Flashing back to yesterday, I was only a couple of hours from my destination of Pismo Beach when I stopped for gas and checked my messages. It seems that my buddy
Rob Kiser who was on his way
south to meet me so that we could ride Big Sur together had experienced a little emergency: his Honda XLR650 had just died. I called him and found out that he was stranded on a remote stretch of road "way out on the boonies". Imagine that last bit spoken in a Mississippi southern drawl.
Not to worry, he said, a tow truck was on the way to fetch him & the bike.
I got a text from him a few hours later: "the tow truck never showed up". So I called him again. It seems that after he realized the tow truck was never coming, he tried to hitch a ride, but nobody wanted to pick up a scruffy looking guy wearing camo pants and army boots carrying a ragged canvas bag full of who knows what. He finally dragged his bike to the side of the road and laid it down to make it look like he'd crashed, and tricked someone into stopping and then guilt-tripped them in to letting him ride back with them to Monterey or wherever, and they dropped him off at a motel.
"Where's the bike?" I asked.
"Near Lucia, I think."
"Did you get a mile marker?"
"No dude! I was in the middle of nowhere, out in the boonies! Can you look for it tomorrow and tell me where it is?"
"Uh, ok. What do you want me to do if I find it?
"Push it over the cliff!"
Imagine my surprise when I found this poor, sad-looking, lonely, beat-up XLR about three miles
north of Lucia.
I swear I could hear little Honda sobs as I drove away, but I learned later that Rob had it picked up later that evening. So much for riding with LiveWire this trip.
One of the things I enjoy about riding is some of the other riders I meet. I bumped into these guys while checking out the elephant seals on a beach south of Big Sur. They bought me a coffee a bit later up the road.
Check out the elephant seals, there must be a thousand of them basking in the 58 degree weather. I'm the one in the red sunglasses.
A flowering bush outside my room in Pismo.