Long Way Home

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Not lost but practising my crisis management. Moving between continents (especially with some old bikes) is a major crisis all the way.

My 950 arrived in Frankfurt today, I'm still stuck in the USSA. Flights are FULL, it's summer in the northern hemisphere and the oil price hasn't yet kicked in.

Will try later today.

Auf Wiedersehen, must practice for next week  O0
 
You can see you've been in Ameerikar for a while..... your writing style reminds me of the best stuff on ADVRider.........  :thumleft: kickass!! :mwink:
 
OK this is getting old now - had TWO sections vanish into thin air cause I was supposedly not logged in. WTFO??? :BangHead: :BangHead:
 
Seems I had my head up my arse so far I could see daylight. Here we go again.

Shipping the bike developed into a ginormous pain in the crotch area. The pervasive paranoia gripping anerica nowadays  has turned all liquids into supposed liquid explosives, which promised to be no fun dealing with. Information posted on Horizons Umlimited's website indicated that Lufthansa is the best way to ship a bike to Europe from North America. When I called their rep at Los Angeles airport he referred me to three freight forwarders whom they now deal with, as the rules and what-what have gotten so stupid they can't afford to try and make sense of it all.

One never bothered to return my call, one called and left a message four days after I left an urgent message. The oke who did call back seemed helpful, but he wanted me to take ALL the fluids out of it including the $50 worth of synthetic MOTOREX I had put in two days before and the radiator coolant, and then pay him $650 for a plywood crate. I had just built six crates for my old bikes that are moving with me, and it didn't cost me more than 50 each using brand-new wood and screws.

He wouldn't budge, so i told him to fuck off and called Motorcycle Services, a Canadian company that does nothing but ship bikes to Europe. $1800 for the flight,  same as from LAX, and I had to drop the bike off at one of several Canadian airports. It  ended up costing me $400 to ride from San Diego including a relatively expensive hotel room when I got to Vancouver BC. So I schemed I saved $250 AND had a good sorting out ride.

In the meantime I was dependent on friends' kindness and hospitality as I was officially homeless and soon to be jobless. A bum. It's a great feeling, I tell yer. Not having to pay a mortgage, satellite TV, phone, water, electricity, sewer, car insurance..........

Guests are like fish, they both start stinking after three days so I was careful not to wear out my welcome. I slept on my riding buddy Larry's sofa for a week, and spent two weeks in San Diego at my lomg-time friends Scott and Teresa's place while I sorted out the final details.

Leaving San Diego, a deliberately late departure to miss traffic on northbound Interstate 15 (that's highway in SA, autobahn in Germany and autostrada in Italy, by the way  ;D ) Scott is envious, but can't go with for obvious reasons.


First stop was an hour and ten minutes up the road, at Lake Elsinore. The setting for a part of On Any Sunday named the "Elsinore Grand Prix".  The race had been resurrected about ten years ago, I raced it twice before my liedown in Mexico put a damper on my racing and riding in general. It was surreal to ride the same course I had watched on film at the Baragwanath Drive In on my tenth birthday. I had chosen to go see OAS instead of having a birthday party, and it had made a huge impression on me.

I retraced the course, slowly, one more time. Like so much else, I will never see it again and it's strange to realise that. For years it was just up the road, or just a short flight and a short drive away. Taken for granted, like so many things I suppose.

The start area, on Main Street. 'For the last 10 years the actual line up was down the street to the right and you made an immediate 90 degree right turn. Always the source of some excitement at the start.    :laughing7:  In the film, this was actually the back end of the grid, the street makes a left turn in the background where the car is and thats where the front of the grid was. 


Just after the start, a very fast section where you went on and off dirt and tar twice.


The back part of the course. The tweespoor road along the hills where, in the film, Malcolm Smith sliced through traffic like a Leatherman blade through a papsak, is clearly visible.


Along that same tweespoor section, one of my favourite parts of the course. It was fast with steep drop-offs to the left.



Getting very tired what with the wasted effort and all. More later, cheers.
 
Keep them pictures coming dude, are you going via the little island on the left of europe? Mmmm is that your left my right.... :patch: Anyho if you do and you need place to crash drop me a pm I am just  40 minutes outside of London (filtering fast through traffic that is)  :biggrin:
 
Thank you for a very entertaining report :thumleft:.

Also have On Any Sunday and was great to see actual photies of the course at Elsinore  ;D

Looking forward to the next installment. 
 
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Whats your bigger plan now, you homeless, jobless, lucky bastard bum ;D?

Guests are like fish, they both start stinking after three days

classic :imaposer: :imaposer:

Keep us posted mate....

H
 
Ah! The RR is back on track ;D Can't wait for the next installment.
 
After leaving Elsinore I went north through Corona, Chino and Ontario, what they refer to in magazines like Motocross Action etc as "the 909"". 909 being the telephone area code here. It's also where all the motorcycle manufacturers have their head offices and warehouses, in fact Honda's is right next to the freeway. It's friggin' HUGE. You could fit 3 or 4 rugby fields inside it. I wanted to take a photo but traffic in that area is insane and I was more concerned with survival.

Two weeks before, I had stopped at a motocross track called Cahuilla Creek in the mountains outside Palm Springs:


Now I rode right past Glen Helen, and considered pulling in to see what was going on. Probably nothing, at 1130 on a Monday morning, plus I was anxious to get off the freeway so kept going. Right at that point is where the road starts climbing up the Cajon Pass into the high desert. Within 5 k's of the top I was off I-15 and on the old Highway 395 that goes all the way north to Canada somewhere, via Owens valley which is a geological wonderland, Mammoth Mountain ski area, lake Tahoe, Reno and I forget the rest.  It's on the map.

I knew this road well too, and was amazed and dismayed  to see the amount of urban development along it now. I hadn't been on it in probably 15 years. The typical american suburban sprawl that looks the same everywhere had spread here as well, and some areas that I remember being cris-crossed with dirt bike trails are now generic stucco-housed neighbourhoods. The United States of Generica, I call this place. No matter where you go in the country, it's the same: the same strip malls, the same chain stores - Burger King, McPukes, Best Buy, Home Depot, 7-11, Ace hardware, Starbucks.......

It turns people into programmed drones.

After a while the open desert reappeared, and forty-five minutes later I was in a familiar place:


I continued on to:


The little living ghost town of Randsburg hasn't changed much in a hundred years except for electricity. It's still a harsh environment, typical desert: hot as hell in summer and freezing cold in winter. It must have been a miserable life breaking rocks in the old days. These are small mines, compared to those in SA. Chicken scratches, in fact. But most of the shafts you still see (with fences and warning signs around them now) were dug by hand. It was a fairly rich mining area but again nothing compared to the Reef.
Main street, Randsburg. The real Randburg probably looke like this 110 years ago, I imagine:




You find some strange, heat-affected people in these deserts, and some of them live in strange places:



While having lunch I talked to an oke named Vic who was towing an enclosed bike trailer. He had a KLR 650 and an MX bike in it, and was cruising around camping out and going on day rides. I was envious, thats the best way to do it - you have enough space to carry everything you need and can ride anywhere with minimal 'baggage. I saw many trails and roads I desperatlely wanted to go explore but would have been ugly on a loaded 950.

Vic took the obligatory "Look where I've been , wanker that I am" shot for me. He was doing my intended route in reverse and gave me much valuable information on road conditions and weather ahead.

 

Another 50 k's north I entered Owens valley, a fascinating place full of natural and human history. It runs north-south at the eastern base of the Sierra Nevada mountains. Mount Whitney, the highest peak in the lower 48 states (except Alaska and Hawaii) is halfway up the valley.

The southwestern US  consists of what's called "Karst und Graben"geological features. It's a repetitive series of valleys and mountains running north-south, Owens Valley is the westernmost one. Death Valley is two valleys to the east. Owens Lake is an ancient lake that is now silted in but used to be much bigger and wetter. At the north end you can clearly see  the ancient shorelines of thousands of years ago.
I helped on an archaeological dig in this area once and it's amazing to find complete stone tools and bowls made by Indians several thousand years ago.



The road went through the buzzing metropolis of Pearsonville:



People do strange things to entertain themselves in places like this  :laughing4:

".......that's a HUUUUGE bitch..........."



Did you know that America had concentration camps during WW2? "Land of Freedom" carries about as much credibility as "Arbeit Macht Frei" over the gate of Auschwich concentration camp in Germany.
After Pearl Harbour all people of Japanese descent, most of whom were american citizens, were gathered together and put in a concentration camp in Owens valley called Manzanar. Today, only political correctness keeps them from doing the same to Muslims. So instead the government and all its gun-carrying tools abuse EVERYBODY in the name of "security".





The graveyard at Manzanar:



It's a bleak place.

At the north end of Owens valley is the town of Bishop, a nice little place with all kinds of outdoor entertainment and amenities. I found a campground next to a golf course, killed two tinnies of Fosters and slept well. I was already finding out that a stock KTM 950 seat was not designed for riding but, apparently, for extracting murder confessions or just making a grown man cry like a little bitch.



Close to the campground is this famous street:






 
Maverick said:
Keep them pictures coming dude, are you going via the little island on the left of europe? Mmmm is that your left my right.... :patch: Anyho if you do and you need place to crash drop me a pm I am just  40 minutes outside of London (filtering fast through traffic that is)  :biggrin:

Thanks for the offer, Maverick, I may take you up on it some time. I've already bypassed the little island though, on an even smaller one for now, a place  wher they add --OS to every word. Strange natives.

One of my fantasy rides is through northern UK, on all the little roads there. For now my bike will be in (southern) europe for a while so hopefully I can get to the UK and a few other places nearby. Problem is, there is so much to see, it's tough to decide what to miss!

Cheers
 
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