Passes & Canyons Blog

When you’re seriously addicted to cruising on two wheels you’ll go to extremes to get your fix. I know I did when a company I once worked for sent me to Sacramento for a month. This was going to be an opportunity to ride some fabulous roads in a place too far from home for us to reach on our usual summer trips. How could I possibly spend a month in California and not have a bike to ride? I couldn’t.

My first thought was to ride my Honda from Denver to Sacramento so I would have it there. Instead, I took a simpler approach: I flew to Sacramento and bought a bike when I got there.

I arrived in Sacramento, picked up a rental car, checked into my hotel, and went to work the next day. As soon as work was over I drove to PCP Motorsports and asked to speak to the manager. Don “Badge” Bajurin, one of the owners, came out. “I’m going to be here for four weeks,” I told him, “and I’ve got to have a bike. Can we set something up where I’ll buy one of your used bikes and then you agree to buy it back from me, at a lower price, when I’m ready to leave?”

The thing about motorcycle dealers like Badge is they generally love bikes as much as or more than their customers. With the very clear understanding that if I crashed the bike the repurchase deal was off, he agreed. I seem to have gotten lucky, too, because Badge told me no other dealer in town would have made that kind of deal. But he was friends with Fay Myers, who runs a dealership in Denver, and he loves to go ride in Colorado on a bike provided by Myers. He understood the reverse was true for me. And I had a bike, a 1984 Honda Nighthawk 550.

False Start
I waited impatiently for the weekend and come Saturday morning I was rarin’ to go. But the bike wasn’t. Being in an unfamiliar place, with my bike parked in the open, I had taken a security measure I normally do not: I had locked the fork. The only problem was, in my unfamiliarity with this procedure, I had set it in a position where the fork was locked but the headlight was also on. Of course the battery was dead when I tried to start it.

I didn’t know that was the problem, though, so I called Badge. He sent a truck over to pick up the bike and they took it to the shop, checked it out, and charged the battery. Then they hauled it back to me, and they did this all at no charge. Nice guys!

And then I took off. With the late start I just blasted down through the Napa Valley on my way to Oakland, where I had friends and would spend the night. We went riding in the hills behind Oakland the next day and then it was back to Sacramento.

The following weekend I had to work on Saturday so that only left me Sunday. Being chronically overambitious, I figured I’d just take a quick cruise down through Yosemite National Park. That turned out to be one heck of a long day, much longer than I had anticipated, but a lot of fun just the same.

Saving the Best for Last
The best came last. On my third and final weekend I had two days and I took advantage of them. I headed west through Davis, up a canyon to Lake Berryessa. I stopped in the canyon and saw a huge blue heron take flight. I then looped around the southern end of the lake, on nice twisty roads, down into Napa Valley. I stopped at a couple wineries and then headed for the coast.

Through incredible good luck, I cut over on what proved to be a narrow, winding, often one-lane road through dense forest, along sheer hillsides, up and down, with curves galore. Following this Skaggs Springs Road I finally reached the ocean at Stewart’s Point, where I headed south along the coast on the fabled Highway 1. My stop for the night was Bodega Bay, where Alfred Hitchcock filmed “The Birds.”

In the morning I continued south to Point Reyes Station and then cut inland. From the coast to the Sonoma Valley to the Napa Valley to the Sacramento Valley it was one narrow, twisting road after another where my little 550 Nighthawk could really shine. What an absolutely glorious time!

Then it was time to sell the bike back to Badge and head home to Denver. This addict had gotten the fix of his lifetime.

Biker Quote for Today

We know you’re a poser if you’re too cool to wave at the kids in the mom-mobile in front of you.

Tags: riding California

This entry was posted on Monday, October 23rd, 2017 at 12:03 pm and is filed under motorcycle touring. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.