Traveling and living mostly off my BMW GS1250 for the past six years has really taught me how to live in a minimalistic way, but travel with enough to be comfortable. It is a rarity that I need anything more than what I have. My organizational skills are honed to the point that I know where everything I own is at all times. Everything has a specific place and keeping items consistent with their location is key to organization. I can get out of my tent at 2:00 a.m. and know not only which pannier any given item is located, but the exact location within that pannier. It’s an art form that I take pride in. So you can imagine if things are flipped upside down and I am pushed into a new packing routine how it would take time to readjust my mindset to a new format.
This is exactly the place I have found myself in now. Beginning January 10th I am converting from a motorcyclist to a backpacker as I begin a trip to Oceania for an unknown period of time. Auckland, New Zealand will be my starting point and a 50 Litre Osprey Backpack will become my new home. Relearning organizational skills as a backpacker will include a learning curve, albeit a fast one. With a little bit of discipline my organization as a backpacker will become just as honed as my previous life was on the motorcycle.
Although this seems minimalistic it will be summer in the southern hemisphere so going light on clothing was an easy decision to make. I am sure if I am missing anything it will be easier to pick it up along the way rather than carry the weight and bulk of unneeded items. Being new to backpacking I am fully open to criticism and suggestions on anything I am missing or have over packed. Let me know your feedback and items that you cannot live without that should be added to this list.
I’ve never had any desire to hunt African game and I probably never will. But I’ve enjoyed reading about the African plains rifles since I was a kid in junior high school. Bringing a copy of Guns & Ammo magazine to school would probably get you a quick trip to the principal’s office these days…but I digress.
Exquisite walnut is often found on the older Ruger No. 1 rifles.
Quite a few years ago I saw an old Ruger No.1 Tropical in the consignment rack of a small gun shop that is now long gone. The owner said, “just pick it up and feel the heft.” And of course, I did and the next thing you know we were talking price, knowing I would never pay $2,000 for a collectible Ruger No. 1. Shaun confided in me that the rifle’s owner couldn’t find the obsolete 405 ammo for it anywhere and he wasn’t a handloader, so he wanted to sell the rifle. Another problem with the rifle was that a previous owner had cut down the front sight, probably because he had been shooting handloads with .41 caliber pistol bullets. So we settled on $500 and I became the owner of my first “unobtainable” Ruger No. 1!
In the gun shop years ago eyeing the Ruger No. 1. Salesman Shaun said, “hand me your phone and let me take a photo of you so you can see how good you look with that rifle!” Shaun passed away a couple of years ago, but I know he smiled down from Heaven yesterday as I fired the Ruger No. 1H Tropical for the first time. And he was right, this gun was meant for me!
It took me a lot of searching over the past few years, but I finally located a set of 405 Win reloading dies, the shell holder, and all the components to bring this rifle back to life.
Hornady had made a run of new 405 Winchester brass and I was lucky enough to find a new old stock box of 50 shells. I also located some new Barnes .412, 300-grain TSX bullets.
The first step in restoring the old 1H Tropical was to contact Ruger and purchase a new gold bead front sight. That was a simple install as the blade is held in place by a small detent spring.
New Ruger NOS gold bead front sight blade installed.
Not wanting to use the expensive Barnes TSX bullets quite yet, lead bullets were cast from lead wheel weights with a bit of tin added using a Lyman 412263 plain base mold to cast 288 grain bullets. These were sized to 0.413 inch and lubed with Alox. Lyman has since discontinued this fine old bullet mold.
A Lyman 412263 bullet, lubed and sized.
Finally, yesterday morning I decided it was time to resurrect this old rifle! Besides, the project would give me the opportunity to test some old “salvage” Hodgdon 4198 powder I’ve had sitting on the shelf for nearly two decades. The powder is probably from the 1950s or early 1960s. I also had some ancient CCI 200 large rifle primers on hand.
Hodgdon “salvage” 4198 smokeless powder. The powder is probably WW II US Military surplus powder that Hogdon bought in bulk and repackaged in the late 1950s or early 1960s.Vintage components for a vintage cartridge.
I loaded 20 rounds of 405 Winchester ammo using the cast lead bullets and a starting load of 38.5 grains of 4198 and headed down the hill with good friend Yvon to an informal shooting range on BLM land.
The obsolete 405 Winchester cartridge (left) and the popular 45-70 Government cartridge (right) used by 1880s plains buffalo hunters of the American west. I don’t shoot buffalo and never will. But I enjoy reviving and firing old guns!
Let me say that this Ruger No. 1H Tropical in 405 Winchester lives again. It shoots incredibly tight groups with the cast bullets and gold bead open sights.
My next project will be to develop a non-lead hunting load using the 300 grain Barnes TSX bullets.
Bringing life back into old obsolete rifles can be tons of fun.
I recently purchased a copy of Elspeth Beard’s Lone Rider, the story of a woman riding her BMW around the world in the early 1980s. To give you the bottom line up front: You need to buy and read this book. It’s that good.
I first became a fan of around the world motorcycle stories back in the early 1990s when I read Dave Barr’s Riding the Edge (another excellent read). I think I’ve read all or nearly all of the books in this genre, and I’ve written reviews on several (I’ll provide a set of links at the end of this blog). Some are these books are outstanding, others are truly terrible, and most are somewhere in between. Lone Rider firmly belongs in the outstanding category.
Picture this: A young British woman in her early 20s decides to ride her 600cc BMW around the world, and with no sponsors and nothing in the way of a support network, she does so. By herself. On some of the worst roads, most hostile regions, and least friendly environments on the planet. On a street bike, for which she fashioned her own panniers and top case. This was before you could buy a ready-made ADV bike.
It took Ms. Beard a couple of years to complete the journey, partly because she had to stop and work to fund the trip. I was captivated by her story, appalled by the way she was treated in a couple of places, and saddened by what I would describe as a surprise discovery decades after the ride ended.
Lone Rider is well written and well organized. The chapters are about the right length (I read one or two chapters each night before lights out), the photos are good, and the writing is superior. Prior to reading Lone Rider, I always thought I wanted to visit and photograph India; the book disabused me of that notion. I never had any desire to own a BMW motorcycle; the book convinced me that I had that one right.
At 336 pages, Lone Rider is substantive and I found it hard to put down. It really is a masterpiece of motoliterature. If you’re looking for your next good motorcycle book, Lone Rider is it. Trust me on this one.
This just came in: A press release from Janus Motorcycles! Janus has a special place in my heart. I rode with those guys in Baja on Janus Motorcycles and I visited the plant (and wrote about their new 450 in Motorcycle Classics magazine) a year or so ago. They’re good folks and they make great motorcycles. The latest Janus press release follows.
Happy New Year!
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: Janus Motorcycles announces new “Origins” line with lower entry price
We are pleased to announce the launch of a new edition of both the 250 and 450 Janus models: the Janus “Origin” model line. The basic idea of the “Origin” line is to provide a blank slate version of our existing models paired down to the essence of what defines each model. This serves to provide both a more affordable option AND the opportunity to build your own Janus just as you would like. To this end, we have removed all but the most vital elements of each model.
For example, the Halcyon 250 Origin edition includes everything that you need to be initiated into the Janus experience: a beautiful handmade motorcycle ready to ride, but without many of the options and upgrades that have always been standard on our production models such as fender pinstripe, air box graphics, and number plate (Origin edition Halcyons come with fenders pr-drilled and capped should you wish to add a number plate), a limited palette of available options for primary color, a single gold option for pinstriping, a standard seat, limited leather color options, a 1-year warranty, and no polished options.
By reducing the number of features and options, this helps us to hold appropriate stock and streamline production efficiency all of which allows us to offer the Origin line at a significantly lower entry price. Should you wish to add additional options or upgrades, these are all available for an additional cost. Add-ons will be shipped separately with instructions for installation by the customer. Get in on the Janus rambling experience and add almost any of our upgrades or extended warranties down the road! Book racks, fishtail exhausts, saddlebags, or headlight visors also make great birthday or Christmas gifts!
The details Get the Halcyon 250 Origin for a $6995 base price. That includes choice of two colors, gold tank pinstripe, and 1 year warranty. Build one here.
Get the Gryffin 250 Origin for a $7495 base price. That includes choice of two colors, gold tank pinstripe, and 1 year warranty. Build one here.
Get the Halcyon 450 Origin for a $13,495 base price. That includes choice of two colors, gold tank pinstripe, simplified feather graphic/emblem, and 1 year warranty. Build one here.
How?
So much of what we do is hands on. By giving you control over how much of that “hands on” you start with on your bike, we can help reduce the upfront price for these packages.
The value of our main model lines and their THOUSANDS of configurations, handcrafted quality, industry-leading warranties, and show-stopping looks doesn’t change. If you still want to “choose everything” it’s still the best value to go with the fully-customizable standard build up front (you can do the math on the website).
Background
At Janus, we pride ourselves on our design, hand-craftsmanship, and hyper-local supply chain—all things that also contribute to the higher cost of our models compared to the mass-produced offerings from the mainstream motorcycle industry. Especially over the past three years material costs, and inflation have meant that our prices have had to climb to stay abreast of our costs. Our goal with the Origin line is to find a way to offer an introductory option to the Janus experience with the potential to add options and upgrades over time.
One of the highest costs we face is also one of our greatest benefits: the numerous and complex menu of potential finishes and upgrades. By reducing these and standardizing the process, we have been able to find just the right balance that allows us to offer the Origin line. We chose to offer a “line” of existing models because, although paired down, the Halcyon “Origin” is still completely a Halcyon. What it lacks in options and upgrades, it makes up for in potential! We have never offered a “kit” bike, but this might be the closest we will ever come…
We chose the name Origin for its associations with just this idea of potential and beginnings (a big theme here with Janus the god who presides over them!) and because it conveys the idea that these are not so much different from the stock models in nature as in degree.
Please contact us with any questions you may have about the new Janus “Origin” line, what is or is not included, and how you can build it out over time!
A quick preface before you read Joe Cota’s blog: Wow, we are up to three Joes on ExNotes…Joe Gresh, me, and now, Joe Cota. Joe Cota has contributed a few blogs to us previously (before we implemented our new writers program). When Joe most recently sent this in, I felt it was time to include him as one of our regulars, and with this blog, he is. Joe is one of the good guys. He is a professional geologist, an active off-road racer in Baja California, a handloader and bullet caster of 18 years, and an avid flintlock rifle and pistol shooter. Joe lives in the San Bernardino Mountains of Southern California. When not working or racing trucks and buggies in Mexico, Joe can be found fly fishing at his summer home on the Henry’s Fork River in eastern Idaho.
– Joe Berk
Written on Christmas Day, 2023
Merry Christmas to all 🎄❄️🎅!
A lot of you will be casting and handloading today, some with their new reloading equipment! Here’s something for your consideration that came up on another message board. Powder weight weenies will argue that all handloaders MUST unequivocally weigh each and every single powder charge to one tenth of a grain of powder or less. Some wildly claim that a half-grain (0.5-grain) of powder makes a 50 to 100 feet per second difference or more in rifle cartridge velocity while others often use this as flawed reasoning as back-up for claiming that volume-based powder dispensers, such as the Lee Auto Disc used on turret presses, are highly inaccurate and produce terrible and unacceptable ammunition. This could not be further from the truth! Let’s bust some reloading myths.
The variation that my ancient Lee Auto Disk throws is about 0.1 to 0.2 grain, depending on if I am using ball powders versus extruded powders. The photos below is what 0.5 grain of Hodgdon H4831 SC extruded rifle powder looks like. For reference, the variation in powder charges that my Lee Auto Disc throws is less than half of the 0.5 grain of H4831 shown in the photo.
So what does a half-grain of powder actually mean in terms of velocity in a typical big game hunting rifle? Let’s explore a real life example. I load .300 Weatherby Magnum ammunition with 168-grain bullets and H4831SC powder. Per the Hodgdon Reloading Data Center, the starting load is 74 grains (which provided 2,865 feet per second in their test rifle) and the maximum load is 81 grains (which provided 3107 feet per second in their rifle). That’s a 242 feet per second difference in velocity over a full 7-grain powder spread. Interpolating these results linearly (a 242 feet per second velocity difference over a 7-grain propellant spread) means that each additional grain of propellant over the minimum powder charger yields an additional 34 feet per second. Therefore, a half grain of powder would make only 17 feet per second difference in velocity! Everyone who uses a chronograph knows that 17 feet per second is typically only a fraction of the extreme velocity spread most rifles and rifle ammo produce.
What about pistol handloads? Take the .45 Colt, using a 255-grain cast lead bullet and Winchester W231 ball powder. The starting load is 5.1 grains (which provides 677 feet per second) and the maximum load is 6.9 grains (which provides 917 feet per second). Using the same methodology as the above rifle computations and comparisons, each 0.1 grain of W231 powder equates to only about 13 feet per second. Again, this is far less than the extreme spread one can expect in .45 Colt ammo.
Does case size matter? I believe it does, but not that much. Take the .223 Remington cartridge, for example, loading 55-grain Hornady bullets with Winchester 748 powder. Straight from the Hornady manual (the 7th Edition), 1 grain of powder between starting and max loads for this combination is 100 feet per second per grain of powder, or 10 feet per second for each 0.1 grain. And again, 10 feet per second is only a fraction of the extreme spread one could expect from perfectly identical powder charges.
So variations in powder volume does matter a little more in the smaller rifle cartridges, but not enough to make anyone steer clear of auto powder dispensers on turret presses versus individually weighing each charge. Richard Lee was right when he wrote in his Modern Reloading book that powder volume is more critical than weight and that one should periodically weigh a charge only as a double check for volume.
So there’s little justification for being a Tenth of a Grain Weight Weenie! Don’t be THAT guy who bashes turret press and powder dispenser users based on misconceptions posted by folks on the Internet.
Happy handloading and a prosperous new year to all!
In a prior blog I described bidding on a Ruger .357 Blackhawk that had been owned by Hank Williams, Jr. The Rock Island Auction folks predicted the gun would sell for between $900 and $1,600, and I wanted it so I put in a bid at $2,000 (which I thought was ridiculously high). That gun sold for $5,000. There are evidently guys out there who have the disease worse than me.
The Hank Williams, Jr., Ruger .357 Magnum Blackhawk. It sold for $5,000. The buyer’s premium on top of that would have been nearly a thousand bucks!
Then last month another Rock Island auction rolled around, and this one had a Ruger .357 Bisley. The concept and history of the Bisley is interesting. Bisley is the name of a target range in England, and when Colt introduced a target variant of its famed Single Action Army revolver in 1894, they named it the Colt Bisley. The most obvious differences between the Bisley and a standard Single Action Army is the Bisley’s longer grip with a more pronounced hump. Colt’s Bisley also had a rear sight that is adjustable for windage and interchangeable front sight posts for elevation adjustment.
Ruger introduced a modern Bisley version of its Blackhawk revolver line in 1985 (with revolvers chambered in .357 Magnum, .41 Magnum, .44 Magnum, and .45 Colt). I always thought the Ruger Bisley was a marketing thing and I thought the Bisley’s odd-shaped handle was visually unappealing, so I never felt the need for one. But needs and wants can change. A friend of mine let me try his .357 Magnum Ruger Bisley a few years ago. I liked its heft and slightly longer barrel (7 1/2 inches versus the standard Blackhawk’s 6 1/2 inches). Ruger stopped making the .357 Magnum Bisley a few years after it was introduced, and they are hard to find now.
A sense of scale: Ruger .357 Bisley, Ruger .357 Blackhawk, Ruger .44 Super Blackhawk, and Uberti Colt Walker. They are all big guns.
The modern Ruger Bisley has a massive appearance, and that’s kind of cool. At 7 1/2 inches, the barrel is an inch longer than the .357 Blackhawk and the Bisley has the larger grip frame. The Bisley grip frame feels awkward to me, but it is easier on the hand under heavy recoil. I’m probably just used to the standard Blackhawk grip frame. For me, the larger Super Blackhawk grip frame is the best of all.
Some might call these big guns horse pistols, which have been defined as handguns usually carried in a holster while riding a horse. The Bisley is smaller than a Colt Walker (a monster of a handgun), but by any other measure the Bisley is a huge revolver. It is heavier than the regular .357 Magnum Blackhawk for four reasons: The unfluted cylinder, the longer barrel, the grip is larger, and the gripframe is made of steel instead of aluminum.
Ruger’s .357 Magnum Blackhawk (on the left) and their .357 Bisley (on the right). Note the difference in the grip shape and length.
The Rock Island folks guessed that the Ruger Bisley would go for between $600 and $900 on their website before the auction. I bid $600. I wanted it, but not so badly that I was willing to go crazy, which is kind of what my previous results told me you had to be to win in the Rock Island crazy competition. To my great surprise, I won the Bisley with my $600 bid. Then I received the emailed invoice and I was even more surprised. There was a 17.5% buyer premium, which tacked another $105 to the price. There was a 3.5% credit card fee, so that was $21. The gun had to ship 2nd day air to my FFL, and that was $46. There was insurance, and that added $7.05. And of course, the Peoples Republik of Kalifornia sales tax for another $60.39. My $600 Bisley suddenly became an $839.44 toy and it hadn’t even arrived. When it did, there was the California DOJ fee and the FFL transfer fee ($74.90). My $600 Bisley was now up to $914.34. I guess that’s okay, though. If I had seen a .357 Ruger Bisley in new condition for a thousand bucks, I would have pulled the trigger (literally and figuratively) and felt good about it. In that sense, I was $85.66 ahead of the game.
Another difference between Ruger’s standard .357 Magnum Blackhawk and the Bisley is the cylinder. The standard Blackhawk has a fluted cylinder; the Bisley has an unfluted and roll-engraved cylinder.
When I saw the gun in person (the day I started my 1o-day waiting period), I was blown away (figuratively speaking, of course). I could see that it was in excellent condition. The quality, fit, and finish are light years ahead of what Ruger is producing these days. You’ll recall that when I lost the Hank Williams Auction I bought a new Ruger .357 Blackhawk and its quality was terrible. The Ruger Bisley’s quality appears to be much better in both fit and finish. I looked up the Bisley’s serial number on Ruger’s website and learned that my gun was manufactured in 1986; I guess Ruger cared more about what was leaving the factory back then.
I’ve been to the range a couple of times with my Bisley. On my first day out with the new-to-me Ruger, one of my friends (a bench rest shooter) came over to watch. There was an old bowling pin laying on its side on the 100-yard line. You know the situation…like the bad guy in an old western movie, it was just begging to be shot. I asked my friend to spot for me. The first shot went high, kicking up a dust cloud about three feet above the pin. I held lower and my second shot sent up another dust cloud two feet below the pin. Okay, I had the elevation dialed in (I wasn’t actually adjusting the Bisley’s sights; I was just holding the front post at different heights). My third shot hit just to the right. On my fourth shot I nailed it, sharply kicking the bowling pin back 10 yards and spinning it violently. Now, just the pin base was facing me, presenting a 3-inch diameter circle. “Okay, let’s see you make that shot,” my friend said. I did, and the pin was kicked back another 10 yards. I looked back and smiled. “Piece of cake,” I said, and we both had a good laugh.
25-yard targets shot with the .357 Magnum Ruger Blackhawk (left) and the .357 Magnum Ruger Bisley (right).
On a subsequent range outing I compared the Bisley’s accuracy to the regular Blackhawk using the same heavy .357 Magnum load in both revolvers (8.0 grains of Unique and the Hornady 158-grain XTP jacketed hollow point bullet). They both shoot groups that were about the same size, and both are biased with the sights adjusted as far as they will go. The regular Blackhawk shoots high at 25 yards with the rear sight all the way down (the front sight is not tall enough). The Blackhawk prints about 3 inches high at 25 yards with the rear sight adjusted as low as it will go. I’ve contacted Ruger and they sent me their shortest rear sight blade for the Blackhawk, but that’s the one the revolver already had in it. Custom gunsmiths offer a taller front sight (Fermin Garza comes to mind), but I don’t know if I want to do that. It’s custom work I shouldn’t have to pay for.
The Bisley’s elevation is okay at 25 yards, but it shoots to about one inch to the left at 25 yards. When I received the revolver from Rock Island Auctions, the rear sight had been cranked almost all the way to the right by the former owner. He ran out of adjustment range and the gun still shoots to the left of my aim point. I thought that the leftward bias could be due to a poor ejector rod shroud fit, or it may just be due to the fact that I was shooting max loads and it’s how the gun reacts in my hand. I fired a few rounds of .38 Special wadcutters and the gun still shot to the left, so I don’t think it is a function of how hot a load I’m shooting or how it reacts to my grip. Then I took the ejector rod shroud off to see if that would make a difference. The ejector rod shroud was very poorly fit to the Bisley and it was pulling the barrel to the right, but when I took it off, the point of impact did not change. You would think the manufacturer would deliver a gun that shot to a point that was within the gun’s adjustable sight range. I’ve been inside a revolver manufacturing facility (not Ruger), and all they do is proof each gun with a high pressure load; that other manufacturer did not check where the gun printed. Ruger evidently does not, either.
The regular Ruger Blackhawk ejects all cases easily (even with the max loads I was using). The Bisley does not. With the max loads I shot in the Bisley, one chamber wants to hang on to the cartridge case. Less than max loads (38 Special and mid-range .357 mag loads) eject satisfactorily from the Bisley. The Bisley has a sloppy surface finish inside its chambers (there are machine marks from the chamber reaming operation). It shouldn’t have left the factory back in 1986 like that, but it did.
There’s one other quality-related observation on the Bisley I should mention. The Bisley makes a firing pin primer indentation in the primer that is bigger and deeper than any I have ever seen. Looking at the firing pin after it has been hit by the hammer, it looks bigger and sticks out of the breech face more than I am used to seeing. I had a bunch of max load .357 rounds with Aventuras primers I had assembled earlier, and Bisley pierced the primers on the first five (so I didn’t shoot any more of those). The firing pin is smooth and round (there are no sharp edges on it); it’s just taking the primer cup material near enough to its yield point that the pressure takes it the rest of the way. These same cartridges worked fine in my regular (i.e., non-Bisley) Blackhawk with no pierced primers, and the same .357 load with CCI primers and Winchester primers worked fine in the Bisley. Note to self: Don’t use Aventuras primers for hot .357 loads in the Bisley.
The Bisley’s firing pin in the extended position. It’s smooth, but big.Pierced primers on .357 Magnum cartridges loaded with 8.0 grains of Unique, the 158-grain Hornady XTP jacketed hollow point bullet, and Aventuras primers.
So there you have it. My knowledge base on the Ruger .357 revolvers continues to grow (and yours does, too, if you’re reading this). I’m still looking for that perfect .357 Magnum revolver. I’ve owned a bunch over the last 50+ years, and I’ll keep looking. I still dream about wandering into a rural pawnshop somewhere and finding a brass grip Blackhawk like that Hank Williams, Jr., Ruger for $200. You never know.
Instead of one of my usual blogs on motorcycles, I felt it was time to highlight some of my motorcycling shortcomings. Many of us when starting this magnificent hobby have had a few blunders along the way and, well, some of us have had more significant blunders than others. Being who I am, it seems when I do anything it is extreme. Over my 28 years of motorcycling, it is pretty obvious that riding is no different.
I was a young U.S. Army Specialist serving in the 82nd Airborne Division. One of my best friends was about to go through a rough divorce at the same time that I felt the call to obtain my first motorcycle. He let me practice on his bike and use it for the test if I purchased it from him. Facing an imminent divorce allowed for an extremely generous discount (he needed divorce and beer money), and being flat broke, this was what led me to make the purchase. The bike was a bright yellow Honda Magna 750 that had more than enough power (probably too much) for a first motorcycle.
The deal was pretty much done. I passed my written test and was ready to take my driver’s exam. I’m not sure if I was nervous or inexperienced (or both), but as soon as I started the test maneuvering around cones, I knew I was making a ton of mistakes. The Honda Magna was heavy and not the best choice for a new rider taking the motorcycle license test. Amazingly, though, I passed the exam. I later learned my friend had been chatting up the evaluator while I was testing to distract him. Regarding a successful test output, my friend had as much skin in the game as I did. After passing the test, I paid him $3500 in cash that I obtained by somehow qualifying for a personal loan. I became the proud owner of a 1995 Honda Magna 750!
It didn’t take me long to realize I was invincible on the Magna, even though I had no riding skills. I was a 22-year-old unstoppable 82nd Airborne Paratrooper with a fast motorcycle. What could go wrong?
Pretty much everything could go wrong. Almost every evening when leaving Ft. Bragg there would be lights flashing in my rearview mirrors. It couldn’t be for me as I was way too far ahead of them. This, of course, was because I was going over 100 miles per hour. Everything was distant in my rearview mirrors at that speed. From what others had told me, the MPs were not allowed to leave post and had to call any pursuits into the local Fayetteville police. By the time that happened and an officer would be dispatched, I was long gone and most likely home on my couch watching TV and having a beer.
This cat and mouse game went on for months. Not daily, but usually one or two times every week. I didn’t care as it was nothing but entertainment for me. These near run-ins with the law helped my ego, but did not improve my riding skills one bit. Until one day when the birds came home to roost.
Sitting at a light on Ft Bragg, I decided to teach myself how to split lanes. Not noticing an MP (a Military Police officer) nearby, and noticing even less the car driver next to signaling the MP. Instantly the lights flipped on and I heard the “whoop whoop” of a siren. This happened at the moment the light turned green. All traffic stopped to allow the MP to move forward but he couldn’t as everyone had frozen (except for me, of course). Clicking down into first gear and blasting off like a Shillelagh missile, I was out of there. Knowing the MP would be able to catch up quickly (I was in the heart of Ft. Bragg), there was no running to the safety of the post border. After a quick couple turns, I realized it was probably best to pull over.
It was no surprise that the MP was not too happy. As he was listing my charges, I asked him if I could go inside my battalion headquarters to let my team know I would be late returning from lunch. The MP agreed, and I entered the headquarters building and proudly announced “Hey, Sarge, I am gonna need a little longer lunch today.”
My sergeant asked why, and the MP promptly and quite loudly said, “His ass is coming with me to the station!” As I rode to the MP processing station and received my charges, it hit me: It was my wedding anniversary. Since my CQ (Charge of Quarters) shift was 24 hours, I hadn’t called my wife. While the arresting officer was rambling to everyone in the station about my reckless driving, I thought this would be a good time to call her. I asked and was granted permission to make a phone call. I called my wife and wished her a happy anniversary. She was quite pleased that I somehow found the time to call during my busy day. The call was going great until my wife asked where I was.
“Ummm, jail,” I said. “I am in jail.”
My wife was instantly very mad at me. Prior to that she had been happy. I’ll never understand women.
Once released from jail, I was not punished, other than receiving a written letter stating that I had embarrassed the battalion and the 82nd Airborne Division:
The letter was quite stern. I could not ride a motorcycle on Ft. Bragg until I successfully completed a motorcycle training class. The safety class was sorely needed, as my riding skills were horrendous (to say the least). The one hope I had was that upon completing the training class my new riding skills would be used for good and not evil. Sadly, there would be a Part 2, a Part 3, and even possibly a Part 4 to my maturing as a motorcyclist. For the time being, however, I was allowed back on post and I didn’t receive any military judicial punishment, and that was something to be thankful for.
That’s me that I’m talking about in the title of this blog and the story is a Riding China excerpt. Joe Gresh and I rode with a group of Chinese riders on a 38-day motorcycle ride around China. This is a small part of it describing the ride into Beijing.
Gresh, King Kong, and yours truly in China. I’m the bugeyed old bastard on the right (after the swelling subsided).
Traffic was moving but it was heavy, and Chinese drivers in cars do not respect motorcycles. If they want to occupy your spot on the road, they just move over. It’s not that they don’t see you; they just don’t care. You’re a motorcycle. They’re a car. They know who’s going to win. At very low speeds in city traffic, you can scream at them or maneuver away or stop. At freeway speeds if you don’t get out of the way, you’re a hood ornament or a big wet spot on the asphalt. Our Chinese riders’ propensity to ride on the shoulder all the time suddenly made sense to me.
On a quiet road in China. China has delightful country roads and modern freeways. We weren’t supposed to take our motorcycles on the freeways, but we didn’t do too well with rules. We literally rode thousands of miles, all of it illegal, on Chinese freeways.
It was dark well before we reached our hotel that night and we had to ride about 45 minutes or so after the sun set. The Asian-configuration RX3 headlight is not very bright (our US bikes are much better), and to make a bad situation worse, as I have mentioned before I don’t see too well in the dark. To see a little better that night, I lifted my visor. Even though it was a clear visor it still has a slight tint to it and when I lift it at night I can see better.
In the motorcycle world, there’s another term that’s similar to ATGATT (you know, all the gear, all the time). It’s “visor down.” What it means is that you should keep your helmet visor down all the time. The reason is obvious: You don’t want to get whacked in the eye with whatever is floating in the air. That night, I proved that “visor down” makes sense. I caught a bug smack in my right eyeball. It hurt immediately, but I could still see. At that point, I put the visor down, but it was a classic case of closing the barn door after the horse got away.
We arrived at the hotel about 20 minutes later. I was tired and cranky. I went to my hotel room in a blue funk. Gresh tried to calm me down, but he was fighting a losing battle. “We have a couple of good rolls of toilet paper in this room,” he said. That was a good point and it was definitely something to be happy about, but it didn’t help me feel any better.
I really didn’t want to eat dinner that night, but I decided that bagging dinner would be too rude. So I went and I sat next to Sean. After some small talk, he noticed my eye. He was shocked. I had not seen myself in the mirror and I guess it looked pretty bad. My eye wasn’t white anymore; it was mostly red and swollen. Okay, I’ve been whacked in the eye by bugs before. I knew it would be red and it would bug me (pardon the pun) for a couple of days, and then it would be okay.
Yep, that Great Wall.
We rode through the countryside the next day to see the Great Wall at another location, but I still wasn’t over being upset and cranky from the night before. When I lead rides in the US or in Mexico that last for more than a weekend, there’s usually one guy in the group that will get cranky at some point. I had thought about that before this ride and I realized that on a ride lasting over five weeks someone would get to that point. I just didn’t think that guy would be me. But it was. I was tired, my eye was jacked up, and the stress of watching out for Chinese drivers was getting to me.
Dong drifting toward Beijing.
The next morning, I missed grabbing a good photo because of that. We were riding to see the Great Wall at a different location. On a lightly-traveled mountain road on a curve, we all stopped and Dong intentionally laid his RX1 on its side in the middle of the lane. He got on the bike with his knee out and had one of the other guys photograph him from the front (to make it look like the bike was leaned way over in the corner and he was dragging his knee). I think nearly everyone got their photo on the bike, but I declined. I just wasn’t in the mood. I think Dong knew I wanted that photo, though, and after I had returned to the US, he emailed a copy to me. (It’s the photo you see above.)
When we got to the Great Wall that morning it involved a considerable hike up a steep hill to get close enough to touch it. I’ve done that on prior visits, so I didn’t want to do it that day. Four of us opted to wait while the rest of the guys made the hike. It was relaxing. Wong, Zuo, Furem, and I shared a bag of peanuts Sean had left in his car while we waited for the others to return.
As we were riding back to the hotel from that location, heading downhill through the mountains the same way we had ridden in, I started slowing down. I didn’t realize it at first, but eventually I was the last guy in our formation. Then I started riding even more slowly, until the rest of the guys were so far ahead of me I couldn’t see them. My eye was still bothering me and by now I was having some problems seeing well. To add fuel to that fire, my left shoulder was hurting (I have a pinched nerve somewhere in there and it bothers me on long motorcycle rides).
But there was more to what I was feeling than just what I described above. Something was going on. I suppose a shrink would call it an anxiety attack. I was driving around every twist in the road expecting to see a truck stopped in my lane, an oncoming truck passing another vehicle in my lane, a person sweeping the street in the middle of the turn in my lane, a guy pulling out right in front of me, a bus making a U-turn in front of me, a car cornering too hard drifting into my lane, someone going the wrong way in my lane, someone pulling into my lane without looking, an old woman walking directly in front of me, people stopping to have a conversation in the middle of the street, or someone squatting down to take a dump (in my lane, of course). On this trip, I had seen all of what I just described and more. What was happening that morning was the enormity of the insanity that is riding a motorcycle in China caught up with me. Yeah, it was an anxiety attack. The nuttiness of it all, my vulnerability being on a motorcycle, and my inability to do anything about it was suddenly overwhelming.
The guys were waiting for me at the next intersection, and from there we went to a Sinopec gas station to refuel the bikes. It was hotter than hell. I guess it was fair to say I was miserable. I was still feeling all of this accumulated anxiety when a guy in a black Mercedes starting blasting his horn at me in that gas station parking lot. He didn’t want to drive around me; he wanted me to move even though there was plenty of room for him to go around. It was more of the “I’m a car, you’re a motorcycle” bullshit that is pervasive in China.
I don’t know what came over me, but I think I just got supremely tired of being the vulnerable victim. I looked directly at that Mercedes driver. I made eye contact. He looked at me, not realizing I was here with eight other guys on motorcycles. I eased the clutch out until my bike was directly alongside his window (which was open). I then leaned on my horn and let it rip for a good solid 20 seconds. Then one of the other Chinese riders watching me did the same, and yet another yelled a really bad word at the Mercedes (which he probably learned from either Gresh or me). It was pretty funny, especially hearing that kind of profanity with a Chinese accent. The guy in the Mercedes had screwed with the wrong Marine on the wrong day. Without realizing it, he took on the Wild Angels that hot afternoon just outside of Beijing. He suddenly and fully realized what might happen as a result of his boorishness. He rolled up his window, he averted his eyes, and he backed his big black Mercedes respectfully away from us. That broke the spell. I wasn’t helpless any more. I felt amazingly better.
Okay, enough about me being a butthead: On to Beijing proper. We stopped at the Beijing Zongshen dealer that afternoon (where they were expecting us) and it was the Dajiu and Arjiu show all over again.
Gresh presenting a vest to a Zongshen rider. They thought we were celebrities.
There were the usual tons of photos with Gresh and me. Hey, how often do Dajiu and Arjiu show up in your neighborhood? Tracy told us the dealer had just sold five new RX1s. He wanted to have a ceremony in which we gave the keys and Zongshen fluorescent vests to the five lucky guys who had purchased the bikes. I was feeling my old self again. I saw an opportunity and I took it.
“We’ll do it this time, Tracy,” I said, “but if you don’t start doing a better job getting these dealers prepped it will be the last time.” Tracy doesn’t always know when I’m teasing him. I could tell that this was going to be one of those times. Gresh picked up on it, too.
“Yeah!” Gresh said. Joe sometimes has a way with words.
“What is wrong, Dajiu?” Tracy asked, concern and maybe a little fear showing in his eyes.
“Where’s the watermelon?” I said. “We’re supposed to have watermelon waiting for us at each dealer visit,” I said.
Joe Gresh on a Zongshen motorcycle and his contractually-mandated chilled watermelon.
“Yeah,” Gresh added, “and it’s supposed to be chilled, too.”
“It’s right there in Section 6, Paragraph 3.2 of the Dajiu and Arjiu contract,” I said, “and there’s no cold watermelon here, Tracy!” (I don’t think I need to mention this for my readers, but I will just in case you were wondering, there is no such thing as a Dajiu and Arjiu contract, let alone any paragraphs about cold watermelon.)
“Ah, I am so sorry,” Tracy said. “It is my bad, Dajiu. I am so sorry.” Then he turned to Gresh, and addressing him as Arjiu, he said the same thing.
“Tracy, relax,” I said. “I’m just screwing with you.” But it was too late. Tracy heard me tell him I was joking, but it didn’t register.
We had a great ceremony and we had fun taking photos and giving those five proud new RX1 owners oversized Styrofoam keys and then their real keys. It was one of the most fun things I did on this entire trip. As we were doing so, I could see Tracy (who had left and returned) slicing several large (and delightfully cold) watermelons on a table in front of the showroom. Hey, a contract’s a contract.
The Beijing dealer had an RZ3, Zongshen’s naked sportbike, parked in front. Gresh was really impressed. I took photos of it and put them on the CSC blog that night, but I couldn’t tell you then what you now know to be the case: CSC is going to bring the RZ3 to North America. I like the RZ3 a lot. It’s essentially the RC3 with a normal seating position and upright bars without the RC3’s bodywork. We’re going to sell a lot of RZ3s. The RZ3 has the RX3 powertrain, and that’s both bulletproof and fast. I already have ideas on how I’m going to customize mine.
When we got off the subway after visiting The Forbidden City, we waited on a street corner for our Uber ride back to the hotel. I watched the scooters and small utility vehicles rolling by, and I realized that nearly every one of them was electric. I must have seen 200 scooters during the 20 minutes we waited, and perhaps 2 had gasoline engines. This wholesale adaption of electric scooters and small utility vehicles in China is nothing short of amazing.
An electric scooter in China.
Sean explained to me that the transition to electric vehicles started about 15 years ago, and the government has done a number of things to encourage people to convert to electricity. For starters (once again, pardon my pun), many of the larger cities in China now prohibit motorcycles and scooters unless the vehicle is electric. Electric scooters are allowed where gasoline-powered bikes are not. That alone is an enormous incentive. The next incentive is that you don’t need a driver’s license to take an electric vehicle on the street. You just buy one and go. And finally, as I’ve mentioned before, electricity is cheap in China. There are windfarms, solar panel farms, coal plants, nuclear power plants, and hydroelectric power plants all over the country. We saw scooters parked on the sidewalk and plugged into extension cords running into small stores everywhere. People charge them like iPhones; they didn’t miss any opportunity to top off the batteries on these things.
That night was a great night. The Zongshen dealer took us to a restaurant that specialized in Peking duck. The guys were excited about this development, but I was initially leery. I thought I didn’t like Peking duck. Boy, was I ever wrong!
I tried Peking duck 25 years ago when I visited Beijing with Sue. We both thought the duck was awful. That’s because we went to a restaurant that served tourists. The food at that place didn’t have to be good. They knew they would never see us again, and Yelp hadn’t been invented yet.
This night in Beijing with the Zongshen dealer and the RX3 owners club was different. The Peking duck was incredible. The chef sliced it paper thin right at our table. They had thin tofu (almost like a crepe), and the guys taught me how to eat duck properly. The deal is you put a few fresh vegetables on the tofu, you add a slice or two of duck, you add this amazing brown gravy, and then you roll the affair up like a burrito. Wow, it was delicious!
Peking Duck, done the way it is supposed to be done, in a Beijing restaurant. It was exquisite. Photo by King Kong.
We had several rounds of toasts at dinner that night and the liquor flowed freely. I got lucky. Kong sat next to me and he schooled me in the proper way to make a Chinese toast. To show respect, you clink your glass against the other guy’s glass, but you hold your glass at a lower level so that when the two glasses meet, the rim of yours is lower than the other person’s. When the Zongshen dealer toasted me, I followed Kong’s advice, and the Chinese riders all nodded approvingly. Ah, Dajiu knows.
It was funny. Sergeant Zuo and I had made several toasts to each other, and when we touched glasses, we both tried frantically to get our glasses lower than the other, so much so that we usually crashed the bottoms of both on the table (to a hearty laugh and round of applause from everyone). Zuo was being polite; I was being completely serious (I have enormous respect for him).
The next day we took the subway into Beijing. We already were in Beijing when we got on the subway, but Beijing is a megacity and you can’t simply drive into the center of it. We rode the subway for a good 45 minutes, and when we emerged, we visited the Forbidden City and Tien An Men Square. It was all grand. It was touristy, but it’s something that should be on any China visitor’s bucket list.
After seeing the Forbidden City, we walked around downtown Beijing for a while. I told Tracy my eye was getting worse and I wanted to get antibiotic eye drops for it. It was Sunday afternoon, but there was a large pharmacy right in front of us and it was open. Tracy went in with me and he told one of the young pharmacists what I wanted. She responded and it didn’t sound good.
“She cannot sell it to you without a prescription,” he told me.
“Well, shoot, Tracy, it’s Sunday afternoon,” I said. “We’re not going to find a doctor. I’ll be okay. Let’s just go.”
“No, it is okay, Dajiu,” he said. “We are China and we have a bureaucracy. It is my bad.”
Good old Tracy, I thought. The guy felt responsible for everything. I was resigned to the fact that my eye was going to take a while to get better. Tracy, in the meantime, had walked not more than 8 feet away to an elderly woman sitting at a wooden table. He spoke to her in Chinese and pointed to me. She never looked at me, nor did she look up. She simply pulled out a white pad with a big “R” at the top. Nah, this can’t be, I thought. She wrote something in Chinese characters and handed the slip to Tracy.
“Our prescription,” Tracy said. “Such a bureaucracy.” He walked the three steps back to the pharmacist, Tracy handed her the prescription, and 30 seconds (and 24 yuan, or about $4) later, I had my antibiotic eye drops. I put two drops in my eye. When we rode out of Beijing the next morning, my eye was good as new.
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The New Year hits tonight. The years keep rolling by and it’s time for my 2024 resolutions. I’ve made a few, and with your indulgence, I’ll share them here.
I’m going to continue to hold my tongue (and my keyboard) on all things political. I’ve never seen anyone read a social media post or a blog or listen to someone with an opposing viewpoint and suddenly exclaim, “ah, now I understand…of course you’re right, and I was wrong all along…” Nope, the era of intelligent political discourse ended in the 1960s with the Vietnam War protests. Back then, and now, everyone is convinced their opinion is the only true path. I’m never going to call anyone ever again a leftwing idiot or a rightwing idiot, partly because of this resolution and partly because I hate being redundant.
I’m going to stop getting upset with people at the gym tying up machines while screwing around on their cell phones. Nope, you can sit on a machine and text to your heart’s content. I’ll just move on to another piece of equipment. Someday, though, when you’re standing in front of the Pearly Gates, you’ll have to answer. And I’ll be there. Just in case there are any questions.
I’m going to lose weight. The answer is to use that calorie tracker on my cell phone and exercise. Really. This time I mean it. I want to be skinny like Gresh.
I’m going to cook more, but in line with the resolution above I’ll eat less. I do a great barbequed salmon, a marvelous Italian meat sauce, delicious stuffed shells, a wonderful chili, incredible stuffed peppers, a great wild pork sausage and mushrooms casserole, tasty chicken tostadas, and a few others. I want to try making my own chile rellenos this year and find at least three more dishes to add to my repertoire.
I’m going to sell a few guns. I own too many to enjoy and more than a few that I don’t shoot. It’s time to convert these investments into cash and let others have some fun.
I’m going to ride my motorcycle and my bicycle more. I’ve slowed down on my riding quite a bit in the last three years. Part of it is the pandemic…law enforcement on our public roads has dropped to nearly nothing, and there are too many people driving like maniacs out there…speeding, weaving in and out of traffic, and screwing around on their cell phones. I’ve been hit by cars twice in my life while on two wheels (once on a motorcycle and once on a bicycle), and I don’t care to add a third bone-breaking event to my resume. But I haven’t been riding enough and I want to get out and ride. Get my knees in the breeze. You know the feeling.
It’s time to put more pork on the table. I’m going to do at least two hunts in 2024. One will be a varmint hunt for coyotes in Arizona with Baja John; the other will be a pig hunt with my 6.5 Creedmoor (location to be determined). If you’re a vegetarian or fundamentally opposed to hunting, you have my permission to skip any blogs I write about these events.
I’m not going to buy any more watches. I came across Segal’s Law last year, which holds that a man with a watch knows what time it is, but a man with many watches is never sure. I’m the guy who’s never sure, raised to an exponent.
I’m going to do Baja again, most likely in March so I can see the whales, eat a chile relleno in San Ignacio, and visit Javier at the La Casitas in Mulegé. I think Gresh wants to go, too. Maybe we’ll get our other ExNotes writers in on the action. You’ll read all about it here on ExNotes.
I’m retiring, for real this time. I’ll still write for the ExNotes blog and Motorcycle Classics magazine (I enjoy writing for both and I never viewed either as work), but I’m done with everything else. It’s time.
There you go…my 2024 resolutions. How about yours?
I mentioned Thai motorcycle taxis in an earlier blog, and on the way back from Wat Arun today, Sue and I grabbed a few photos just outside our hotel of young ladies riding moto taxis sidesaddle to points unknown (points unknown to me; they knew where they were going). It’s an interesting take on Thai life in the big city. I’d seen this moto taxi business in China 30 years ago, but not anymore. In China today, you just don’t see motorcycles in the big cities. And you sure don’t see anything like this in America.
The photography challenges were interesting. I couldn’t get close to the bikes (it was a wide and busy avenue in downtown Bangkok), the bikes were moving, and the lens didn’t have a lot of reach (it was the 18-55mm Nikon kit lens, an inexpensive lens not nearly as sharp as Nikon’s pricier offerings). I cranked the D3300 camera’s ISO up to 800 (even though I was shooting during the day) to get the shutter speed up (to freeze the action), and then I relied on Photoshop to do the rest (the rest being cropping, adjusting the levels and the curves, adjusting for shadows, adjusting vibrance and saturation, and finally after sizing the photo to the sizes you see here, adding a touch of sharpness. I think they came out well. Consider this photo from the above collection:
Here’s the original photo it came from before all the above adjustments:
If I had a bigger lens (say, a 300mm), I would have had a larger and sharper original photo, but as Donald Rumsfeld liked to say, you go to war with the Army you have. I had my 18-55mm lens with me. And I have Photoshop on my laptop.
I shot all of the photos above and a bunch more in the space of maybe five minutes (Bangkok’s Asok Street is a very busy street), and then I spent maybe another hour selecting the ones I wanted to use in this blog and Photoshopping them. You can have a lot of fun with a camera in Bangkok.
Regarding the safety implications of what you see above, what can I say? The riders had helmets. The passengers? Not so much. We weren’t not in Kansas anymore, Toto.
The photography challenges were interesting. I couldn’t get close to the bikes (it was a wide and busy avenue in downtown Bangkok), the bikes were moving, and the lens didn’t have a lot of reach (it was the 18-55mm Nikon kit lens, an inexpensive lens not nearly as sharp as Nikon’s pricier offerings). I cranked the D3300 camera’s ISO up to 800 (even though I was shooting during the day) to get the shutter speed up (to freeze the action), and then I relied on Photoshop to do the rest (the rest being cropping, adjusting the levels and the curves, adjusting for shadows, adjusting vibrance and saturation, and finally after sizing the photo to the sizes you see here, adding a touch of sharpness. I think they came out well. Consider this photo from the above collection: