Being a kid again…

Josh's photo of me this morning...note the high tech electrical tape camera mount!

Motorcycles make grown men and women act like little kids.  You know it’s true.   There’s just something about hopping on a motorcycle that peels away the years and turns you into a kid again.

Need proof?  Okay…my buddy John Welker is a guy I’ve ridden with for 20 years.  He’s a fellow Baja explorer.  I’m 60.  John is just a little bit younger than me.   The point here is this:  We ain’t kids.  But we sure act like kids…especially when we’re on our motorcycles.

John and I were down in Baja on the KLRs a couple of years ago honking through the Vizcaino desert when I spotted a tarantula.  Gotta stop for that, right? 

Yep, so here’s these two geezers (uh, that would be John and yours truly) stopped in the middle of nowhere fooling around with a spider the size of a good meal.   This is something mature adults do all the time, right?  It’s not like we’re acting like little kids or anything.   Right?

We got a few photos and then John, for reasons I can only guess at, decided to kneel down in front of this big hairy spider to get a better look.   Face to face, so to speak.  With about 18 inches between them.  That’s when we found out just how fast tarantulas are.  Trust me on this…they’re fast enough to turn geezers into sprinters and make them scream like a couple of little kids.  And then laugh like a couple of maniacs for a long time afterwards. 

My good buddy John standing by my KLR after we had recovered from being chased by the guy in the photo below. John rides a red CSC Classic now, and he is a CSC Affiliate in the Tampa area.

Our buddy Quentin, who has a summer home in Baja's Vizcaino Desert and gets around pretty well

Want more proof?   Okay.  Today, we went for a little putt up on Glendora Ridge Road on our California Scooters…Steve, Josh, Tom, and me.   I caught a lot of video with my little Flip camera and an improvised helmet mount.  I’ll put together a longer video later, but I thought I’d share this one with you first.   As we were riding along, Steve pulled into a clearing on the side of the road, and then he stopped so quickly I thought he was gonna drop his bike.   Why? 

Well, here ya go…four grown men acting like kids again…motorcycles just do that to you…

After running the length of Glendora Ridge Road, we had a great lunch at the Mt. Baldy Lodge, and then we headed back down the mountain.  I’ve got the entire trip on video, and judging by the speed of my YouTube uploads, it’s gonna take about a zillion hours to get it on the Internet.  I’ll play with it a bit and upload the highpoints later.  It was a fun ride.  It was my first big ride in months.  It was beyond great.  I had a lot of fun.  I always do.  Basically, I’m a 60-year-old teenager.

And that snake…it’s a Pacific gopher snake.  Non-venomous.  But it was still exciting.  Like being a little kid again.  Motorcycles do that to you.