600 Mile Service & A Coastal Revival

This morning I found myself flying up CA-2 towards Glendale at a breakneck pace with completely mixed emotions to say the least — On one hand I was entering the familiar, a part of California I know so well and have so strongly desired to ride again, and yet on the other hand I was about to drop the very bike I’ve been lusting to bring up here – to the canyon and mountain roads – off for its very first service. Between the crazy maneuvers of my freeway cohabitants and the lack of early morning coffee, I kept finding myself drifting off and thinking about how once again it’s time for another 600 mile service.

It sure seems like I do this a lot.

In some respects this has become a yearly ritual, if not a right of passage. There was a time when I rode bikes that never even needed service. They just ran. And ran. And ran. At most I’d pour in some oil and be done with it. But that’s no longer the case. These days taking the Ducs in for service runs hand in hand with the performance, the passion and the emotion that they offer. To go get a bike serviced isn’t a chore or a weekend errand or something easily dismissed, but rather a tent-pole moment in the bike’s life. It’s a marker, a defining moment, a point in time when you and the bike come to terms with your joint connection and the machine’s soon to be discovered new found abilities.
In some ways it reminds me of being a young-adult and turning twenty-one all over again. Overnight, with shock and awe instantaneous results, the whole world changes right before your eyes. Things open up. The very nature by which you live suddenly and irrevocably alters. And all because of a number that seems arbitrary at best. Why do we gain access to alcohol at twenty-one and not twenty or twenty-two? Why does the bike need to be serviced at 600 miles and not 500 or 750?
While I don’t know the answers to the above questions, what I do know is that having a 600 mile service performed on a new Ducati is something that should be cherished. Instantly the bike becomes more then it ever has been before. It shifts – dramatically – from merely being a motorcycle and transforms into a its own bike. Its own soul. Suddenly what you’re riding becomes a true sportbike. A sophisticated, emotionally impacting soul stirring machine who’s true character you only briefly have thus far been able to see or touch.

So I found myself smiling inside as I handed the 1098S’s key over to the boys at Pro Italia. Once again it’s time to see what truly lurks deep inside and frankly I can’t wait…
On most days that would be the end of it — but today was one of those rare days when it wasn’t. Instead of merely popping back into the truck and heading off, I stuck around and picked up the keys to a new Multistrada 1100S (review to follow shortly ) and then hit the Santa Monica Canyons with the old man.

It’s remarkable to me how just seeing the ocean can lift your spirits and alter your perceptions on life. Everything in life seems healthier and grander. Bluer and brighter. The details you normally misplace or pass over, suddenly seem truer and more important. It’s as if the very way in which you look at the world shifts focus, from the moments you must take care to the things that you must remember. And it happens quickly. Snap your fingers fast. With lightning like affect, the spirits lift and the eyes widen and in mere seconds you feel the clouds lift and the pressures whisk away.

The second I hit the Pacific Coast Highway, my first thought was that it felt like it had been eons since I last rode the canyon roads above Malibu. Of course that’s not exactly the case, I was up here riding just a month and half ago, but it highlights perhaps the greater issue at hand — These days the very nature of time seems to exist on a timeline whose framerate I no longer feel I can easily understand or discern. Events take place, actions happen, and life moves forward, yet the very building blocks from which these moments grow happens so quickly (or slowly) that I find myself wondering did they really happen at all? While the specific points, when I’m in the moment as folks like to say, still elicit the same cathartic emotional response, the longevity of the memories seems to get shorter and shorter. As if the drug like high can no sustain itself. It can no longer last.

Which begs the question, what does one have to do to keep the buzz going?