Tag: Simon Gandolfi

Baja, 150cc at a time: Part VI

As you’ll recall from our last installment of the CSC Mustang Baja saga, we left Ciudad Constitucion the next morning and we continued south.   We wanted to make Cabo San Lucas that evening.  That would be the turnaround point for our journey from southern California to the tip of the Baja peninsula, and we rode the entire distance on our little single-cylinder, 150cc, hardtail Mustang replicas.

Our intent was to bypass La Paz, as it is a large city and we didn’t want to get bogged down getting through it.   The map showed a bypass road, and that’s what we intended to grab.  But, our plans meant nothing. We missed the bypass road, and we found ourselves in downtown La Paz. Like I said, it’s a big town, and the temperature was over 100 degrees again.  We were getting goofy from the heat.  It’s almost hard to describe how oppressive the heat was.  We were literally in the tropics, having descended past the Tropic of Cancer.   High heat, high humidity, the hottest month of the year in Baja, fully suited in our riding gear…it was tough sledding.   Simon had the best idea…he started shedding the heavy riding gear.

Simon, with red suspenders flying…all the gear, all the time!
John and Arlene, suited up and sweating.

Simon wrote an entry on his blog that said it all…

La Paz is a hot sweaty city on the Sea of Cortez. We are hot and sweaty (other than J. who travels in air-conditioned splendour). We miss the bypass and are lost. I ask a lady for directions. She begins describing the route. I understand individual words, even entire sentences. The whole becomes a jumble. My eyes betray a fatalistic acceptance of inadequacy.
The woman halts her instructions. Her smile is familiar. It is the generous female’s smile of understanding when faced by male incompetence. Men are men. They have their uses. However, rational thought is not the male’s strong point (expect even vaguely mature thought and you will be disappointed). Humour them. Lead them by the hand. Such is the Latin way…

In brief, she stops giving directions and says, “It will be best if you follow me…”

A very patient woman and her daughter in La Paz, who guided us out of downtown…

Once we were out of La Paz, we were on the open road again and it was much better. Even when it’s hot, you can still stay cool on a motorcycle if you are moving.  When you stop, though, it gets warm and it does so immediately.  So, we kept moving. We were approaching the Pacific Ocean on the other side of Baja, and the temperature dropped a couple of degrees.

After La Paz on the eastern side of Baja, it was about 70 miles directly across the peninsula to Todos Santos on the Pacific side.  It was a nice ride.

We stopped in Todos Santos for lunch.  I grabbed this shot of my bike and I want you to notice the BajaBound.com decal.

Taking a lunch break in Todos Santos. BajaBound!

BajaBound was one of our sponsors on the CSC 150 run, and they are one of our advertisers now.  We were very grateful to Geoff and the good folks at BajaBound for their help on this adventure.

I wish I could remember the name of the place we had lunch in when we stopped in Todos Santos. It was great.

John and J enjoying lunch in Todos Santos.
Our Todos Santos waitress, Erica.

After lunch, we were on the road again…headed to our next stop and our destination for the evening, Cabo San Lucas!

Simon taking a break just north of Cabo San Lucas. He was 77 years old when I took that photo. I really admire him.
Curva Peligrosa means “dangerous curve.” I don’t know how you say “watch out for the goats.”
Just north of Cabo. This guy pulled out right in front of us…anybody who would do this has to be a real ass…

We encountered a lot of construction during our trip, which gave the CSC Mustangs a real workout. I would guess that we probably did about 50 miles or so on dirt roads where the main highway was under repair.

We didn’t intend to do any dirt riding on this trip, but we sure rolled through a lot of dirt. One of the things that surprised me was how well the little Mustangs handled in the dirt, and in particular, in soft sand. Soft sand has always scared me on a motorcycle.   At the time, I also owned a  KLR 650 and a monstrous 955cc Triumph Tiger.  With their narrow tires, these bikes would just sink into soft sand and do their best to toss me.  The Mustangs didn’t do that. They had wide tires (almost balloon tires) and they were very light. They handled the soft stuff just fine. I’m not advocating using a CSC 150 as a dirt bike, but if you find yourself on a dirt road with soft sand, these bikes handled it with grace.

And finally, the California Scooter contingent arrived in Cabo after 1100 tortuous, hot, and beautiful miles through Baja!   This was the perspective from our guest villa.

Cabo San Lucas! That’s the Sea of Cortez on the left, and the Pacific Ocean on the right.

Yep, some of the toughest riding in the world…and we did it!  We ran the entire length of the Baja peninsula!   I will tell you that I was absolutely beat when we finally made it to Cabo.  The heat was bothering all of us, my leg was giving me a lot of grief from a prior injury, and we were all feeling the burn of a long ride.  But we made it.

More good Baja trips on all different kinds of motorcycles…check out the ExhaustNotes Baja page!

If you would like to get up to speed on the prior installments of our CSC 150 Mustang replica ride to Cabo San Lucas, you can do so at this link:  The CSC 150 Cabo Run

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Learn more about motorcycling through paradise in Moto Baja!

Baja, 150cc at a time…

This was a trip I did almost 10 years ago with a few good friends, and we were all on 150cc hardtail Mustang replicas.   California Scooters, to be precise.  Just as they were being introduced to the market.   Yep, we rode to Cabo San Lucas and back on 150s.

Anybody can ride Baja on a big bike.  We wanted to do something different.  It was all a big publicity thing.  Dog bites man, no big deal.  Man bites dog, that’s a story.   Ride to Cabo and back on a motorcycle?  No big deal.  Do it on a 150cc repop of a bike made 70 years ago?  That’s something the media would pick up, I reckoned, and I was right.

But first, let me introduce the crew…

Simon, Arlene, J, Baja John, and me. And the star of this show, the CSC 150 Mustang Replica.

I invited folks on this ride who had to meet two criteria:  They had to be able to help maximize CSC’s exposure in digital and print media, and they had to say yes.

Simon Gandolfi is a British novelist who rode a 125cc bike all the way to the southernmost tip of South America and back, and then he rode another 125cc bike across India.  He had a blog and he posted a lot on ADVRider.com.

My good friend Arlene Battishill is president and CEO of Go Go Gear, a maker of high end women’s riding apparel. Arlene had a custom California Scooter, she’s a tweeter, and she’s all over that great American institution fortuitously founded before the #MeToo movement, Facebook.

I wanted my longtime Mexico riding partner Baja John Welker to ride with us. John and I have been all over Mexico on our motorcycles.  He keeps me from doing really stupid things on our Baja trips.  To hear him tell it, it’s a full time job.

My good buddy J Brandon (president of American Sahara), tagged along in his Dodge Power Wagon, carrying spare parts and water.  I thought having a chase vehicle might be a good idea.  It turned out that having the chase vehicle along was just okay.  Having J along, though, was great.

You might be wondering…how did I hook up with CSC?  I kind of fell into the CSC gig.  I was initially hired to duel the digital dufi, the cretins badmouthing CSC on Internet forums (dufi is the plural of dufus).  I knew the digital dufi supply was infinite, so I reckoned this new gig might be a job for life.  Dealing and Dueling with the Dufi.   It almost sounded like a TV show (you know, Dancing with the Stars).  What intrigued me beyond that, though, was the CSC motorcycle.  I liked it.  A modern Mustang.  That could be a hell of a thing.

As I was being clever and outwitting unarmed digital opponents in the Great Forum Wars of the New Millenia, I pitched the Baja idea to Steve Seidner, the guy who owns CSC.  Steve was all for it.   “Don’t be gentle,” he said.  “Take the bikes down there and break them.”  Seidner wanted to unearth the modern Mustang’s weaknesses, and Baja’s broad badlands would bubble those up.

So, what was it like?  Okay, here ya go…

A sneak preview of the next 2200 miles….on 150cc California Scooters!

I’ll tell you about the ride, and I’ll tell you a bit about each of the riders on this trip, and in this first installment, Simon Gandolfi gets the spotlight.  Like I mentioned above, he’s a British author.  A famous one.  And he’s a blogger, too.  I started reading Simon’s blog during his travels through South America, and I was hooked. He wrote Old Man On A Bike about that adventure.   This guy would be perfect for our ride, I thought.  World traveler, small bikes, and he has a following.  And then Simon met the most important criteria:  He said yes when I invited him.  Simon blogged our Baja adventure, and his words were mesmerizing.   Here’s one of his descriptions…

Joe and Arlene ride production bikes. John and I ride pre-production bikes. These are small bikes, pretty babies to treasure. The average owner will ride down to the store on a Sunday or drop by a neighbour’s – say twenty minutes max. Steve wants the bikes tested to destruction. John is massive and I’m no light-weight. Steve wants destruction, we’re his men. Day one south from Tijuana is horrific coastal-strip development on the cheap side of cheap. Pass Ensenada and I begin to understand Baja’s magic: clarity of light, range upon range of mountains, immense spaces across which merely to travel is an adventure. Even Big John becomes little more than a moving microdot.

Baja John, a microdot somewhere up there…riding south of Ensenada, headed for Cabo San Lucas…

This will be maybe six or seven blogs in total, spread out over the next month or so.  It’s a good story and I like telling it.  This has been the first installment.

To be continued…

High end, high class small bikes…

On its face, it seemed like a weak market to target…folks  who want very high end, small displacement, expensive custom motorcycles. But it worked.

When CSC revived the Mustang motorcycle concept 10 years ago, the company didn’t really have a grand plan, a handle on the market, or even a clearly defined name. CSC was originally California Scooter Company, and the original plan was to re-introduce a concept pioneered by the Mustang Motor Company in the postwar 1940s.

Original vintage Mustangs. Both of these bikes, along with more than a dozen others, are in Steve Seidner’s personal Mustang collection (the largest vintage Mustang collection in the world).

The idea was to spin off of Pro-One Performance Manufacturing’s line of very high billet and other accessories (and complete large V-twin custom motorcycles), and apply it to a small, modern version of the Mustang.  Pro-One, CSC’s sister company, was founded by Steve Seidner (the same guy who started CSC).   And boy oh boy, did those little bikes sell. They were beautiful little creations. Jewels, actually. Hand made, and built to extremely high standards. Mirror-like paint. Billet. Chrome. Little choppers. Expensive little jewels you could actually ride.

Ah, but that name…the California Scooter Company. It created confusion. People would see the new California Scooter modern Mustang and ask: Is it a scooter or a motorcycle? They didn’t get that the name was old school. Back in the day, antiques (folks like yours truly) called any bike a scooter. A Harley was a scooter and so was a Triumph…as in “I’m going to ride down to Cabo on my Scooter.”

Me? I wanted to tell anybody who asked that question (is it a motorcycle or a scooter?) that they were too dumb to ride either, but I couldn’t do that. Then one day, the boss hit on the idea of just calling the company CSC Motorcycles. You know, go with the tradition of other world-class marques with three-letter names: BMW, BSA, AJS, KTM, and more. And that worked.  The dumbass scooter or motorcycle questions stopped, and the bikes continued to sell.

Back to the modern Mustangs…the initial thought was that the bikes would sell for $4,995, and they’d be a hit with young folks.

The modern California Scooter Greaser in the San Gabriel Mountains. Folks loved this bike and it was one of the best-selling paint themes.

Ah, what we didn’t know. The market will tell you what it is. Plans and fancy marketing studies mean nothing. A hit with young folks? The problem with young folks is that they don’t have any money and they don’t buy motorcycles. Hell, a lot of them don’t even want driver’s licenses. Just, like, you know, call an Uber.

Good buddy Walter B, back in the day, on his Knucklehead Harley-Davidson.

What we found out at CSC 10 years ago was that our modern Mustang market squarely centered on older folks (who often have a lot of money). Specifically, older folks who wanted a Mustang back in the day, but Dad said no. Or folks who rode big bikes way back when and who still wanted to ride, but they didn’t want to wrestle with 800-lb monsters.  Fast forward 60 years, Dad’s no longer around, an Advil a day is just the ticket, and what do you know, I can buy that Mustang I always wanted and still ride. And they did. In droves.

A near-standard CSC Mustang on the right, and two custom versions on the left. Nearly all California Scooters were extensively optioned with additional chrome, billet, and custom paint.

Almost no one bought the standard, no-accessories, $4,995 CSC 150. They could have (that bike featured a slew of custom high end stuff, like billet and chrome all over the place and a world class finish). But those old guys who were denied an opportunity to scratch that Mustang itch as teenagers wanted more. A lot more. They would call on the phone (“I don’t do the Internet”), option the little California Scooters up to over $10,000 with lots more bling (custom wheels, custom paint, and more), and then put it all on a credit card. They wouldn’t attempt to negotiate price. California Scooter buyers wanted to spend more. Negotiate a lower price? Nope, that would demean the purchasing experience. It was full boat, full freight, and here’s my security code number…

A custom California Scooter. This was the “Bobber” variant. Note the gangster whitewalls, chrome wire wheels, and other custom touches.
Steve Seidner built a personal aviation-themed custom California Scooter he called the P-51 (get it?…the P-51 Mustang).  Steve intended to keep the bike, but I put this photo on the CSC blog and it sold within an hour. Someone called with a godfather offer (a deal Steve couldn’t refuse).

Those little bikes were awesome. I owned one of the very first ones, and I found I was having more fun on 150cc than I had on bikes with ten times the displacement. I rode mine all the way to Cabo San Lucas and back, but that’s a story for another blog.  The Baja trip did a lot for CSC, too.  The 150cc bikes had Honda CG clone engines manufactured in Asia, and the Baja trips showed the bikes were supremely reliable.  We invited famous people to ride with us in Mexico and that was a force multiplier.  The press coverage was off the charts.

Simon Gandolfi, British novelist and world traveler, on the road in Baja with a California Scooter.  He cuts a commanding figure, doesn’t he?
Simon, suspenders flying, at speed on my CSC 150, just north of Cabo San Lucas.
Arlene Battishill, CEO of Go Go Gear, on the Sea of Cortez with her custom California Scooter.  Arlene later appeared on the TV show, Shark Tank, with this motorcycle.

One of the things that sticks in my mind is the uninformed and the ignorant occasionally posting somewhere on an Internet forum that you could get a used Sportster for the kind of money people were happily spending on California Scooters. These keyboard commandos just didn’t get it. You could actually get a new Sportster for that kind of money, but that wasn’t the point. California Scooter buyers didn’t want a Sportster. They wanted, and were happy to pay top dollar for, a custom-crafted bit of motorcycle jewelry that could be both admired and ridden. A current classic.

There’s a market for such a thing. I know. I was there.