SoCal Drive and Ride

This was a little different ride. We trailered the bike down to San Francisco because at this time of year there might be rain either going or coming, and I did not want to ride Interstate 5 in the rain.

During our brief visit in SF, I went on a ride with Jenny's son Jonas.

He plans to learn to do stunts on his bike, so he has installed crash bars and an extra rear caliper with hand operated braking......why, I haven't a clue.

When we left SF, Carolyn drove to visit a unique underground garden in Fresno, while I rode Skyline Drive down to Santa Cruz and over to Visalia where I met Carolyn at the motel. It was while suiting up to ride in SF that I discovered the mistake that was to plague me most of the ride; I forgot my leather jacket and only had my summer mesh jacket. Much of the riding time was too cool for that jacket as even in the mid to upper 60's the jacket flows so much air I would get cold after awhile. To help block the airflow through the jacket I sometimes wore my non-motorcycle rain jacket over the mesh jacket and in the extreme case when we were over in Morro Bay, I wore my cooling vest (without soaking it) over my long sleeve jersey and then the rain jacket over the mesh jacket. I really missed the leather jacket. It is like a well broken in pair of shoes in terms of comfort and it also makes me feel safer (and warmer) than the mesh jacket. The next day I rode some really good roads around the southern end of the Sierras past Lake Isabella and over to Kennedy Medows where many fun times were had camping and riding dirt bikes back in the 70's and 80's. Below is a photo of my GPS while riding one of those roads up to Lake Isabella:

There was no traffic and nice scenery with lots of green grass:

I met Carolyn that night in Bakersfield and the next day we rode/drove together to Riverside. I had found a Sena intercom like the one I use, but with a headset and not a helmet mount, so Carolyn could wear that and we could talk while traveling together. It really made the travel nicer, like when we used to be on the same bike together. I had planned to ride from Riverside over to the Phoenix area to visit my oldest friend Jimmy Ingersoll, but I decided not to becuse it was really windy in the desert and it was all boring freeway to get there. So I took the car. Having to put up with strong head winds or side winds while doing 75-80 miles an hour on a freeway is not my idea of a fun ride. After a couple of days visiting friends around SoCal we headed over to the coast to ride highways 1 and 101 back to San Francisco. To get from Riverside to Morro Bay we had to go through north LA on freeways. We didn't leave Riverside until after 9 am, so we should have been passed the rush hours, but L.A. has stop and go traffic no matter what time of day. This was when being on the bike was nice. I couldn't stand to be in the stop and go traffic so I left Carolyn and got in the car pool lane. When that came to a stop, I started splitting lanes and at one point I was nine miles ahead of Carolyn. Lane splitting is such a wonderful thing when done properly among drivers who are used to it. I split lanes again just outside of San Francisco when there was a crash on a section of freeway that we were on. Traffic was restricted to one lane out of four or five and about completely stopped. I split to the front and the cops let me by the emergency vehicles. Drivers are very accomodating and I would often see them move over slightly in their lane to give me more room. Luckily I don't have to comute in Washington or I would be very frustrated with no being allowed to lane split. I rode a total of 1815 miles and found a few good roads but generally there was too much traffic and I'm done with riding in Southern California.