Motorcycle Classics Magazine – Page 2

Pre-ride jitters…

Yours truly on an earlier ride to San Felipe. I’m buggy about riding in Baja!

By the time most of you read this, I’ll be on the road on a Janus Gryffin with Devin and Jordan headed toward San Felipe. It’s something I’m really looking forward to…a road trip on an exotic 250cc motorcycle in Baja. That’s a formula for a good time, any time.

I’m always a little apprehensive before a big ride and I probably will not have slept well the night before you read this. But I’m relaxed in the knowledge that as soon as the wheels start turning I’ll be completely at ease. I know I’m going to have an awesome time. And I know the memories will last a lifetime. It’s always that way. If you ride big rides, you have had these same feelings before, during, and after any adventure.

Yesterday afternoon was packing time. I always travel light. It actually takes more time to pack light than it does when you can just bring whatever you want. I’ve get a set of Wolfman soft bags I’ll pull off one of my other motorcycles, and I’ve got a Nelson Rigg tailpack I’ll use for carrying my laptop and my camera. I’m thinking I won’t need the Wolfman bags, as I want to get everything into the tailpack. A change or two of underwear, an extra pair of socks, my meds (all us old guys need our meds), my riding gear, and I’m good to go.

There are all kinds of riders in the world. I’m the kind that lives for big miles on rides that cross borders. I guess folks call that adventure riding, but I’ve been doing it before it had the label. Back in the day, we simply called these things motorcycle trips. My first one ever, when I was a college kid, was from New Jersey to Canada. You know what they say about Canada: It’s almost like going to another country. All kidding aside, that was a great ride. This one will be, too. They all are.

I love what Janus is doing, I know the CG engine is a classic stone-cold reliable motor, and I love riding in Baja. I know many of you reading this were alerted to the ExNotes blog by Janus’ Facebook posts. Thanks for joining us. If you’d like to get more info on where we are headed (and Baja in general), please take a look at our Baja page. Our ExNotes site has a lot on Baja, and that’s for good reason: It’s a great motorcycle destination. If you’d like to know more about San Felipe (our destination on the Sea of Cortez), please take a look at this “Destinations” piece I did for Motorcycle Classics magazine a few years ago. And for those of you who are loyal ExNotes blogistos y blogistas but you haven’t heard about Janus yet, please take a look at this awesome review my good buddy Richard Backus did on the bikes earlier this year in Motorcycle Classics magazine.

This is going to be a fun ride, my friends. Hang with us here on the blog, and you’ll be a virtual reality Bajaeno. One of these days, I hope our paths will cross on a Baja ride!

Don’t forget…if you’d like to get automatic updates on the ride and on future ExNotes blogs, please sign up for automatic email notifications on the widget you see here on the blog. We’ll never provide your email address to anyone else, and you’ll be eligible for a drawing for one of our moto-adventure books!

Want to read the rest of the story? Please visit our Baja page for an index to all of the Janus Baja blog posts!

A quick update…

Wow, we sure are generating a lot of interest, a lot of hits, and a lot of comments here on the ExNotes website and blog. We appreciate the comments, folks, so please keep them coming.

I need more form-generated junk emails like I need a summer cold, and I’m willing to bet you feel the same way. That said, please consider adding your email address to the list of folks we auto-notify every time we post a new blog. We try to post every day, and I know many of you probably just check in when it’s convenient. Getting on our email list, though, will add one advantage you won’t otherwise get. On a quarterly basis, provided we get at least another 200 folks sign up each quarter, we’ll give away a copy of either Moto Colombia, Riding China, or 5000 Miles at 8000 RPM to a name drawn at random from our email database. The first winner will be announced sometime around Christmas this year. Please encourage your friends to sign up, too. If you’re already on the list, you’re eligible for the first drawing. We don’t give or sell our email list to anyone, so your address is safe with us.

More news: The next Long Beach Moto Show is just around the corner. I’ll be there, and I’ll have lots of photos of Bold New Graphics from the Big 4, and interesting new models from everyone else. And yeah, I’ll get a few photos of the young ladies in the Ducati, Harley, and Indian booths, too.

Make sure you check the newsstands for the latest offering from Motorcycle Classics magazine. It’s titled Tales from the Road, and it’s a dynamite collection of great travel stories that MC, one of the greatest motorcycle magazines ever, has run in the past. Two of my stories are in there, and I know you’ll enjoy them.

We’re going to be adding a couple more index pages to the ExhaustNotes site, as we have already done for the Resurrections, Baja, Dream Bikes, YouTube, Tales of the Gun, and Books pages. We’re thinking the next index pages will be on e-bikes, and another one for the CSC RX4. Those areas are getting a lot of attention and a lot of hits on the blogs we’ve done, and the idea is to make it easy for you to find all of our blogs on a particular topic. And speaking of resurrections, Joe Gresh tells me we may not be too far from hearing Zed, the star of the Resurrections page, fire up. I’m excited about that. Joe’s work on that barn-find Kawasaki Z1 sure is interesting. And there’s more good stuff in the works…a feature on an old Ruger rifle in 7mm Remington Magnum for which I finally found the secret sauce (a load delivering less than 1-inch groups at 100 yards), and a special feature on something that weighs more and has less power than a full-dress potato-potato-potato cruiser (I know you didn’t think that was possible, but I have the photos to prove it).

It’s getting dark what with the time change being in effect, and my keepers are telling me I have to take my pills and get ready for bed. Stay tuned; there’s more good stuff coming your way.

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Another cool Janus article…

One of my favorite publications, Motorcycle Classics magazine (I write their Destinations column), recently published an article on Janus Motorcycles, one of the companies we featured just a few blogs down. Richard Backus (MC‘s Editor-In-Chief) penned this one himself. It’s an awesome motorcycle review titled Artisanal Ambitions: 2018 Janus Gryffin. You might want to take a peek; it’s a great read about a great motorcycle.

Destination: New Hope, Pennsylvania!

New Hope, Pennsylvania, from the iron bridge over the Delaware River. George Washington crossed the Delaware just a few miles from here.

Motorcycle Classics published my latest Destinations piece, this time on New Hope, Pennsylvania. New Hope is a great destination in an historic place, and it’s a ride I used to do regularly back in the early ’70s on my CB750 Honda. Good times, those were. I recently made the trek again to write the story for MC, and the ride to New Hope through New Jersey’s rolling farmlands is as good as it ever was. It’s a good read, and Motorcycle Classics is a great magazine.

I’ve been writing for Motorcycle Classics for 10 years now, and if you’d like to see the complete collection, here you go! Joe Gresh, who is a much better writer than me, has been similarly widely published in Motorcyclist and other magazines, and if you would like to visit the grotto of great Gresh literature, here it is!