Leanings
LEANINGS
Last ride in California
Peter Egan
WISTFUL, I SUPPOSE, IS THE BEST word to describe our mood in packing for the weekend trip to the USGP at Laguna Seca. This would be our last real ride in California. At least for a while. It seems my wife Barbara and I just signed the papers and bought ourselves a small farm in southern Wisconsin. We are moving there at the end of the month.
“Farm” is actually something of an exaggeration. It’s an old farmhouse on a small riven with 16 acres of woods and pasture, a horse barn and a reasonably good, three-car (20motorcycle?) garage. There’s an old iron bridge and a winding country road at the foot of the driveway, which is no small part of the reason we are moving there.
The motorcycle roads in Southern California are great—maybe the best in the world—but it's taking us longer and longer to get to them. The southern coast has become just a bit too crowded for our tastes, and it suddenly feels as though it's time to move on. I'll still be doing this monthly Leanings column and the occasional feature story for Cycle World, but they will now be beamed from afar through the magic of modem and FAX.
Fortunately, this is not a move that calls for the burning of bridges. A decade in California has left us with a great fondness for the place, and if we ever win the lottery, we could easily be convinced to buy a second house here, maybe a place to spend the winter months. I suppose you could say our schizophrenic affinity for both California and the Midwest has left us bi-coastal, if you can call our small riverbank a coast, that is.
So, we packed for our third-annual GP run to Laguna with a sort of premature nostalgia, knowing that next year at this time, we might find ourselves in the last snowstorm of a late Wisconsin spring. I’d decided to make this final run on the good old Kawasaki KZ 1000 Mkll, but the day before we were supposed to leave. I called David Edwards at CW, just on the off-chance he might have an interesting test bike that hadn’t been scarfed up by one of the staff.
“It just so happens,” he said, “we have a brand-new Honda ST 1100 you could borrow.”
Perfect. An 1 100 V-Four sporttourer, with real saddlebags, shaft drive and a fairing. Everything we needed, by all appearances.
As usual, we left for Laguna Seca at 5 a.m., hit the Coast Highway at Santa Monica, and headed north along the ocean under dark coastal clouds. We stopped for our traditional daybreak breakfast at Paradise Cove (where James Garner’s trailer used to be parked in “The Rockford Files”), motored through Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo, then swung back to the ocean past the Hearst Castle and up through God’s own fog-shrouded Zen-forest at Big Sur. We got to our hotel late in the afternoon, surprisingly unfatigued.
As a sport-tourer the big Honda worked pretty well, at least for my particular tastes. It has a big. 7.4-gallon fuel tank, for 250-plus miles between fill-ups, a wonderfully comfortable seat for both pilot and passenger, and—best of all—genuinely tall gearing. It purrs along at a relaxed, 3000 rpm at 60 miles per hour. At a mere 4000 rpm, it’s going 80.
As for shortcomings, the ST has a windshield that at certain speeds creates helmet-level turbulence, with a whorl that carries cold air down the rider’s back and —by extensiondown the passenger’s front.
The ST is also quite heavy at 700 pounds (with fuel), though like a lot of big Hondas, it disguises its weight well. Without working too hard, we were able to stay with a gaggle of well-mounted sportbike guys who thought they were dragging their knees in corners. In short, the ST is a nice bike for people whose touring tastes lie somewhere between Gold Wing conservatism and racebike masochism, which is probably a lot of people. In fact, I'm one.
If the Honda had the BMW R100RS fairing and the Boxer’s light weight, it would be almost perfect. On the other hand, if the BMW had the Honda’s comfortable saddle and suspension, it, too, would be almost perfect. Someone, eventually, will get it exactly right.
As most people know by now, Wayne Rainey won the USGP, riding with a flawless, surgical attack on the course while other riders crashed in his wake. John Kocinski rode a similar race in the 250 class, proving that Kenny Roberts either has a good eye for talent or trains riders very well, or both. (Both. I’m told.) Sadly, it was a weekend with more than its share of injuries, Kevin Magee's being the most serious. Laguna Seca is an unforgiving track for those who leave it at high speed.
We left at relatively low speed ourselves, taking a full, sunlit Monday to ride home through the mountains with our friends Hank Murdoch, Doug Booth and his dad. Jack, who flew all the way in from Massachusetts to make the ride. Spring rains had made the coastal range brilliantly green, so that the cattle ranches looked more like part of Switzerland than the brown hills of the West.
We reached the coast at Malibu on a balmy evening, just in time to witness an almost spectral event. It was a brilliant red sunset, followed immediately by the rising of the largest moon I've ever seen, tinted an unearthly lavender-red. As it came into the darkening sky, the moon threw a shaft of its strange light glittering across the waves through a grove of tall palms. The whole scene was so perfect, so tropically surreal and idealized in its composition of color and form, that I nearly laughed out loud. Nothing looked this good. Not even in the movies.
As we rolled along the beach, it suddenly occurred to me that perhaps California knew we were leaving, and had decided to rub it in. It was showing us, one last time, that its legendary natural beauty still has the power to raise its head and tower over the smog and the gridlock and the shopping malls.
Fair enough, I thought. It deserves to be remembered well. This has been a good 10 years.
