{"id":13078,"date":"2021-05-20T06:28:29","date_gmt":"2021-05-20T13:28:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/exhaustnotes.us\/blog\/?p=13078"},"modified":"2021-05-20T06:28:29","modified_gmt":"2021-05-20T13:28:29","slug":"my-1st-international-motorcycle-adventure-eh","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/exhaustnotes.us\/blog\/index.php\/2021\/05\/20\/my-1st-international-motorcycle-adventure-eh\/","title":{"rendered":"My 1st International Motorcycle Adventure, Eh?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Everybody has their preferred riding schtick and for me it’s international motorcycle travel.\u00a0 Anyone can ride their cruiser to a local hangout for a beer or their GS to Starbuck’s for a $6 cup of coffee.\u00a0 My riding is all about crossing international borders and collecting cool photos in places most two-legged mammals only dream about.\u00a0 Just to make a point, I once rode a 150cc scooter (my CSC Mustang) to Cabo San Lucas and back.\u00a0 The day after we returned, I needed something at Costco and I rode the little CSC there.\u00a0 When I parked it, a beer-bellied dude in a gigondo 4×4 pickup told me, “that’s a little cute bike.”\u00a0 He didn’t intend it to be a compliment.<\/p>\n

“Thanks,” I said.<\/p>\n

“I ride a (brand name deleted to protect the guilty),” he announced, his chest swelling with Made in ‘Merica pride to the point it almost equalled his waistline.\u00a0 \u00a0“We ride all<\/strong><\/span> over.”\u00a0 He emphasized the “all” to make sure I got the point.<\/p>\n

“Cool,” I said.\u00a0 “Where do you go?”<\/p>\n

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Cook’s Corner, the ultimate So Cal burger\/biker stand.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

“Last week,” he told me, “we rode to Cook’s Corner!”<\/p>\n

Cook’s Corner is a southern California burger joint about 40 miles from where we were talking.<\/p>\n

“Where do you all go on that little thang?” He actually said “you all” and “thang,” but he didn’t have the accent to match the colloquialisms.\u00a0 Okay, I had the guy dialed.<\/p>\n

“Well, we rode to Cabo San Lucas and back last week.” I said.<\/p>\n

Mr. 4×4’s jaw dropped.\u00a0 Literally.\u00a0 He looked at me, speechless, dumbfoundedly breathing through his open mouth.\u00a0 Without another word he climbed into his big truck and rode off.\u00a0 Our conversation was over.\u00a0 So much for the biker brotherhood, I guess.<\/p>\n

\"\"
My 150cc CSC Baja Blaster. I had a lot of fun and covered a lot of miles on that little Mustang.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The international motorcycle travel bug bit me when I was still in school.\u00a0 I had a ’71 Honda 750 Four back in the day (that’s me 50 years ago in the big photo up top).\u00a0 One of my Army ROTC buddies had the first-year Kawasaki 500cc triple.\u00a0 It was a hellaciously-fast two stroke with a white gas tank and\u00a0 blue competition stripes.\u00a0 We were in New Jersey and we wanted to do something different, so we dialed in Canada as our destination.\u00a0 They say it’s almost like going to another country.<\/p>\n

And so we left.\u00a0 Our gear consisted of jeans, tennis shoes, windbreaker jackets, and in a nod toward safety, cheap helmets (ATGATT hadn’t been invented yet).\u00a0 We carried whatever else we needed in small gym bags bungied to our seats.\u00a0 Unfortunately, in those days “whatever else we needed” did not include cameras so I don’t have any photos from that trip.\u00a0 That’s okay, because all they would have shown was rain.<\/p>\n

\"\"
A 1969 Kawasaki 500cc, two-stroke triple. Widowmakers, they were called, in a nod to their often unpredictable handling.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

As two Army guys about to become Second Louies, we joked about being draft dodgers in reverse.\u00a0 We were looking forward to active duty (me in Artillery and Keith in Infantry).\u00a0 We were going to Canada not to duck the draft, but as a fling before wearing fatigues full time.\u00a0 We didn’t really know what we were doing, so we took freeways all the way up to the border. It rained nearly the entire time.\u00a0 All the way up and all the way back.\u00a0 We bought sleeping bags because they looked cool on the bikes (it was a Then Came Bronson<\/em> thing), but we stayed in hotels.\u00a0 It was raining too hard to camp, and besides, the sleeping bags were soaked through and we didn’t think to bring a tent.\u00a0\u00a0We got as far as Montreal, which seemed far enough to give us Canada bragging rights.\u00a0 We spent that single Montreal night in a cheap dive and pointed the bikes south the next day.<\/p>\n

These days, I know to check the weather, bring rain gear (even if none is forecast), and study a map to find the most interesting roads (rather than the fastest).\u00a0 But hey, we were young and dumb, it was an adventure ride, it crossed an internationational border, and riding four days in a steady cold rain was a lot of fun.\u00a0 I didn’t think so at the time, but that’s how I remember it today.\u00a0 In fact, I remember that ride like it was last month.\u00a0 And it got me hooked on international motorcycle adventures.\u00a0 Canada was to be the first of many.<\/p>\n

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Never miss an ExNotes blog.\u00a0 Sign up here for free, unless you have a .ru in your email address!<\/p>\n\n

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More epic international rides?\u00a0 Right here<\/a>, folks!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Everybody has their preferred riding schtick and for me it’s international motorcycle travel.\u00a0 Anyone can ride their cruiser to a local hangout for a beer or their GS to Starbuck’s for a $6 cup of coffee.\u00a0 My riding is all about crossing international borders and collecting cool photos in places most two-legged mammals only dream … Continue reading “My 1st International Motorcycle Adventure, Eh?”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":13079,"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":[235,392,182,136,64,89,140],"tags":[2030,2031,2034,2033,2045,2044,502,2035],"class_list":["post-13078","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-amazon","category-back-in-the-day","category-camping","category-canada","category-gear","category-motorcycle-adventure-ride","category-vintage-motorcycle","tag-canada","tag-early-adventure-ride","tag-honda-750-four","tag-honda-cb-750","tag-kawasaki-mach-iii","tag-kawasaki-triple","tag-riding-in-the-rain","tag-vintage-motorcycle-photo"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/exhaustnotes.us\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/05\/JBIMG_0275-002-900.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/exhaustnotes.us\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13078","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=13078"}],"version-history":[{"count":25,"href":"https:\/\/exhaustnotes.us\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13078\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13183,"href":"https:\/\/exhaustnotes.us\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13078\/revisions\/13183"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/exhaustnotes.us\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/13079"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/exhaustnotes.us\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13078"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/exhaustnotes.us\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13078"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/exhaustnotes.us\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13078"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}