kawasaki motorcycle) roaring down the highway full of life and power. I hope whatever becomes of that soulful part of a man after death is aware of the happy life CT and I have built atop the 5-acre spread he must have loved dearly. And I hope he finds joy in all that we have done.
The town of Weed is our last chance for gas or groceries. It’s a small place, population 20, and every Weed-ian citizen is packing heat. The chick working at the only store in town sports some kind of .45 auto that wobbles a crazy figure 8 on her hip as she totes pallets of soda pop from the storage shed into the store. The tall cowboy who delivers propane has a revolver on his hip also but that gun is not nearly as active.
Look there: a soccer mom wearing a white cowboy hat, plaid shirt, jeans and a 9mm pistol goes into the store for a gallon of milk. Mid-sized dogs hop out of a Polaris side-by-side, both dogs strapped with camouflaged vests that sport bandoliers of ammunition and pup-optimized night-vision goggles. Tactical mutts, man. A small child, not more than 2 months old waves about a menacing AR-15 while his head lolls in an elliptical orbit. Each complete cycle baby’s hard eyes lock onto mine and dare me to steal his candy before rotating on.
Okay, okay, I’m joking. The baby wasn’t carrying an AR-15. Needless to say, the crime rate is low in Weed. Either that or the woods are full of spongy ground and failed attempts. Mike and I fill our gas tanks at Weed not so much because we need fuel but because it’s more an offering to the forest gods before we leave civilization. Cover me while I pump the 87 octane.
Mike has a BMW 650 and I’m on my Husqvarna 510. We leave Weed heading west and after the even smaller town of Sacramento, Aqua Chiquita Road rises into a dark green forest of pines and aspens. This is the Lincoln National Forest. National and state parks may be closed due to Covid but here in New Mexico rough camping in the forests is still allowed.
We originally planned on camping further west, on Thousand Mile Trail, but an interesting unmarked side road caught our attention so we wandered off to see where it went. You can do stuff like that when you have no destination.
The side road was bumpy and almost all rock. Not loose rock, but solid rock. We bounced along for a mile and the road dipped into a sandy mud hole. Off to the right was a wide, shallow valley covered in lush green grass and dotted with grazing cows. “What do you think?” asked Mike. “Lets go check it out.”
The valley was much smoother than the road. There were tangles of old barbed wire sprinkled among the cow patties. Each time we would stop at the perfect camping place another perfect camping place was just a little further ahead. We kept following the Valley Of Perfect Campsites until it split off into two directions. We made camp at the junction of the two valleys on a slight rise that gave a commanding view of the pastoral scene.
I mean camping doesn’t get any better than this: no people, no RV’s, the camp even had a pre-constructed fire-ring and enough firewood for a month. Setting up my new tent was easy. I’ve used pup-style tents for years and they are all the same simple sleeve with two poles. One modification I’ve learned over the years is to use bungee cords for tying off the end poles. In a hard wind the bungees stretch but don’t yank the tent pegs out of the ground.
The pup tent was easy enough to rig but my new air mattress made up for it. I bought a Soble brand mattress with a built-in pump. The deal is, you remove the cap and then the plug on the square pump area. Next you push down on the square pump to fill the mattress. And you pump. And you pump. I started grumbling, “This damn mattress pump isn’t doing anything!”
I pumped and pumped. Sweat started trickling down my sides and still I pumped. Then I tried inflating it by blowing into the fill hole. After 20 minutes of struggling I was light headed, feeling sick and getting nowhere. I gave up and tossed the completely flat mattress into the tent and my sleeping bag over that. At least we had soft grass under the tents.
We were drinking smoky coffee and cooking hot dogs on a stick over our roaring fire. It really was the perfect camp site. Mike asked me, “Tell me how your air mattress works.” I explained the cap and the plug and the little square built-in pump to him. Mike thought about it for a few minutes then asked me, “How do you deflate the mattress?” I was stunned. What a dumb-ass question: deflating the mattress was the last thing I wanted to do! Then Mike said, “There must be a way to let the air out.”
My world shattered. Dark, stumbling stupidity was illuminated by the light of one thousand suns. Of course! There had to be a second plug! I ran to the tent, all doubt erased. There, underneath the pillow on the opposite side from the pump was a 1-inch deflation valve and it was wide open. For 20 minutes I had been pushing air from the foot of the mattress out the valve on the other end. With the deflation valve plugged the Soble mattress took about 2 minutes to inflate into a firm, comfortable sleeping pad.
After the air mattress debacle I realized I should have brought some gin along. I’ll put that on my list of equipment along with more water. Making coffee, cleaning up and drinking used up most of our water supply. Mike had an emergency drinking straw, the king you put into any old water and it filters the muck. A stream runs alongside Aqua Chiquita road a few miles away so we weren’t going to die. Other things we brought but didn’t use were aerosol cans of bear spray and bear bells. The bells were CT’s idea. If a bear can’t hear me snoring then he’s a pretty old bear.
Speaking of snoring, I’ll need a new sleeping bag as the tiny mummy bag would not allow much movement. I finally un-zipped the thing so I could turn and parts of me fell out into the 50-degree night air. I woke up sore. But then I always wake up sore. That night air also soaked all our gear. The bikes were wet, our folding stools were wet, the inside of my tent was dripping with condensation and that’s with both sides open. Mike’s tent didn’t have a rain fly, the top is mesh and was still wet inside. I don’t know if this was just a function of the dew point or the tent material not breathing.
Hot coffee in the morning will pave over a lot of rough patches and by 11 a.m. we felt alert enough to head back down the mountain. We rode west on Aqua Chiquita until Scott Able Road and followed Scott Able back to the paved highway.
A brief discussion was held at the 1000 Mile Trail, our original destination but we were both kind of tired from our night on the hoof. Anyone who thinks homeless people are homeless by choice has never camped with me. I don’t like motorcycle camping and this trip has done nothing to alter my opinion. I guess it’s the new normal until things start re-opening and a treatment or vaccine for Covid 19 is created. I’m not going to complain too much. I’ve learned more on fine-tuning my camping gear, which was the goal on this ride. You know, waking up sore and damp beats not waking up at all.
