Big Sur Claims a KLR

Long over-due? Yes. Absolutely. Deal with it.

My last day in San Fran, while the other boys did there own thing, I walked across the street to check out the dirty hippies at the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass festival, a huge open-air festival including 6 stages for much of the week. Last year attendance was over 800,000 people. Incredible energy and culture to the festival as everything from the Blind Boys of Alabama to MC Hammer to Robert Plant play.

After leaving San Fran we continued along the one through Big Sur, the mecca of motorcycling in North America, and it absolutely lived up to expectations. Beautiful vistas through forest to cliffs lining the ocean. All on slow tight, twisty roads and in beautiful weather. The day could not have been going better, until Billy decided that the road had looked at him funny and needed a stern talking to. In one fluid motion he threw his motorcycle into a cliff and pounced upon the unsuspecting road. Thankfully both parties escaped relatively unharmed, the road does have a nice scar now, however, where Billy caught it with a piece of motorcycle. Needless to say the bike lost out of all three parties and needed to be towed to the nearest town, San Luis Obisbo.

This unfortunate turn of events did have a silver lining. As Billy waited to deal with insurance we were stuck in SLO, a place we would never have stopped otherwise, and now I can't wait to go back to. SLO has some of the nicest people I've ever met. Bill's tow truck driver, Brett, was a middle aged surfer, who'd surfed all through Mexico, Central and much of South America. He was full of good advice and better stories. He even helped us find a place to stay.

The next night, after discovering the magic of a $20 1.75L bottle of rum, and $1 tacos, we met some of kids from Cal Poly. They took us to a local brew pub called SLOBrew. College town heaven. Every table was full of university students playing drinking games. We made friends.

A few nights later, who should show up at our hotel door but Brett, our tow truck driver, with Joe. Joe was a 50 something carpenter from New Jersey who'd gotten a flat on the number 1 and Joe wanted to party. There happened to be a street food festival on, so we grabbed supper with Joe, who was a most gracious host and we traded stories of the road and life while we had a few drinks. As fate should have it, as Joe decided to take off in favour of a more refined bar, we met up with our Tuesday night friends as well as some more.

Oh. We also did lots of hiking. Both Madonna and Bishop Peak were great local hikes up volcanic plugs. Bishop was especially fun. There are two routes up this 1500 foot hill. One of moderate difficulty and one difficult. We (Bill, Pat and I... Colin was feeling ill) decided to disregard the "paths" in favour of a scramble straight up the face of the rock. A great four point scramble along a half formed path from climbers in the past.

Once things had been taken care of, the road had been named victor of the scuffle and Billy's bike deemed ready for replacement he flew ahead to Phoenix to purchase his shiny new BMW while the other three of us rode in over two days. After the first half hour of coast the roads to Phoenix were not worth further discussion, so I'll hit some highlights.
-driving on the historic Route 66
and that about sums that up.

We did end up having our first real interesting camping experience. In a Route 66 town named Ludlow. Estimated Population, 6. There was however, a gas station, motel and big pile of rotting concrete that used to be houses. We were just setting up to camp in a parking lot when a rail worker, and Ducati rider, showed up and suggested some trails and that we sleep in the nearby rail yard as it would be more quite than being near the highway and safer as well. This sounded fair, so we took him up on his offer. Promptly after finishing setting up the tent, as supper was boiling away a train came by. Roughly 150 feet from our front door. They proceded to come every 40 or so minutes throughout the night... Ugh.

After 11 hours of something vaguely resembling sleep we continued in to Phoenix to meet with Billy and my aunt, uncle and cousin. Phoenix is just a sprawling metropolis, so once we were settled we did not go far. We went out on the first night with my cousin Jaime who introduced us to some of her friends and the following day we spent most of the afternoon playing golf at the local links.

After the weekend Bill was able to pick up his bike from across town, a mere 110 km jaunt, one way. Other than that we primarily spent time sorting our time through Mexico as well as insurance and the like.

Well. That seems like a reasonable enough update. Mexico to come soon. Expect more regular updates, it's been a wild ride.

Bray