It’s been raining quite a bit in LA lately and oddly enough it usually pours the most on the exact days I have the means and motivation to get a ride in. Some folks out there ride in the inclimate weather and I’d imagine a certain percentage of them actually enjoy it. As a general rule, I don’t however. When dark skies start rolling in all I tend to think about is the losing my traction in the middle of a corner and the puddles of Malibu mud I’ll have to wage war with. Rain also has the particularly wonderful side effect when it’s combined with SoCal canyon roads of producing all sorts of rocky road hazards. As a general rule these sorts of obstacles make leaning a sportbike over a much more exciting adventure than I tend to desire. Give me clear skies and clean roads and I’m a much happy camper…

So last week while it was raining I felt pretty certain that I wouldn’t be getting a ride in this weekend. It had all the trappings of a foul experience in the making. Yet I guess the moral to this story is that you should never say never - even mentally - because sometimes things surprise you and come at you from places you least expect. Saturday night I ended up meeting a group of fellow LA based gearheads and moto-enthusiasts. As it turns out nothing stirs the passion of and more importantly for riding like chatting about it over some cold beer and mexican food. Suddenly, there I was, ready to go. Blood was pumping through my veins and nothing was going to hold me back from hitting the road. It seemed less like an activity to be planned and more like a calling. So come Sunday morning I found myself hitting the road and rolling around the canyons even though earlier in the week I was 99% sure I wouldn’t be out there.

Heading down the PCH and turning up Las Floras Canyon Road, I found myself feeling very aware of how special it felt to be out riding when I didn’t think I would be. It made the morning feel that much sweeter and in some respects I cherished the adventure more - because it shouldn’t have been there. It normally wouldn’t have been. Of course to be fair I suspect that much of this emotion is coming from a variety of places that honestly probably have no business in a motorcycle blog. Lately I’ve been working like crazy, dealing with deadlines and more annoyingly dealing with all the issues that come up in post-production at the last minute. Events that are either preceded or followed by ’should have’ or ‘could have’ and usually are controllable issues that were overlooked or under thought. In Hollywood there’s an age old expression that a production can either be good, fast or cheap but you only get to choose two. At no time in my life have those words rung more true.

Given all the chaos at work it took awhile to truly get ‘into the ride’ - but eventually it came and for once I felt like I was able to push all of the usual noise to the side and just allow myself to enjoy the ride. I wasn’t even close to being 100% ‘on’, but oddly that was really ok with me. Sunday was about just being ‘there’ and feeling alive. It was particularly hard to ignore how magnificent the Santa Monica Mountains felt. During the patches of sunshine the canyons simply came alive. Green and lush with miles and miles of views. It felt like you could see forever.

As you’ll notice from the picts, I picked up a new riding bud - Stazz, who tosses his BMW R1100S around with abandon. The more I find myself riding with other folks the more enjoyable it gets. Truth be told, I’m probably not the best guy to follow around as I imagine I tend to wildly fluctuate between sight-seeing and attacking corners. But Stazz was a good sport about it and eventually we worked our way from Las Floras to Saddlepeak. Headed down to Las Virgines and then shot up Mulholland before grabbing some eats. Afterwards we hit the back half of Mulholland and took it to out to the coast. By the time we pulled off and I grabbed a smoke it was hard to justify heading back south on the PCH. By then it was around 2 in the afternoon and all the sensory inputs of life seemed to point us back in the direction of Mulholland heading East. So we flipped around and head back up through the canyons. It’s amazing how different a road can feel going in the opposite direction. Corners you think you know act like fresh faces and the very places you feel the least comfortable suddenly seem easy.

And for the first time I’m going to be able to actually share the experience. As it turns out one of the bonus side effects of all this rain is that it gave me a ton of time to think about trying to shoot more onboard video. As some of you might recall last year I was offered the chance to try out a Twenty20 Helmet Camera but truth be told I did a pretty piss poor job testing out the unit. The more I mulled the idea of video over the more I came to realize that the mistake that I had made was mounting the unit to my helmet and keeping the record camera in a fanny pack. That particular set up simply didn’t work well for me - perhaps others have had better experiences trying it that way. But the $39 Joe Rocket Tank Bag solved the storage problem and as I’ve grown more accustomed to riding around with it mounted on the bike, the thought to try the video thing again continued to creep into my mind. So this time I stuck the record deck in the tankbag and hard mounted the camera to the upper left side of the fairing. The difference is night and day.

Video Clips

I’ve encoded the vid files in Windows Media Player since the vast majority of TwistingAsphalt readers seem to be on Wintel machines according to the tell-tale web logs. But I’m not a compression expert by any means so I’m sure there’s some tweaking to be done on that front. I wish the Twenty20 unit didn’t seem quite so sensative to changes in the quality of the light, but overall I was impressed with the difference between hard mounting the camera unit and sticking it on my helmet. The whole set-up was quick and easy while out on the road. Given the results I’m beginning to think that it might be time to shoot more videos than stills - but that requires me to sort out just how I’m going to host the vid files… So who knows…

Here are some picts from the ride