{"id":1107,"date":"2018-09-19T14:42:34","date_gmt":"2018-09-19T14:42:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/exhaustnotes.us\/blog\/?p=1107"},"modified":"2018-09-19T14:47:16","modified_gmt":"2018-09-19T14:47:16","slug":"baja-150cc-at-a-time","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/exhaustnotes.us\/blog\/index.php\/2018\/09\/19\/baja-150cc-at-a-time\/","title":{"rendered":"Baja, 150cc at a time…"},"content":{"rendered":"

This was a trip I did almost 10 years ago with a few good friends, and we were all on 150cc hardtail Mustang replicas. \u00a0 California Scooters, to be precise.\u00a0 Just as they were being introduced to the market. \u00a0 Yep, we rode to Cabo San Lucas and back on 150s.<\/p>\n

Anybody can ride Baja on a big bike.\u00a0 We wanted to do something different.\u00a0 It was all a big publicity thing.\u00a0 Dog bites man, no big deal.\u00a0 Man bites dog, that’s a story. \u00a0 Ride to Cabo and back on a motorcycle?\u00a0 No big deal.\u00a0 Do it on a 150cc repop of a bike made 70 years ago?\u00a0 That’s something the media would pick up, I reckoned, and I was right.<\/p>\n

But first, let me introduce the crew…<\/p>\n

Simon, Arlene, J, Baja John, and me. And the star of this show, the CSC 150 Mustang Replica.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

I invited folks on this ride who had to meet two criteria:\u00a0 They had to be able to help maximize CSC’s exposure in digital and print media, and they had to say yes.<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0 He had a blog and he posted a lot on ADVRider.com.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0 He keeps me from doing really stupid things on our Baja trips.\u00a0 To hear him tell it, it’s a full time job.<\/p>\n

My good buddy J Brandon (president of American Sahara), tagged along in his Dodge Power Wagon, carrying spare parts and water.\u00a0 I thought having a chase vehicle might be a good idea.\u00a0 It turned out that having the chase vehicle along was just okay.\u00a0 Having J along, though, was great.<\/p>\n

You might be wondering…how did I hook up with CSC?\u00a0 I kind of fell into the CSC gig.\u00a0 I was initially hired to duel the digital dufi, the cretins badmouthing CSC on Internet forums (dufi<\/em> is the plural of dufus<\/em>).\u00a0 I knew the digital dufi supply was infinite, so I reckoned this new gig might be a job for life.\u00a0 Dealing and Dueling with the Dufi<\/em>. \u00a0 It almost sounded like a TV show (you know, Dancing with the Stars<\/em>).\u00a0 What intrigued me beyond that, though, was the CSC motorcycle.\u00a0 I liked it.\u00a0 A modern Mustang.\u00a0 That could be a hell of a thing.<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0 Steve was all for it. \u00a0 “Don’t be gentle,” he said.\u00a0 “Take the bi<\/span>kes down there and break them.”\u00a0 Seidner wanted to unearth the modern Mustang’s weaknesses, and Baja’s broad badlands would bubble those up.<\/p>\n

So, what was it like?\u00a0 Okay, here ya go…<\/p>\n

A sneak preview of the next 2200 miles….on 150cc California Scooters!<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

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.\u00a0 Like I mentioned above, he’s a British author.\u00a0 A famous one.\u00a0 And he’s a blogger, too.\u00a0 I started reading Simon’s blog during his travels through South America, and I was hooked. He wrote Old Man On A Bike<\/em> about that adventure. \u00a0 This guy would be perfect for our ride, I thought.\u00a0 World traveler, small bikes, and he has a following.\u00a0 And then Simon met the most important criteria:\u00a0 He said yes when I invited him. \u00a0Simon blogged our Baja adventure, and his words were mesmerizing. \u00a0 Here’s one of his descriptions…<\/p>\n

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 \u2013 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.<\/em><\/p>\n

Baja John, a microdot somewhere up there…riding south of Ensenada, headed for Cabo San Lucas…<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

This will be maybe six or seven blogs in total, spread out over the next month or so.\u00a0 It’s a good story and I like telling it.\u00a0 This has been the first installment.<\/p>\n

To be continued…<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This was a trip I did almost 10 years ago with a few good friends, and we were all on 150cc hardtail Mustang replicas. \u00a0 California Scooters, to be precise.\u00a0 Just as they were being introduced to the market. \u00a0 Yep, we rode to Cabo San Lucas and back on 150s. Anybody can ride Baja … Continue reading “Baja, 150cc at a time…”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[235,63,57,96],"tags":[169],"class_list":["post-1107","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-amazon","category-baja","category-baja-cuisine","category-feel-good-stuff","tag-simon-gandolfi"],"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\/1107","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=1107"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/exhaustnotes.us\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1107\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1112,"href":"https:\/\/exhaustnotes.us\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1107\/revisions\/1112"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/exhaustnotes.us\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1107"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/exhaustnotes.us\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1107"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/exhaustnotes.us\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1107"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}