Awkward Dance Partners - The Ducati ST3 & MV Agusta F4 up The California Coast

California Route 33 above Ojai

At first there’s one. A second later comes another… And then all hell breaks loose, as a cascade of perspiration rolls forward with vengeance. It’s the first real tangible clue that you’re getting close; close to the middle of nowhere and close to California’s Central Valley in the middle of summer.
Coming out of yet another series of contiguous sweeping corners, you feel the slight ache in your wrist - because it’s already been a long day - but instead of falling victim to your inner demons you press on. Ignore the pain. There’s just too much bounty to be had here. The sirens of an empty road are far to captivating as they call out.

So you roll the throttle back. A minuet movement in a landscape of grandeur. Once again feel the bike pick itself up and hustle forward as it shoots up the short straightaway that connects this twist with that twist and a moment later you remember to exhale before getting right back on the brakes, settling the suspension back down and diving into yet another arched asphalt form of serenity.
It’s a fast paced dance done with a mountain top. You throttle up, you throttle down. You duck, you dive, you pick it back up. You brake. Perhaps you even continue breathing.

And as the pace quickens so to does the transformation. Not of riding but rather life.
What had been a scenic route splitting bundled patches of pine tree derivatives quickly evolves. In minutes, or maybe just heartbeats, you rip through another banked corner and crest a 5,160-foot summit of dreams.

On the other side lies a stark and desolate arena. The average visitor might think it far to remote and well past dull to bother with, yet for an actively engaged motorist it is an untroubled paradise full of unique forms of individual adventure and challenge.

Welcome to the Southern edge of California’s Central Valley.

The landscape is harsh and dry, built on brush and cattle, tumbleweeds and water prudent oak trees. A place far removed from the concrete jungle and yet fairly dependant on it for survival. To live or work here is to languish in an alternate version of society, more Steinbeck then Grisham, where the quality of the water pump in your pick-up truck is far more important then the latest magazine cover girl.

It is also a place that time has forgotten and yet still hit hard nonetheless. Where every hundred miles empty retail spaces battle big-box stores for supremacy and conflict runs deep, which somehow encapsulates both the best and the worst of the Golden State all in one place. Everywhere you look the hopes, the dreams, the challenges, the exploration, and even dire hopelessness are blatantly apparent trends.

Yet life still goes on. Moves forward. Boiling upwards, inch by inch, in a thousand degree melting pot of that exists on the fringe of civilization.

A day later I swing the other extreme, subtly freezing as I watch seagulls dance just a short fragment off the coastline and the last drip of coffee tries its best to push past the lingering memories of a long last night. A quick wick the throttle and a different beast fires forward as a bucket of aspirin takes hold. The engine’s suggestive notes find instant traction. On the road and in my mind. Each millimeter of piston movement brings out a louder, deeper, more hideous wailing. A sound so strong it forcibly removes the thumping headache and matter of factly tosses it down on the road. For all to see and hear and trample. It’s the kind of evocative auditory experience that only comes from a bullish inline four cylinder that’s cracking its raw fists on the skull of an open road… And absolutely laughing about it afterwards.

Just like that I’m awake — But better yet, I’m alive.

Thanks in large part to the combination and contradiction of two completely distinctive types of riding – One which elicits sheer passion while the other remotely suggests it. Together they bend the rules of life and their associated meanings; forcing the yellow lines that divide us to vanish as the cool damp early morning fog evaporates in a mere moment.

This is a radical departure from my usual trips up the California Coastline — because I’ve never cruised up the coast on a true thoroughbred before…

Logically I’ve always held the belief that inside every machine is the perfect tool for a particular job and it’s foolish to ask a sportbike to do a touring task. Conceptually the idea of taking a full-blown sportbike up the coast has always seemed rather suicidal at best. The reasons and rationales range from the physical toll they take on a rider all the way to the unforeseen mechanical hiccups that could, and often times do, occur with trackday weapons are used on public roads.

Yet the older I get the less inclined I am to allow logic to infiltrate an arena of passion. If for no other reason then everything else in the day-to-day of the real world is completely and one hundred perfectly logical. And somewhere deep inside I keeping trolling over one basic core thought – If not now, when?

A half hour later while shooting up CA-46, which is an inland oasis of an open road, the traffic is surprisingly light for an upcoming MotoGP weekend that will take place in Monterey. Brilliantly crisp vineyards fly by on both sides as we burn through California’s Central Coast wine country on two rather awkward dancing partners; the old man’s brand new MV Agusta F4 and my trusty Ducati ST3. Neither is the perfect 1,000-mile adventurer yet they might just be the most fun for a joint trip covering a collection of remarkably empty and remote curving roads.

Coming around the next kink in California’s landscape of tarmac armor, I flash backwards eleven days and think how ridiculous this all must seem. A little less then two weeks ago the old man and I hit the track where one might have thought that we would have gotten our fill of getting our rocks off on the fast paced sportbike ethos. Yet we didn’t. Instead a strange thing happened on the way home.
We decided to let go of logic and instead starting formulating a plan entirely designed by passion.
The F4 was just too enjoyable – and to be honest, probably too new - to leave in the garage… So we left Buttonwillow openly talking about ratcheting up the stakes on our coming California coastal adventure. Could it make it Monterey? Could we survive it if it did?

We had no idea.

But it was a gamble that seemed worth taking. So we did something that even now strikes me as somewhat flawed. We left a perfectly good and capable sport-tourer in the garage, the BMW K1200RS, and instead flew the coop with one full-blown sportbike and one seriously sporty sport-tourer.
Our plan; A multiday escapade over and through some of California’s finest routes, starting with Central Valley staples CA-33 and CA-58, followed by the more coastal CA-41, CA-46, and inland avenues of chance G14 and G17, and then finally the mother of all great California roads, CA-1, which is better known as the Pacific Coast Highway. And that was before we started all over and did it again in reverse.

It’s a journey that over the past few years I’ve had the pleasure to attempt several different times – The old man however hasn’t been as fortunate for a variety of reasons, most of which center around time or the lack thereof. But motorcycles are about more then just tracks and canyons; they’re also about escapism as well. So once we committed to attending the GP races at Laguna this year we decided it was time to take a different kind of journey together – a more mellow, free-flowing amble North, which traversed both dreamlike scenery as well as our collective past.

Entering Lockwood, we stop at the aptly named Lockwood Store for a BSB break (butt-smoke-bathroom) and snap a few pictures. It’s a slightly surreal experience. Because we’re in effect retracing our previous steps. Our first great California road trip adventure rolled right through here and it’s surprisingly odd to stand in exactly the same spot you did eight or nine years ago in a seemingly remote part of the world and realize that while nothing has changed here, everything else in life has.

And then there are the bikes…

Eight or nine years ago we rolled through here on two BMW R1100S sport-tourers. At the time they seemed like the epitome of the perfect riding companions. Looking at the ST3 and the F4 that seems like a long, long time ago.

“This is a very different trip,” MotorMilt says, while running his hand over the tank of the F4, “and we’ve come a long way since then”.

All I can do is acknowledge the sentiment with a smirk as he smiles and says, “These are just a hell of a lot more fun”…

Both bikes offer a more fluid system of travel then the Beemers did; yet when compared to each other they are radically different animals. The ST presents a unique blend of both speed and semi-comfort while pushing the sport side of the sport-touring equation to the forefront of the category’s inherent compromise between the two extremes.

The F4 on the other hand is completely uncompromising to say the least. It’s a full-blown racing bike that just happens to have mirrors and lights. Everything about it is harsh. Hard. And uncomfortable. The footpegs feel like they’re stacked against the exhaust, the seat is the antichrist of plush, and the only seating position that feels remotely comfortable is a completely tuck.

Yet what this bike lacks in creature comforts it more then makes up for in wicked acceleration, awesome exhaust notes and remarkable handling. The bike just feels completely planted. All the time. It’s a freakishly secure feeling that’s night and day different then any of the Ducati Superbikes I’ve ridden, including the 1098S. On the F4 it feels as if you’ve got a holy ghost lingering above and watching your every move as you attack each successive corner. The chassis feels so solid that seems damn near impossible to upset it unless you’ve done something completely idiotic.

Of course the irony of idiocy on this bike is that it’s only a throttle advance away.
Twist your right wrist and you thrust the machine forward so fast that even a GPS enable iPhone accelerometer has trouble keeping up. The bike just hauls. Flat out and with idiocy in tow.
Just in case the warp speed disappearance of the landscape surrounding you confuses your visual sensory perception, there’s also a series of auditory battlefield explosions as well. The four organ-like pipes in the back bellow out such a nasty, evil, downright scary wail that both big and little critters alike flee in fear.

Stacked next to the 1098S it’s a very different riding experience. Far less fluid and far more point and shoot. Where the ’10’ feels torquey, the F4 feels defiant. Making such a loud and demonic noise that it makes mothers across the country to cringe in terror. The 1098S lets you delicately dance into and out of apexes where as the F4 cracks heads like sledgehammer, never losing sight of the fact that it’s got somewhere else to be.

An hour later I am somewhere else, as I take a slow drag from the smoke and suck down my eighth vitamin enriched energy drink of the day. Glancing at the digital clock in the dash it’s hard to fathom that it’s not even noon yet — Already my sense of time and space has been lost, much like contemporary society’s awareness of the true roots of California.

Looking out at a collection of wide-open fields surrounded by rolling hills and mammoth mountains in the distance, the old man smirks, “It always amazes me how empty most of California is,” he says before matching my puff of smoke with his own, “I think we tend to forget about that sometimes”…
He’s right; the enduring legacy of California isn’t the marvelous technological advancements, the Disneyland theme parks or the beacon like draw of the Hollywood scene that continually draws thousands of young dreams each year, rather the permanent fixture of the State is what’s missing in a pristine undisturbed landscapes. There are no hands-free gizmos sprouting out of anyone’s ear nor the rushed sensibility to trade your gas guzzler in for a hybrid so you can sleep better at night, instead just an honest panorama that’s not all that far removed from our pre-technology existence.
California’s Central Valley isn’t just physically at the state’s core but emotionally as well. This is the land of classic California virtue. Where dreams drift in the soft summer breeze and potential is allowed to amble undisturbed until it’s ready to come to fruitarian. What exists here today is completely indicative of what used to exist everywhere and the more you peer over the landscape, the clearer it becomes that something tragically got lost in our society’s evolution from the past to the present.

I’m not completely sure what that exactly is but each time I step foot in this Valley there is a sense of peacefulness and comfort that you could spend a lifetime searching for in the big cities and never find. A sensibility of hard work and determination scratched on people’s faces that echo’s the founding of this great nation not the current sense of elite entitlement broadcast nightly on E!

Six days after setting out I’m flush with fear when entering LA County again. While I’m still physically on the bike, I’m no longer not actually riding it. Instead I’ve already made the mental leap towards re-entering the ‘real world’. Something I feel inherently loath to do right now, but I know I must. Because that’s the way it works when you grow up. When you have bills to pay and tasks to do.
As the traffic thickens, I feel my lower back start to tighten up. The muscles squeezing the nerves for all there net worth. It’s not a comfortable sensation by any means, but then the last leg of a thousand mile adventure almost always ends in some sort of ailment.

Yet today the physical toll that the trip has taken is the least of my worries.

Rather it’s the never-ending game of mental catch up that I’m frantically playing that’s drawing my attention as I try to deduce what I’ve now got to get done while still expressively coming to grips with where I’ve just been. What I’ve just seen. Who I might be.

It’s an inherently unstable moment to say the least and one that leaves me wondering why the ride home always feels both completely premature in its arrival and yet long over due at the same time?
But then I suppose all great rides ultimately are comprised of a mixed bag of emotions. On one hand, you never want to see them end and yet on the other hand there’s definitely a physical and mental ceiling that you hit. Especially when one of the bikes you’ve chosen for the particular task is the completely wrong tool for the job from a logical standpoint.

Of course common sense only gets you so far in this world and in the space of the past eleven days, from the trackday at Buttonwillow to this trip up the coast, the old man and I have gone from one extreme of the motorcycle persona to the other, battling and conquering the vast differences between logic and insanity.

Without a doubt my non-riding friends would say that taking a bike, any bike, to a track is an insane endeavor. Yet my guess is that they would completely understand the appeal of a good ol’fashion road trip – even if it is on a bike.

Yet as the road buckles down and the traffic comes to a halt, it occurs to me that these two divergent extremes of the motorcycle experience are exactly the opposite. The time we spent at Buttonwillow was all about the application of logic. Perfecting the art form of proficient riding. Taking two Italian motorcycles on a thousand mile journey up and down the coast on the other hand isn’t just an adventure – It’s also just plain nuts.

And it’s also a personal fantasy come to life.

For all the times I’ve ridden up and down the coastline, I never done it the way I’ve really wanted to – on a full blown sportbike that has a wicked engine, killer brakes and instinctive handling. Instead I’ve always bent to convention or at least logic and taken a sport-tourer of one kind or another. To finally make this sort of fantastical mental image come to life is something that’s worth any and all residual back pain and leaves me thinking that perhaps the axiom of the right tool for the right job is incorrect at its core. Maybe, just maybe, sometimes we need to choose the wrong tool for the right job in order to make dreams come true.

Aug 09, 2008 | Categories: Headline, Rides, Top Rides | Tags: Adventure, CA Route 1, CA Route 168, CA Route 33, CA Route 41, CA Route 46, CA Route 58, Ducati ST3, Journey, Laguna Seca, Lockwood California, Morro Bay, MotorMilt, MV Agusta F4 1000R, Pacific Coast Highway, Sport-Touring, Taft California | 2 Comments »