You never see it coming and you never hear it. There’s no obvious marker to acknowledge or route you can take to find it. Yet it’s out there, waffling among the molecules as they wrap themselves around your fairing while you fly around a curving slice of canyon ecstasy.
And when it hits – there’s no jarring effect, no fully compressed suspension, no unexpected side-to-side drift – just a deeply meaningful motherload moment of personal inspiration.
It’s the kind of jolt to your system that throws every circuit breaker on your body. A charge so powerful that it electrifies every aspect of your riding and reminds you in that one particular moment exactly what it is about this sport that means something to you on a personal level.
Now, it doesn’t happen on every ride – I wish it did – and perhaps it doesn’t even happen for every rider – but it does exists. And when it comes your way there’s a shock and an awe that holds the power to overwhelm the very things that you thought you knew when you woke up and the things that you wished you remembered for all of eternity.
For months it seems like I’ve been chasing a fantasy, maybe even a ghost, and yet when this kind of inspiration comes smacking itself upside your head in such a blatant and full tilt manor it’s hard to ignore its presence. It’s hard not to be pulled straight out of your helmet right in the middle of the ride and pulled straight up in to a third-person view of life that where the ‘real’ reveals itself as the very fantasy you were seeking in the first place.
For me, today was that day.
It wasn’t just a ride and wasn’t just a journey. It was something much more profound. Something much more meaningful. To be inspired is to believe that the best in life is real and at its core inspiration is the match that lights your inner creativity.
Of all the words in the dictionary, ‘creativity’ is perhaps the most elusive. There’s little that’s tangible about it and there’s no way to account for what spurs it on. What brings the ideas buried deeply within to the surface or when they will appear. It’s a concept that ebbs and flows with far less precision then the ocean tides. There’s no way to predict when it will come in or where it will go. There are no mathematical formulas that can help you find it either. No map, no GPS system, no chart. It’s just something that does what it pleases when it wants with a kind of uncertainty that forces you to try and explain its very presence.
But then you come across a day like today when it all just falls into place. When you’re forced to realize midway through the ride that there’s something beyond special about this kind of real-world, high adrenaline activity. Something that makes you fully aware while in the act of riding that this is the very inspiration you’ve been seeking.
For me, that inspiration is the allure of California.
There is something that lives and breaths here that I’ve never felt anywhere else in the world. Something that can be acknowledged in many places, but I personally can only feel when riding here. In just a few short enchanted hours it felt like I was everywhere at once – from incredible mountain tops with curvy roads, to flat plateaus that went on forever, to desolate and forgotten desert by-ways, to mountain lined valley roads. Sitting here now, it seems hard to believe that a two hundred mile trip could encompass so much scenery and so many monumental roads.
The view from the Eastern Side of Palomar Mountain
CA-79 North just outside of Warner Springs
On The South Grade of Palomar Mountain
The famed Mother’s Kitchen
The ‘9′ outside Mother’s Kitchen
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Palomar
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