During the US Round of World SuperBike (SBK) Ducati Owners Club, arranged a preview of the Talbot Motorcycle Museum for club members. It was a great, warm and sunny evening in Carmel Valley, amongst some amazing motorcycles!
If you ride a motorcycle, and have never been to California, you are truly missing out on one of the best places in the United States to ride a motorcycle. PERIOD.
Here a few photos from various places along a ride I took yesterday from Santa Cruz, CA, to Lucia,CA:
We met up with the remainder of the group in Carmel.
View Larger Map
We gassed up the bikes and prepared ourselves (with more caffeine of course) for what was about to transpire. Rich (on the 916) took the time to model his man-sack for us. I hear it’s last word in manly riding apparel for the Central Coast.
From here on our, it was Ride like the Wind all the way to Lucia. We did stop once to regroup, turn on the video cameras and discuss the awesomeness so far:
The first of many great surprises on this ride, was our lunch destination in Lucia. Ah.. what a view! What a great place to relax after a spirited ride up Hwy 1.
Next stop. Nepenthe in Big Sur. Despite a hair raising incident with an inattentive tourist in a rental car, we made it there without obvious injury. Despite the fact that the highway was the destination and the star of the day, this pulled off a pretty convincing 2nd place.:
What a fantastic ride today. Perfectly organized (or properly disorganized?) group. It’s always a blast to right with these guys and gals. Looking forward to our next epic excursion!!
PS. Video will be added to the blog as soon as I can clear 132 GB of space on a computer, somewhere.
Last night we had the 2nd meeting up of the Nor Cal Ducati Club this evening in at Cibo, in Monterey CA.. It was a nice evening, warm, sunny and the food was quite enjoyable, but the company made it all worth the ride. And a bit of a challenging ride it was!
I met up with Dimitri on his cool Monster900 (a deal may be in the works soon!), at the Vista Point on Highway 1, for the ride to Monterey.
We waited a little while to try and catch a couple of riders coming down from the North Bay, but by 5:30 PM we decided it was time to head south. We didn’t make it far before we were caught in a massive traffic jam on Hwy 1. It was a virtual parking lot, we were going nowhere.
Fortunately we both knew of an alternate route and turned around on Hwy1. By the time we reached Castroville, the traffic heading north was also backed up for miles. A check of the local news sources didn’t reveal the cause of all this chaos, but I heard that at least one person was life-flighted from and accident scene on the highway.
We arrived in Monterey a little later than planned but it was no matter, there were two parking spots for us in front of Cibo, so we pulled in, popped off the helmets and met up with the southern contingent of the Nor Cal Ducati Club. It was nice little array of fine Italian machines on display:
Thanks to The Bear for setting this all up. Looking forward to the next Ducati Bike Night.