{"id":1029,"date":"2018-09-13T15:01:10","date_gmt":"2018-09-13T15:01:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/exhaustnotes.us\/blog\/?p=1029"},"modified":"2018-09-13T15:05:47","modified_gmt":"2018-09-13T15:05:47","slug":"made-in-china-the-mt-rushmore-riders","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/exhaustnotes.us\/blog\/index.php\/2018\/09\/13\/made-in-china-the-mt-rushmore-riders\/","title":{"rendered":"Made in China:  The Rushmore Riders!"},"content":{"rendered":"<figure style=\"width: 800px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><img decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full\" src=\"http:\/\/californiascooterco.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/07\/140721_6574-800.jpg\" width=\"800\" height=\"643\" \/><figcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Mt. Rushmore, Hecho en China!<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p>Mt. Rushmore, South Dakota&#8230;the turnaround point on our 5000-mile Western America Adventure Ride, a wildly-publicized event to show the world that the Chinese RX3 is a reliable motorcycle (and it is; we rode the entire ride with a bunch of bikes without a single breakdown, I wrote a book about it, and the rest, as they say, is history).\u00a0 We cut a meandering beeline (I know&#8230;we&#8217;re running a special on oxymorons this week) on some of the best roads in the US, from So Cal to South Dakota, turned west and hit more great roads until we ran out of continent, and then turned left again to follow the Pacific Coast back to So Cal.\u00a0 It was an amazing ride (you can read about it in <em><a href=\"https:\/\/www.amazon.com\/5000-Miles-At-8000-RPM\/dp\/1517355354\">5000 Miles at 8000 RPM<\/a><\/em>) and it was incredible fun.<\/p>\n<p>My favorite moment?\u00a0 Hands down, it was a photo at Mt. Rushmore.\u00a0 Kyle, one of the Chinese riders, was grabbing a pic of King Kong, Leonard, Hugo, and Tso in front of the world-famous monument. \u00a0 Dumb-ass me&#8230;I thought Kyle just wanted a photo of the four with Mt. Rushmore in the background and I wondered why he was making it so complicated. \u00a0 Holding the camera with his right hand and barking orders in Chinese while motioning with his left, old Kyle seemed to be injecting complexity into a situation that required none.\u00a0 At each new Kyle edict, the four guys in the above photo moved this way or that, changed their gaze slightly, and generally responded instantly to their Chongqing taskmaster. \u00a0 It suddenly dawned on me (and the rest of the folks watching this show, who started laughing and cheering at about the same instant):\u00a0 Kyle and his men were creating a &#8220;Made in China&#8221; Mt. Rushmore!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Mt. Rushmore, South Dakota&#8230;the turnaround point on our 5000-mile Western America Adventure Ride, a wildly-publicized event to show the world that the Chinese RX3 is a reliable motorcycle (and it is; we rode the entire ride with a bunch of bikes without a single breakdown, I wrote a book about it, and the rest, as &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/exhaustnotes.us\/blog\/index.php\/2018\/09\/13\/made-in-china-the-mt-rushmore-riders\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Made in China:  The Rushmore Riders!&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":true,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[235,72,96],"tags":[275,276],"class_list":["post-1029","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-amazon","category-china","category-feel-good-stuff","tag-mt-rushmore","tag-photography"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/exhaustnotes.us\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1029","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/exhaustnotes.us\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/exhaustnotes.us\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/exhaustnotes.us\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/exhaustnotes.us\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1029"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/exhaustnotes.us\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1029\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1035,"href":"https:\/\/exhaustnotes.us\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1029\/revisions\/1035"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/exhaustnotes.us\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1029"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/exhaustnotes.us\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1029"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/exhaustnotes.us\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1029"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}