The Jagrolet

Last century I worked on a boat called the Attessa. The Attessa has worn many names since and was a steel Kong & Halvorsen dry docked at a National City, California shipyard for a fairly thorough refit. I think it was over 150 feet long by the time we added a stern section. For some reason we didn’t move the rudders aft at the same time, which was kind of weird. I always wonder if it steered well or crab-walked when you turned the helm? We also re-flared the bow to give the front of the boat a less navy, more-yachty look. A complete remodel of the interior was also done. That’s where I came in. I was one of three electricians on the job.

The other two electricians were from Montana and were sent from the yacht owner’s personal supply. The Montana boys were house electricians and had never done boat wiring so I was there to help them with the oddities of marine construction. All three of us got along well. One day I accidentally caught our lead electrician snorting coke down below in the new aft section. “I guess you shouldn’t have seen this,” he said. I didn’t care, there was so much work to do we needed everyone we could get. Besides, the painters were all speeded up.  Why not Sparkies?

You may remember the Attessa as the boat featured in Goldie Hawn’s movie Overboard. The owner of the boat was an ultrarich Montana guy named Washington. The project was pretty massive. The boat even had two captains at one time. Something about overlapping contracts. I spent months just doing interior lighting. For some reason one captain of the boat hated me and would go around sabotaging my work. He bitched constantly even though I was getting more done than the other two guys put together. The other captain was fine and we worked well together.

One day Bad Captain cut out a low-voltage lighting transformer because he didn’t like where it was. I just followed the plans, man. The wires were cut at the worst location making them unusable, meaning I had to run new wires or splice them. Splicing is never good on a boat. I was pissed off. “What the F is wrong with you?” I asked the captain. “You just destroyed 8 hours of work! It was done! It was tested! Now I have to run new wires and re-do the transformer. Like we don’t have enough shit going on!”

I went to the main contractor on the project, Neil, and told him about Bad Captain’s constant needling and tampering. It caused a real hubbub. Neil was already under the gun for cost overruns and hearing about the sabotage made him mad as hell. We had a team meeting where Bad Captain was told to leave me the F alone and that if he had any problems with my work to go see Neil. We maintained a frosty relationship after that but Bad Captain let me work undisturbed.

The engineer aboard the Attessa also hated Bad Captain so naturally we hit it off in grand fashion. He was the cool kid aboard the boat. He was a lovable cad and everyone liked him, which should have tipped me off. He had a Jaguar sedan with the straight 6 and wanted to repower the car with a small block Chevy. I had a sweet, 400 cubic-inch small block Chevy trapped inside a giant green station wagon.

It was a pain in the ass to work in National City. You had to park far away and check in or out. It was like working at a factory. The shipyard had a huge floating dry-dock and did a lot of contract work for the Navy. The metal grinding was constant, every day you’d have to blow the iron dust off the decks or the next morning you’d have rust stains bleeding all over. When the new bow and stern were finished we launched the Attessa and took her to Shelter Island for completion. I was much happier on Shelter Island.

I sold the 400-inch Chevy Wagon to Attessa’s engineer for 400 dollars. He didn’t have the money right then but we were good friends, you know? He pulled the engine and transmission from the Chevy and installed it into the Jag. I guess there is a kit that makes this swap particularly easy. The Attessa re-fit job was starting to go sour. The budget was blown to hell and the owner was getting tired of shelling out so much money. In the afternoon Neil would come aboard and ask each of us what we did that day. I’d show him what I was working on and he’d tell me to speed it up as he was getting heat from the owner. Our lead electrician was fired for drug use. People were quitting. Good Captain was gone. The engineer left.

I started getting parking tickets for the Chevy Wagon. The car was abandoned without plates in downtown San Diego racking up charges. They cops traced the car to me by the VIN number. I guess the engineer never changed the title to his name and just shoved the scavenged car into the nearest parking spot. At the same time Neil was bugging me to get the old 6-cylinder Jaguar engine out of his shop. My engineer buddy had given it to me as partial payment for the small block. I had no use for the Jag engine but that didn’t deter his generosity.

The Chevy was towed followed by more bills and notices. I had a hell of a time convincing the department of motor vehicles that I didn’t own the Chevy. The tow company kept the car. Nobody knew where my engineer buddy had gone. I had nowhere to store the Jag engine and no one wanted to buy it. This was pre-internet days and advertising the engine for sale would cost more than it was worth. I called around but even Jaguar repair shops wouldn’t give me 25 dollars for the engine. I told Neil to toss the double overhead cam, inline 6 engine in his dumpster.

Everybody on the Attessa was starting to get on each other’s nerves. It wasn’t a happy workplace since the crew stopped using drugs. There was constant bitching about how long the job was taking. On lunch break one of the welders told me, “I don’t know why they’re bitching at you, you’re the only one doing anything on this boat.” Morale was falling apart. After 5 months of hustle and push the Attessa needed a fresh team. We were burned out. I got a better offer from another boat builder (twice as much per hour!) so I told Neil I was quitting.

Neil took it well, we are still friends today, and had me use my full two-week notice to get the remaining Montana electrician up to speed as best I could. We kicked ass and when I left the lower decks were all done and we were working in the pilothouse so the electrical part was nearly finished. Starting the next boat project felt like I was in a prison early release program. The new boat build was full of happy workers. Some of the welders and painters from the Attessa got there ahead of me. It was like a family reunion except you were being paid to attend. I never got a penny for the Chevy small-block and I never heard from the engineer again. Which is just as well or I probably would have given the lovable cad another damn car.

More Joe Gresh is right here!

Chiriaco Summit and the General Patton Memorial Museum

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.

More great Destinations are right here!

LA Sheriff’s 1938 Pistol Team Video

Here’s one that’s pretty cool…a 1938 video from the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department.  There are a few things in there that are a little scary, but I’ll let the video show all that.  Enjoy, my friends…and kids, don’t try the chalk or cigar stunts at home (or anywhere else).

More gun stuff?  Check out our Tales of the Gun page!

Road Test: 1975 Kawasaki Z1 900

The Kawasaki 900 is a legend amongst savvy motorcyclists around the world. Back in the day the limited-to-paper Moto Press lavished high praise on Kawasaki’s top of the line motorcycle. They even called it the King of Motorcycles. And the praise was well deserved. On any greatest-list the Z1 pops up as one of the best motorcycles ever built. But what’s it like to ride today? How does it compare to modern bikes with their liquid cooling, fuel injection and zillions of horsepower?

As it turns out, not too bad. The first thing you’ll notice is the power. Or lack of power compared to a modern Ricky-Racer type of motorcycle. The Z-1 is fast but in a leisurely way. The revolutions build slowly through the gears allowing a rider time to enjoy the acceleration process. There are only 5 cogs in the smooth shifting transmission but you get to enjoy each one of them for a few seconds before going on to the next. With less than half the horsepower of a modern 1000cc motorcycle the Kawasaki Z1 has a human-scaled power delivery. You don’t need the vision or reflexes of Valentino Rossi to wring the neck of this willing old battlewagon.

There are plenty of options available to increase the Z1’s horsepower to near-modern levels but I don’t feel like the bike needs more power. The Z1 is plenty fast enough to keep up with today’s traffic situations and unless you plan on improving the brake system you really don’t want this old Kawasaki going any faster.

The brakes are where you feel the weight of all those years that have scrolled past since 1975. The brakes are not good. The single disc, single piston front brake is the culprit. It takes a healthy squeeze to lock the front wheel and the brake lacks the precise feel of a modern multi-piston caliper. The rear drum brake is better at its job than the front brake but that’s only because rear brakes have much less influence on stopping. Antilock brake systems for motorcycles were unheard of when the Kawasaki 900 was made and you won’t miss it. I say all this for informational purposes only. It’s not like you can’t enjoy the 900 on a ride or you’re fearing stop signs. In regular use the brakes are borderline but acceptable.

A big surprise is how well the Z1 handles. When the Kawasaki first came out most moto-magazine reviewers praised the handling or at worst didn’t complain about it. Since then the un-illuminati have managed to change the narrative. Today the general consensus is that the Z1 is a widow maker, a bike with a hinge in the middle. Unsafe at any speed. I call BS.

The Z1 has a wonderful, lightweight feel through corners. The wide handlebars help with the easy steering. Large diameter wheels may also contribute to the stable, enjoyable ride. Leaned over the Z feels planted and neutral as long as you don’t hit any mid-corner bumps. On straightaways at speed the bike does not wobble. My Z1 has 45-year-old shock absorbers and so an upgrade might help but I’m not going that fast anyway.

This whole, canyon carving, race bike for the street thing has gotten annoying and probably explains the popularity of adventure motorcycles. Riders who blitz around on public roads feel like they’re really hauling ass but that’s because they are the only ones racing. Everyone else is just out for a ride. I get it: it’s hard to keep a 170-horsepower motorcycle under the speed limit or anywhere near it.

Marc Cook, an editor I worked for, once told me the 200 horsepower 1000cc BMW sport bike would be unrideable without all the electronic nannies. Modern bikes have gotten much better than modern riders. That’s where the human-scale power of the Z1 shines. You can whack it open without activating any rider aids because there are none because the bike doesn’t need them. Traction control for the Z is in the right twistgrip.

The Z1 is a mostly comfortable bike to spend the day on. Those high, wide bars that make steering so easy work against you at high speeds. If it didn’t mean replacing the cables and hoses I’d lower the bars a couple of inches but leave them wide. The big, long, cushy seat on the Z1 is a marvel of comfort. I slide way back for fast highway touring and scooch up tight to the gas tank in the twisty stuff. The mid-bike foot peg location is a good compromise and suits the Z1’s multipurpose nature.

Since the Z1 engine is a non-counterbalanced, inline 4-cylinder bolted solidly to the frame some vibration is transmitted to the rider. Personally, I love the way it moves but everyone has their own level of vibration tolerance and the quality of the vibrations changes with different engine layouts. The Z1 is smooth up to 4000 rpm. Above 4000 the vibration takes on different shapes and affects different areas of the motorcycle. None of this is very strong or detracts from the ride. There’s a sweet spot around 4700 to 6000 RPM where the Z1 feels as smooth as it needs to be. I wouldn’t call the Kawasaki a buzzer but if you were to jump onto the Z1 from your modern bike you may think the old Kawasaki is kind of raw. I think of that rawness as being alive with possibilities.

Fuel economy on the Z1 is so-so. I average between 38 and 40 miles per gallon but live at high-ish altitude and it’s been very hot. Heat and altitude kill mileage. I will check again in cooler weather when I expect a slight improvement. Fueling, the way the bike responds to throttle input, is slushier than an injected motorcycle. There are no abrupt engine responses. Things happen slightly slower right off idle but that may be my carburation setup. At a steady cruising speed the slushiness means you don’t need to keep strict control over the throttle. This bike is not nervous or skittery.

You’d think parts would be hard to come by for such an old motorcycle, but no. There’s a thriving Kawasaki Z1 restoration movement afoot. It’s mostly driven by demand, as the Z1 is commanding a premium price in the vintage motorcycle market. The Z1 is right at home in the middle-aged, empty-nester-loaded-with-cash, nostalgia-boomer’s wheelhouse. That demographic has and generates the most dollars. It’s actually easier to get parts for a 1975 Z1 than many more recent models and the prices aren’t unreasonable. With an abundant supply of repair parts easily obtainable the Z1 scores high for livability.

Compared to a modern 1000cc motorcycle the Kawasaki Z1 is slower, takes longer to stop and is worse in tangible ways. On a racetrack, that is. In ways intangible the Kawasaki Z1 is the better street motorcycle for simply enjoying a motorcycle ride. It’s easy to fix, reliable as any new bike (maybe more reliable) and a joy to possess.

I never feel like the Z1 is tolerating my incompetence. Instead we work together, both of us not in our prime, and we get places, you know? Riding Kawasaki’s Z1 feels like springtime and affirmation and young, anxious wonder. The bike is a time machine that radiates happiness. And when we get to the place we were going milky-eyed old men walk up and tell me how wonderful my motorcycle is and how much they loved the one they owned back when they were strong. That kind of reverence and emotion is not going to happen with just any motorcycle. The Kawasaki Z1 900 is much more than a collection of parts assembled in a factory. It’s industrial art that inspired an entire generation of motorcyclists. Long live the King!

Check out Gresh’s Kawasaki Z1 resurrection here!

Watch this…

My name is Joe and I’m a watchaholic.

It started for me when I was a kid and my parents bought me a Timex, and it’s never subsided.   I can’t walk by a watch store or jewelry counter without stopping.  Watch technology has jumped through several advances in my lifetime, and I’ve enjoyed them all.  I like digital and I like analog watches, and I like that different watches work best for different applications (it gives me an excuse for buying one that, you know, I might need).  I like the idea that I can order a watch from overseas that’s not marketed here in the US, and I like a lot of the watches that are marketed here.  I travel overseas on a fairly regular basis, so I’m a sucker for a good-looking GMT watch (they’re the ones that allow you to see the time in two or three different places in the world simultaneously).  I’ll do another blog about the GMTs at a later date.   The focus of today’s blog is ride-specific watches.  I tend to think of watches by major motorcycle adventures, and there are three I want to mention today.

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The first one I’ll mention is the green-faced, military-styled Seiko I wore on the Western America Adventure Ride.  It’s a quartz watch and it’s not a model that was imported by Seiko’s US distributor (which doesn’t mean much these days; I ordered it new from a Hong Kong-based Ebay store and it was here in two days).  But I like the fact that I’ve never seen anybody else wearing this model.

I bought the Seiko on an Ebay auction about 15 years ago, and I think I got it for something like $52 brand new.  I like the style, I like its relative light weight, and I like the size (it’s the right size, not ridiculously-large like many watches today).  The Seiko is impervious to wet weather and it has served me well.   Just for grins, I tried to find it again on the Internet, and I only found one that was used in an Ebay auction, and it had already been bid up to over double what I paid for mine new.  You might be wondering about the compass directions on the Seiko’s bezel.  There’s a method of using those, the watch hands, and the sun to identify which way is north.  I don’t need that feature, I don’t use it, and I’d have to read the directions to learn it again, but it’s cool to know it’s there.  It’s kind of an Indiana Jones thing, I guess.

Next up is the safety-fluorescent-green Timex Ironman I wore on the ride across China.  I’d seen one at a Target department store and for reasons it would probably take a behavioral psychologist to explain, I decided it was one I had to have on the China ride. Gresh arrived in California a few days before we left for the China adventure, and we spent a good chunk of our pre-departure time running around to several different stores trying to find that watch.  Maybe I thought it would match my riding jacket.  Maybe I thought it would be good because you can light up the face at night (a feature that is very useful for finding your way to the latrine at night).  Like I said…who knows?  The Timex did a good job for me.   It was bitter cold up on the Tibetan Plateau, hot in the Gobi Desert, hot and humid everywhere else, and it rained so hard at times I swore I saw a guy leading animals two-by-two into a Chinese ark.  My Ironman is still going strong on the original battery.  Those Ironman watch batteries seem to last forever.

The last one is a Casio Marlin diver’s watch.  It has to be one of the best watch deals ever.  I’m  not a diver, and there are really no features (beyond telling time, luminescent hands, a rotating bezel, and a waterproof case) that I need, but I just like the thing.   You can get a brand new Casio Marlin for a scosh under $50, and folks, that’s a smoking good deal.

It rained like hell half the time we rode in Colombia, and the Casio never let me down.  I vividly remember waiting for the ferry to arrive in Magangué for our cruise down the Magdelana River to Mompos when a Colombian boy came over to see what we were all about.  He fixated on my Casio as we waited in sweltering heat under the shade of a very small tree.  He finally touched the watch and simply said “good.”   You know, I needed that watch on the trip (it was the only one I had with me), but if I had a spare, I would have given it to him.  I still wear the Casio regularly.  It’s just a good, basic, comfortable, and easy to read watch.  It’s a favorite.

Watches, saws, generators, and more…it’s all on our ExhaustNotes Reviews page!

Tequila!

Jose Cuervo is no friend of mine.   Not after I’ve seen how (and where) the good stuff is made.

This, my friends, is the story of how tequila is manufactured.  It occurs in one place and one place only:  Tequila, Mexico.   And it all begins with the blue agave plant.  That’s what you see in the big photo above.

Yes, Tequila actually is a place.  It’s about 50 miles northwest of Guadalajara, Mexico.

The origins of this story, for me, go back to the early 1990s, when Baja John and I rode our motorcycles the length of Baja and then took the ferry across the Sea of Cortez to mainland Mexico. John and I stayed in beautiful Guadalajara for a few days on that awesome trip and I fell in love with the place.  I was determined to get back there someday, and that someday occurred sooner rather than later.  Just prior to a 4-day Memorial Day weekend in 2003, I bought three AeroMexico tickets, and Susie, our daughter Erica, and I explored Guadalajara and the interesting places around it. One of those places was Tequila, with good buddy Carlos as our guide.  You’ll see Carlos a photo or two down.

Making tequila starts in the fields with the blue agave harvest.  The blue agave is a majestic plant that grows in the red earth of the region, where the soil, water, sunlight, and everything else the tequilameisters worry about is Goldilocks perfect.

The blue agave takes about 8 years to reach maturity, and each one produces about 8 bottles of tequila.  As you might imagine, security around these fields is tight.

The guys that harvest the agave plant are the Airborne Rangers of the operation.  They chop away the pineapple leaves (the pineapple is the plant’s heart), and they do so with a tool that made me nervous just looking at it.  It’s a deal that has a plate-sized blade on the end of a long handle.   The operators keep the plates razor sharp (they carry stones and sharpen the blades constantly).  The scary part is they hold the pineapple down with one foot and whack at it with that tool, missing their toes by millimeters.  The plants are tough, the guys work quickly, and when I asked our guide Carlos about it (that’s Carlos in the photo above), he told me accidents are not unheard of out in these fields.  Think about that the next time you sip a good tequila.

Here’s the agave field after it has been harvested.

The pineapples weigh between 80 and 120 pounds, so the guys doing this get a workout all day long.  I imagine the truck you see below was resting on its axles after it had been fully loaded.  I’ll bet those guys sleep well at night.

The pineapples are then transported to the factory to be turned into tequila.  The process goes like this:  Bake, squeeze, ferment, distill (a little or a lot), age (a little or a lot), bottle, label, and drink (a little or a lot).

But I’m getting ahead of myself.  Let’s throttle back a bit to see what it all looks like.

Caldera is Spanish for boiler, and the heat and steam produced by the boilers is needed for the slow agave pineapple bake.   Hang in there; this is about to get very interesting.

The tequila pineapples are delivered to the hornos in the factory.  Horno is Spanish for oven. It’s where all that heat and steam from the calderas gets put to good use.

The hornos are room-sized brick ovens that are stacked full of the harvested agave pineapples.  Think of them as immense crock pots.

After an all-day bake, the pineapples are soft and mushy.  Carlos peeled off a piece for us and we tasted it.  The plant had a sweet and faint tequila flavor, but it contained no alcohol yet. It would make for a good candy, but the plants are too valuable for that.  There’s more money in turning them into tequila.

The baked blue agave hearts then go through crushers, which separate the juice from the pulp.

The juice goes on to giant vats (we’ll see those in a second) and the pulp is sold separately as an agricultural byproduct.  Farms use it for feed (lucky cows, I guess) or compost.

The vats shown below are where the agave juice ferments for 2 to 5 days.  That’s where it develops its initial alcohol content.   Carlos explained that it is basically a tequila-based beer at this point.  When the Spaniards arrived in the New World, they found the native Mexicans making and drinking this.  The Spaniard’s contribution to the development of tequila was the distillation process, and that’s what takes this gift of the gods from agave beer to tequila.

I noticed that some of the vats were bubbling, and I asked Carlos if there were air injectors or heaters in the vats.  Nope, that bubbling occurs naturally as a consequence of the fermentation process.

The factory helps the process by planting fruit trees that attract a certain kind of insect around the fermentation building.  The bugs are drawn to the scent of the fermenting tequila juice.  They fly into the vats and drown, and their decomposition accelerates the fermentation. It’s a good thing I developed a taste for tequila before I knew that.

The photo below shows the distillation line.

Distillation is followed by aging in oak barrels, and how that’s done is a big part of what makes for different grades of tequila.

The pecking order for different tequila grades goes something like this:

    • Cheap tequila is produced from the juice of the agave plant mixed with other juices.  You can get a pretty nasty hangover from this kind of tequila (like I said at the beginning of the this blog, Jose Cuervo is no friend of mine).
    • The next big step up is tequila made of 100% blue agave juice.  If it’s that kind of tequila, there will be a notation somewhere on the label that says 100% agave. If it doesn’t have that, it’s the cheap stuff, not matter what some smooth-talking liquor store dude tries to tell you.  100% blue agave tequila is less likely to give you a hangover, too.
    • Higher grade tequilas are aged in oak barrels, and the amount of time they are aged makes for a better grade of tequila. Longer is better.
    • Really good tequila is distilled multiple times and aged.
    • Really, really good tequila is aged for 2 years in French oak barrels. This kind of tequila has a dark brown appearance, and when you turn it in the light, it looks like it contains little flecks of gold (it doesn’t actually have flecks of anything in it, but it looks like little pieces of gold). This tequila can go for hundreds of dollars a bottle.

After distillation (and after aging, if you’re going for the good stuff), the next step is bottling.   Then the bottles are labeled, and then they’re packaged.

Our tour was at the La Cofradia distillery in Tequila, about an hour northwest of downtown Guadalajara. Surprisingly, the La Cofradia distillery had a tasting room (just like you’d see at a vineyard), and we sampled different tequilas after the tour.  The bottle that our guide, Carlos, is holding in the photo below is the good stuff with the dark brown color and gold flecks. I tried a sip, and it was very, very smooth indeed.  I was tempted, but I wasn’t going to drop $400 (in 2003, or for that matter, at any other time) on a bottle of tequila.

Just for giggles, I Googled “expensive tequilas” and I found that you can pretty much go crazy spending money on tequila, including one that sells for $6700.  I’m not into it like that.  I’ve found that the best place to buy reasonably-priced 100% blue agave tequila is Costco.

I am glad we visited Guadalajara and Tequila when we did.  With the pandemic and the drug cartel situation down there, I don’t know if I would do it again today.  I looked up Guadalajara safety and it’s rated as a medium risk city.  By today’s standards, that’s probably accurate.  Truth be told, I’d much rather visit Guadalajara than, say, Portland, Chicago, or Seattle these days.  The pandemic will pass; the drug situation in Mexico will take longer.  I hope the Mexican government gets on top of it soon.  I’d like to explore mainland Mexico again.

If you’re planning a ride into Mexico, make sure you insure with the best and our favorite:  BajaBound!

Want to know more about riding in Baja?  Just click here.

If you enjoyed reading about how tequila is produced, you might enjoy our story on Jack Daniel’s, too.

It’s not a BSA!

I saw this YouTube video a few days ago on the Royal Enfield 650 Interceptor, and I’ve been meaning to post it here on the ExNotes blog.  I think YouTube motorcycle reviews are generally a time suck, but I enjoyed this one.  The dude who made it (MotoSlug, a guy I never heard of before) nailed it, I think, with his description of the Enfield, its capabilities, and the riding experience.  It’s no BSA, Senator, but it’s still a fun ride. Actually, it’s way better than any BSA I ever rode.

I’m inspired. It’s late afternoon here in So Cal, which is to say it’s hot.  When things cool off in a couple of hours, I’m going to fire up my Enfield (that’s it in the photo above) and go for a ride.

Read our story about riding Enfields in Baja here.

Product Review: Chase Harper 650 Tank Bag

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.

Land O’ Goshen: A Janus ride!

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.

12 Tips for Hot Weather Riding

I visited Chiriaco Summit and the Patton Museum last week (we’ll have a blog on it soon) and it was awesome.  But wow, was it ever hot.  As in 111 degrees when we left, and that’s not an unusually warm day out there in the Sonoran Desert.  The next town over is called Thermal, and a little further north there’s this place called Death Valley.  Death Valley recorded a whopping 131 degrees three weeks ago.  Sensing a pattern?

Looks like the Mojave, doesn’t it? Nope. That’s Joe Gresh in the Gobi Desert. Gresh and I rode across it after coming down off the Tibetan Plateau. It was a bit warm out there.

Yeah, it gets warm in these parts, and in other parts of the world as well.  Hot weather is not ideal riding weather, to say the least, but sometimes we find ourselves riding in shake and bake conditions. I’ve done it. I rode a 150cc scooter all the way down to Cabo and back in Baja’s hottest month of the year (September, when it was well over a hundred degrees every day).  It was humid down there, too, once we crossed over to the Sea of Cortez side of the peninsula.  We were literally entering the tropics as we crossed the Tropic of Cancer.  Whoa, that was rough riding!

Simon Gandolfi, suspenders flying in the breeze, riding my Mustang replica bike south of the Tropic of Cancer in Baja California Sur. It was one of the hottest rides I ever experienced.

When we did the Western America Adventure Ride with CSC and the guys from Zongshen, we rode through the same corridors described earlier above, riding across California and the Mojave Desert, through Joshua Tree, and on into Arizona with temps approaching 110 degrees.  That was brutal riding.

King Kong and Mr. Zuo in Joshua Tree National Park. That was another brutally hot day.  Higher higher temps were still in front of us when we later rolled through Amboy, California. This picture became the cover photo for 5000 Miles At 8000 RPM.  You should buy a copy or three (they make great gifts).

The ride across China that Joe Gresh and I did had similar challenges.  It started out hot, then it got cold as we rode into the Tibetan Plateau, and then it became brutally hot and humid as we descended into central China and rode east to Qingdao.  That was a 38-day ride, and I’d guess it was well over 100 degrees for at least 30 of those 38 days.

The risk, of course, is heat stroke, and it’s often not the kind of thing you can feel coming on.   You’ll think you’re okay one minute, and the next you’re waking up in an emergency room wondering what happened.  If you start to feel a headache while riding in hot weather, you are already perilously close to heat stroke.  You need to stop, drink copious amounts of water, and get some shade.   The better approach, though, is to not let yourself get anywhere near that condition, and that’s what this article is all about.

It almost seems like heresy to say it, but my first bit of advice about riding in hot weather is:  Don’t.  Given the choice, postpone the ride.  But let’s assume that this is not an option, as was the case for each of the rides mentioned above.  Okay, then…here’s my guidance on the topic.

12 Hot Weather Riding Tips

One: Don’t ride naked.  I’m not trying to be funny here, and I’m not implying you might be the kind of person who would go down the road wearing nothing at all (although there is that story about Gresh riding around with only a bathrobe).  Nope, what I’m talking about is not shucking your safety gear.  You have to wear it.  All of it.  ATGATT.  All the gear, all the time.  You can’t peel it off just because it’s hot.  It’s saved my life.

My Viking Cycles mesh jacket and the mighty Enfield.

Two: Wear a good mesh jacket.   These are available from several sources.  I have a Viking Cycles jacket I’m wearing these days and it works well.  I wore a Joe Rocket mesh jacket on the ride across China and it made a big difference.  You can get them from Viking Cycles, CSC Motorcycles, British Motorcycle Gear, and other sources.  Trust me on this…you need a ventilated jacket for riding in hot weather.  EDIT:  We’re getting interesting comments advising not wearing a mesh jacket in hot weather.  Make sure you read the comments below, and for those of you who responded, thanks very much!

Three: Use a cooling vest.  These things actually work, but they’re not as easy to use as it sounds.  They don’t work for long, but they work.  The idea is you soak them, and then wear them under a jacket.  The airflow causes the water in the vest to evaporate and that cools the vest and you.  I’ve found that on really hot days these vests need to be remoistened about every thirty minutes, but you should be stopping that often anyway (more on that later).  It’s the remoistening part that I don’t like.  It seems like they take forever to soak up water when you remoisten them.  I’ve found it easer to just get my clothes wet (see the next point below).

Four: Go soak your head (and everything else).  Don’t laugh; I’ve done this.  On the Baja ride I mentioned above, it was so unbearably hot that we took to pouring water down the inside of our riding jackets and inside our helmets at every stop.  We became rolling evaporative coolers.  It helped.

Five: Change your riding hours.  On the really hot days, I like to hit the road at 0:Dark:30.  Get out and get a hundred or so miles in before it gets unbearably hot.  You’d need good lighting on your bike to do this (I generally don’t like to ride at night, but I’ll make an exception when I know it’s going to be hot).   This is difficult to do when riding in a group because it’s hard to get everybody moving that early.  If it was just me and Gresh or Welker, we’d leave way early and get in a couple of hours of riding (or more) before the sun comes up.

We knew it was going to be brutally hot riding through Joshua Tree and the Mojave Desert, so we left just before sunup on the first day of the Western America Adventure Ride.

Six: Drink a lot of water.  The problem with riding in high temperatures is you don’t realize how much water you lose through perspiration.  My advice is to stop every 30 minutes and drink a bottled water.  Like I said above, most of us ain’t spring chickens, and you might be wondering if this means you’re going to be stopping a lot to pee.  Hey, it’s a common old guy problem, but it won’t be in hot weather.  Drink a lot of water; you’ll lose it through perspiration as you ride.

Seven: Avoid alcoholic beverages.  Alcohol will cause you to dehydrate more rapidly, and that’s the opposite of what we’re trying to do here.  You shouldn’t be consuming alcohol on a motorcycle ride anyway.  Drinking any kind of alcohol while riding in hot weather is just stupid.  Where I found you really have to watch this is when riding in a large group (there will be one or two riders who have to have that beer or two at lunch).

Beer is good, especially when it’s a Tecate at the Old Mill in Baja overlooking Bahia San Quintin. But save it for the end of the day, when the bikes are parked for the night.

Eight: Stop regularly to cool off.  Find a bit of shade or someplace air conditioned, and get off the bike to cool down.   When I ride in hot weather, I usually stop to cool off and rehydrate every 30 minutes or so.

Stopping to cool off at the Tropic of Cancer. Wow, it was hot and humid down there!  We were off standing in the shade, drinking bottled water.

Nine: Keep your tires at recommended pressures.  Another thing you definitely don’t want on a hot day is underinflated tires.  Tires flex with every rotation, and flexing causes the tires to heat.  Throw in high road surface temperatures with underinflated tires, and you’re flirting with a blowout.  This is especially important to remember if you’re one of those guys or gals who deflate their tires for dirt riding.  Don’t forget to pump them back up when you get back on the asphalt.

Ten: Don’t speed.  Tar melts on hot days, and melted tar is slick.  Factor that into your riding when it gets toasty.

A meal fit for a king, but not for lunch. You wouldn’t want to ride in hot weather immediately after this Baja seafood extravaganza.

Eleven: Eat light.  Don’t over indulge.  Heavy meals put a strain on your digestive system and your heart, and that can elevate your body temperature.  When I was involved in testing munitions out in the Mojave on hot days (where it was sometimes over 120 degrees), we always brought along melons for lunch and nothing else.  We didn’t need to keep them cool.  They were a great treat, they seemed to make it a little cooler on those horrifically hot days, and they help to keep you hydrated.  Good buddy Sergeant Zuo seemed to know all about that in China, too.  We were riding through Ledu in central China one ferociously hot day when our favorite Chinese NCO stopped the group, disappeared, and returned with a couple of watermelons.  That was a welcome respite and a marvelous treat.  We ate a lot of watermelon in China.

Gresh taking a break in Ledu, China. That’s the Yellow River (China’s Mother River) behind Uncle Joe.

Twelve:  Lighten up on the low sodium schtick.  A lot of us older guys try to watch our sodium intake.  When I was in the Army, they actually gave us salt tabs on really hot days when we were in the field, the theory being that we needed the sodium because we were losing so much through perspiration.  I later heard the Army reversed that practice, but the fact is you lose a lot of minerals through perspiration.  I don’t worry about my sodium intake when riding on hot days.

So there you have it.   You know, most folks who ride motorcycles these days…well, how can I say this delicately?  We aren’t spring chickens anymore.  Motorcycling tends to be a thing mostly enjoyed by full-figured senior citizens, and we have to take care of ourselves, especially when we venture out on hot days.

If you other ideas about hot weather riding, let us know in the Comments section.  We love hearing from you.