There was a twinge of summeritis hanging in the air. Carloads of kids were heading out to camp grounds, swimming pools and mountain trails. Stacked five deep in heavily loaded minivans, they ambled up the grade, confiscating the curving asphalt one bend at a time. Until what remained to exploit was little more then minor gashes of straightness. It seemed the regularly empty roadway had become a hub of mass transit for the camper crowd.
And so started my Friday escape.

With summer having hitting full stride and the work week wrapping up a tad early, around 11 in the morning I had the inspiration to close things down, gear up and hit the road. Perhaps foolishly thinking that it was a good time to grab some lunch up at Mother’s Kitchen on the top of Palomar.

As it turned out, the food was great, the ride wasn’t quite what I had in mind.

On a day when all I wanted to do was to relax and unwind, it felt damn near impossible to lose myself on the bike. And not for the normal reasons - usually when I have trouble relaxing it’s because my head is filled to the brim with a never ending to-do list or the ever present things going on at work - But yesterday none of that was true. I was held up not by my head, but rather by the road.

There was just to much of everything going on all at once to feel calm. To much interference, to many other folks, and way too much heat. Nearly triple digit temps that even at eighty miles per hour felt like bathing in molten lava.

Sitting inside at Mother’s, I flashed back to heading up to the top of Palomar for the very first time. It was just about a year ago when I first moved down to this part of SoCal. Since then it’s been a rollercoaster of a life, filled with lots of travel and little free time spent at home. Unlike previous years when I had the time to hit the canyons nearly every weekend, this year I’ve ridden far more away from home then near it. Subsequently I find myself still feeling rather uneasy with the roads down here, still finding my way around, trying to discover where the great asphalt lies. It’s both a blessing and curse. Fun because there’s always the opportunity for discovery and adventure. Annoying, because on a day like yesterday, when you simply want to ‘ride’ and wish to escape, I still really don’t know where to go. No matter how many message boards I surf or maps I examine, finding the kind of curves that speak to your soul isn’t as simple as going down to the nearest big box store and picking up a package of curvy corners.

After lunch, having spent some time pondering the past year, I felt determined to try and salvage the day. So I deviated from my now normal path back home and instead followed the universal riding principal to head towards the top of the nearest mountain you can see, towards hopefully curving sections of asphalt. Usually this theory works. But as if to add injury to insult, not yesterday. Not on a day when I really needed it to work. Instead of saving the day, instead all I managed to do was make it worse. Much worse.

Instead of finding new corners to conquer, I managed to stumble into the middle of a gigantic and rather contiguous orange grove that seemed to go on forever. I had no idea just how many oranges SoCal produces… When it finally dawned on me that perhaps I ought to turn around, I was so backwards that I didn’t even know how to get back to where I just was. Which is perhaps the most practical deifintion of being lost. Eventually I ended up on not one, but two separate freeways that I never even knew existed.

By the time I finally pulled into the driveway back home, I had ridden a little over 150 miles — Only a mere 20 of which were actually curvy. As anyone with a sportbike will tell you, that’s a horrific Riding Ratio. The kind of mathematical equation which makes you shake your head at whomever coined the axiom, ‘any day riding is better then not riding at all’ because clearly they were completely out of their mind.