Twisting Asphalt - A SoCal Ducati Motorcycle Blog

When I last left off it was around noon when MotorMilt and I left Los Olivos on Sunday’s Sport-Touring Sportbike Ride (Part 1).

We had stopped there for a few minutes to take a quick breather and rest the wrists from what already had become a rather lengthy morning ride for us. At this point we had already rolled up a good 150 to 175 miles and I sort of knew that we were beginning to enter that dangerous territory where we might be getting just a bit to far away for our own good. In many ways what had started out as a slightly longer than usual Sunday ride had more or less morphed into a single day’s adventure that would have felt right at home on one of our week long extending riding vacations. At some point we were simply going to have to turn around and head back…

Leaving Los Olivos I briefly flirted with the idea of just simply continuing North on The San Marcos Pass (Route 154) and getting back to the 101 Freeway heading South… But really what fun would that have been? Sometimes it seems to me that just as you physically and mentally have to push yourself on the track, you have to do the same thing with distance riding. You have to force yourself to break through those self-imposed walls inside your mind that say, ‘whoa… this is to far‘. Logically getting back on the 101 at this point probably would have been the smart choice, but emotionally I just simply couldn’t do it.

So instead of taking the easy way home, I forced MotorMilt to follow me as I took a sharp right hand turn just a few miles outside of Los Olivos and headed up Foxen Canyon Road.

As I had mentioned in part one of this utterly to long riding write up, the previous evening while playing around on the ‘net I had discovered the rather amazing Santa Barbara County based riding site, SBC Rides. The minute I found the site I knew I was either in serious trouble or complete bliss… Ten minutes on the site quickly turned into twenty, then thirty… Soon I was discovering whole new adventures. Sitting right before me on the computer monitor were a whole new collection of roads - most of which I’d never read about or seen on a map…

Of all the routes laid out on the site, the one that kept sticking in my mind was Foxen. The SBC Review was sounded remarkable…

Foxen Canyon Rd is yet another of my favorite rides in Santa Barbara County. It is 31.3 miles long, with a good portion of the ride on excellent road with light traffic. It also takes you through some fantastic scenery, right through the heart of wine country.

Having never really ventured to far off The San Marcos Pass, it seemed like it’d be a shame - if not a waste of the day - to be this close to riding it and not take advantage. So instead of doing the smart thing I pushed MotorMilt to go a little bit further and in retrospect it was the best decision of the day!

It only took a few miles to instantly realize that Foxen Canyon is just one of those super-fantastic California rides that everyone should experience at least once. Right off the bat it shoots you down between several extremely iconic SoCal meets Wild West looking farms before giving way to a series of sweepers that slowly rise you up and above the relatively open valley base. Before you know it civilization vanishes and if you’re like me, you don’t even realize until suddenly it’s all just gone. You’re quite literally surrounded by nothing… More ‘nothing’ exists here than I think I’ve ever felt in my entire life. It is simply an amazingly beautiful no-man’s land that forces you stand in awe of nature and the way I imagine California felt fifty or a hundred years ago. This is truly the land of Gene Autry, John Ford, and John Wayne. It takes little imagination to find yourself visualizing cattle rustlers out on the open range.

Somewhere along the route we stopped to take a breather and I was struck by the fact that the only noise I could hear was from the relatively mellow wind gusts that were intermittently floating across the valley. It was the riding equivalent of getting far enough away from the city lights to see all the stars that are out at night. With no noise, relatively no other traffic to speak of and a completely picturesque valley standing before my feet, I just could help but think how living in a concrete city completely warps your mind. Somehow when you drive everyday in LA you slowly begin to believe that the entire world has been paved over and yet nothing could be further from the truth. This valley is only around two hundred miles away from LA and it’s completely untapped… (Granted I’m sure it’s expensive as hell - but that’s another discussion ).

When we got back on the bikes we were able to only get a couple more miles up the road before my gas light decided to come on. This was perhaps the first of two strategic mistakes that MotorMilt and I made over the course of the day. We had talked about filling up the tanks in Los Olivos but hadn’t, partially due to a bit of laziness I think and partially because when I’d done a rough milage count on the various maps I felt we’d be alright for the roughly thirty miles that Foxen supposed last. Yet here we were riding through what has to truly be God’s country with reserve fuel light now lit up and virtually impossible to miss. Perhaps it’s a bit of target fixation on my part, but few things make me as nervous as the reserve fuel light being on when I’m riding the Duc. To be fair it’s never let me down, I just don’t trust it and I guess I’ve just come to question certain aspects of Italian engineering. Do they go fast - yes. Do they perform well when you ride them for sport - absolutely. But are they built like a BMW - not at all.

After passing a half dozen wineries and dealing with some less than stellar pot-holed parts of the road we came to the intersection of Foxen Canyon and Palmer Road. I hung a left on to Palmer and headed West. This sent us back towards the 101 once again. I had originally planned to have us continue up Foxen until we entered the Eastern side of the city of Santa Maria and have us gas up there. Then I thought we’d head back down South on the 101 so that we could pick up Palmer Road and get back to Foxen for the return trip home. Now what had been planned as the flipside of the trip was becoming our safety value to fuel! Palmer as it turned out was another hoot of a road to ride - but surprisingly slightly different than Foxen even though they’re so close to each other.

Instead of feeling like the almost endless collection of sweepers that rise and fall in elevation on Foxen Canyon, Palmer seemed to hold longer straight aways and higher elevation changes when you hit the corners. It’s a pretty short ride, but in many ways it felt a great deal faster. At one point I looked down and I was doing eighty-five without even knowing it or even trying… Eventually Palmer intersected the 101 - which to my surprise was now a two laned road. I guess it’s been awhile since I had been this far North and not on Interstate-5.

For some reason I had thought that the more country-road part of the 101 was above Santa Maria, not below it. As it turns out it starts in San Ynez and stays that way all the way until just before Santa Maria. In either case getting on to the 101, we headed North in search of fuel. Luckily it was only a few miles before I saw a tall Chevron sign off in the distance and we were save - so to speak. By the time we hit the station we’d ridden around 125 miles on one tank which is an all-time record for either MotorMilt or myself. So perhaps being that far out in the middle of no-man’s land taught us a bit more about the bikes…

After filling up three or four different people came up to us to ask about the bikes. I have to say it’s one of the unique things about the 999. Not everyone knows what they are, but for some reason they know they’re fast and they’re special. One guy came up to ask if he could take a cell phone picture of the bikes for his buddy. Now that’s a new one for me but hey what the hell… I guess the part that surprises me is not that people have reactions to them. I’m sure a lot of people have reactions - both good and bad - to motorcycles in general when they see them out on the road. But these are the first bikes I’ve ever owned or seen that ellict people to actively engage you in order to talk about them. One older couple came up to us and just wanted to know if they were loud. Another guy walked up and told us that he owned a Gullwing. A third guy just gave a thumbs up from his car. All within five minutes in the same gas station parking lot. Go figure.

Before we got back on the bikes Milt and I had a quick chat about our location. I could tell at this point that we were both starting to hit the lengthy ride wall. I would have had no qualms at this point had this been day 1 of a week long adventure and we were only a few miles away from our hotel for the night, but instead we were now several hundred miles away from home. Knowing all of this we started talking about how to get home. As I mentioned earlier I had sort of planned it out, but perhaps not as well as I should have. This was much more about getting up the coast than getting back down… Now as it turns out Santa Maria sits only a couple of miles away from Route 166 which you can take east to the Northern entrance of Route 33 as a way to get back down South to Ojai. Having ridden it a couple of times, it’s a pretty lengthy ride although usually traffic free and fairly wide open for higher speeds. All told it’s probably 100 to a 120 miles to get back to Ojai that way. Great ride, but just very lengthy. Taking the 101 South to Route 154 and then getting back on the 101 South in Santa Barbara again is a significantly shorter ride and at this point shorter seemed to sound better. I would say that this is where MotorMilt & I probably made our second strategic mistake of the day. We went for the shorter ride instead of thinking about how long we’d been on the bike and what they ment for traffic.

Heading down the 101 past Solvang ( where a very cool motorcycle museums resides ) we hit our first batch of traffic. This probably should have been a sign of things to come, but we ignored it and powered on towards Santa Barbara and Montecito. At this point the new found power of the broken in 999 was worthless and things were starting to get pretty hot under the seat. These bikes just aren’t designed for stop and go. Unless they’re rolling along at sixty or above they just don’t dig it. You can call it a racetrack oriented design or character or just plain hot when you’re stuck on a non-moving freeway. Eventually we navigated our way through Santa Barbara and decided to stop in Montecito for a late lunch.

After lunch is when everything went absolutely crazy. The 101 as it turns out was completely backed up heading out of Santa Barbara - then for brief stretches opened up - and the almost completely suddenly would shut back down to a crawl. By the time we got back to Ventura I thought the worst had to be behind us because from this point forward the 101 has 4 lanes, but as it turns out I was completely wrong. There was traffic everywhere. And it was the kind of late weekend traffic that seems bring out the nuttiness in people. Lane changes without looking. No turn signals. Late braking. I felt like I was stuck in a bad Drivers Ed video production. It almost felt like absolute chaos. So when we hit the PCH and found it to be relatively free of traffic around Point Magu, I was overjoyed. Finally I thought, ‘we can relax a bit’… Again, I was completely mistaken. Turns out in Malibu there was a pretty serious accident. Multiple ambulances and cars facing the wrong direction on the otherside of the road. Big mess. Cars were backed up for miles. Luckily - if you can call it that - we must have hit the scene relatively soon after it happened because by the end of the day the PCH was apparently backed up all the way back the 101. That’s like 30 miles. ( I wasn’t there obviously, but this is what I heard fwiw)…

So by the time we got home I felt in many ways lucky to be alive. We had been out on the bikes for over 12 hours over the course of the day. That’s definately an all-time record for MotorMilt and I. We had ridden somewhere around 340 miles - I think perhaps even a touch more. Again an all-time record for us. We had been out in no-man’s land, carving corners on curvey twisty roads, fighting rush hour traffic, and seeing so much of California. All in one day on the sportiest sporrtbikes either one of us has ever owned. It was just absolutely amazing.

Forgetting all the late afternoon chaos, I have to say that this was simply one of those wonderful rides that felt almost completely unreal. As if it just couldn’t possible have happened. It should have been to long and to far. Instead it was just right. If could have removed the traffic issues at the end of the day it would have be absolutely perfect, but even with them it was still an amazing adventure that just went on and on and on. Perhaps most remarkable was the fact that after getting out of the BMW sport-touring game I wasn’t sure if I’d ever get to experience that type of riding again while owning a 999 and yet I did. By the end of the day I felt rather beat physically, but emotional it was amazing. To get that far north and feel so much freedom was remarkable. I wish I could bottle that feeling and save it for the rest of the week. By the time the day wrapped up I felt like every issue, every worry, every part of life that I can’t control had vanished because of the sheer power of the ride and the amount of focus it takes to do it safely.

All told this has been one insanely amazing collection of rides for me lately. By my rough count I’ve put around 900 miles on the new Diva over just a ten day stretch. During which I’ve covered the greater LA basin from it’s far Northwestern corner all the way to it’s Eastern Mountain range and a whole bunch of canyons inbetween. I’ve had the chance to stop at some of the most amazing motorcycle hangouts I can think of - Newcomb’s, The Rockstore and The Cold Spring Tavern - and I’ve had a ton of time to get lost in such a wonderfully good way. And to think early last week I had no idea this was going to happen but in a fantastically organic way it just did and I feel so thankful for that… All I can say is just ‘WOW’….

More picts from the day can be found in the Santa Barbara’05 Photo Gallery.

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