CSC Blog

About those photos I promised earlier…here’s the first batch.  It’s Sunday here and it is a quiet day, so I walked a couple of miles along the river after enjoying the typical morning feast featured in every 5-star Asian hotel…

There was way more food in the breakfast buffet this morning than what I’m showing you above.   I only shot photos of what I sampled.  I suppose I could have a little fun and tell you that the upper left photo is something exotic like slices of shark intestines.   Nope, they are just onion rings (and they were good).   I had a very early breakfast, I read a bit (I’m on to Jeremy Kroeker’s Motorcycle Messengers book now), and I just kicked back and enjoyed my morning meal.  Like I always say, life’s tough and this is a tough job, but hey, somebody’s gotta do it!

A heads up here, folks:  I didn’t bring my Nikon with me on this trip.  Everything you’ll see on here today is from my iPhone.   I’ve had guys tell me that you can get photos from an iPhone as good as the ones you get from a Nikon.  I’m here to tell you that just ain’t so.  I can see the difference.   I had to try it, though.  On my next trip, it’s back to the Nikon for me!

I shot all of the photos in this post along the Singapore River, except for this one.   Take a look at this, my friends.   It’s a vintage mid-’60s CB160 Honda, and it’s still doing its duty as a daily driver!  It was parked in the Muslim Quarter on Arab Street here in Singapore.  Wow!  I’ll have more photos of it for you in the next blog.

Okay, so back to the Singapore River.  I grabbed a cab down to Clarke Quay (the Singaporeans pronounce “Quay” as “Key”)…

As near as I can tell, there are three or four of these “Quay” areas in Singpore, and I think the term means something like “dock area.”   The only boats that hang out there now are tourist river cruise affairs, and the entire area is basically a restaurant river walk sort of arrangement.  I imagine the place really hops at night.

So, how do you read this sign?  Does it require the folks in Clarke Quay to consume the entire booze inventory by the posted times?

More photos along the Singapore River…

This guy was out for a Sunday morning bike ride with his dog…

Yep.  Mi casa es su casa.  Just like home…

I even saw a Mexican restaurant that was advertising Taco Tuesday.  In Singapore.  Go figure.  I’m tempted to try one of these places just to see how their Mexican food compares to the real thing.   I’m convinced that the best Mexican food is to be found in a few spots in California and most of Texas.  Mexico has a few good spots, too.  But Tex-Mex is the best.

Here’s a motor officer.   The engine looks like a CG derivative of some sort, similar in design to our TT250.

There are four languages in Singapore:   Malay, Mandarin, Hindi, and English, mostly reflecting the ethnicities I saw here this morning.   Singapore is a multicultural city.  One of the cab drivers told me the dominant religions also reflect the population (Buddhism, Chistianity, Hindu, and Islam).

In some places the walk along the Singapore River has steps that go right down to the water.   This sign was at the edge of the last step.   I wondered about the story that led to a sign like this.   Maybe some guy fell in the river and told folks he didn’t realize he was on the last step.   It could happen, I suppose.

Here’s my obligatory selfie.   There were these huge polished domes outside the Museum of Asian Civilizations.  Singapore has a lot of museums.

The Cavenagh Bridge, and another interesting sign.   The bridge made me think about our good buddy Jim Cavanaugh, a key guy in helping Steve resurrect the old Mustang motorcycle.

More bright colors.  Singapore is the cleanest city I’ve ever experienced.   You can’t chew gum here, and the sidewalks show that (they’re spotless).   The city has lots of color.   It’s a very green place (I’m not trying to be politically correct here; the place actually is very green with many parks, trees, and other plant life).   Many of the buildings are painted in vivid pastel colors.   There doesn’t appear to be any air pollution, and the sky is a vivid bright blue.  It’s a great place for taking photos.

A motorcycle with a sidecar used as a food cart.   That little bike was hauling a lot of weight!

One more photo of one of the many night spots along the river.   I liked it….a P51 Mustang mockup outside a bar…very cool indeed.

After I walked along the river in in the Clarke Quay area for a couple of hours, I grabbed a cab and went to Singapore’s Muslim Quarter.  I wanted Middle Eastern food for lunch, and I got what I wanted.  But that’s a topic for the next blog post (which I’ll get to later today or tomorrow).   As always, stay tuned!

16 hours…that’s the time difference between Los Angeles and Singapore.  It’s 5:00 a.m. Sunday morning over here and 1:00 p.m. Saturday afternoon back at the plant.   16 hours.  And it took a little over 19 hours to fly here.   So I’m wondering…does that mean it only took 3 hours to get from LA to Singapore? Or that I flew into the future? It’s all so confusing. I know things will clear up as I continue to savor that cup of instant coffee I just brewed in my Singapore hotel room…my very own version of a Singapore Sling. I’ve got a day to kick around before the serious secret mission stuff starts, and I may visit the actual bar where the Singapore Sling was invented. We’ll see.

It certainly has been an interesting 12 months.  Last year at this time I was getting ready to ride in Colombia, and I sure had a fantastic time on that ride with my buddies Juan and Carlos.   Colombia was one hell of a ride, and my RX3 (actually, my loaner bike from AKT Motos) performed magnificently as we rode through Colombia’s Andes Mountains and the coastal lowlands.

It’s amazing how much of the world is out there that I had never heard of, and then once I visit a place, I seem to hear about it on a regular basis.  Sam Manicom, in his excellent book Distant Suns, wrote about his ride through magnificent Colombia and he mentioned the city of Zipaquira (among many other places).  I want to return to Colombia with my wife someday just to explore that city.  Really.  Zipaquira.  It has a magnificent underground cathedral carved out of a salt deposit that I missed on the trip last December, and now I want to return just to see that.  And I had never heard of the cathedral or Zipaquira before my ride with Juan and Carlos.

And yet another Colombian location…Antioquia.   It was another place I never knew existed, but we rode right through it.   There was a special on the TV show 60 Minutes this past weekend about a disease prevalent in Antioquia, and I knew the region when they spoke about it on that show.  I even recognized the architecture and several of the street scenes in the show.  It was indeed amazing.

We had two great Baja rides last year.  One was our normal Spring Break Baja run down to the see the whales.   I think I am either getting used to these tours or I am getting better at organizing them, because that ride was genuinely fun and stress free for me.   We saw and did a lot.  You’ve no doubt seen this video before, but because it is one of my favorites, I’ll show it here just in case you haven’t seen it…

Our second Baja adventure last year was the run through southern California down to Tecate, San Felipe, and Ensenada on the TT250s.   That ride was a hoot and I thoroughly enjoyed myself.   We had a great bunch of guys and we ran a great route on a great new bike…here’s the video from that adventure…

So I’ve got three motorcycles in my garage right now, and the TT250 is the one I am riding the most.  Many of our friends who buy the TT250 own several motorcycles, and I’m hearing the same thing from them…their TT250s are the bike of choice.   There’s something about the TT that makes it special.   I know I love mine, and I’m glad I got the black one (it is the fastest color, you know).  The white ones are fast, too, and I think we are down to less than 10 of them now on our special deal to close out the 2016 models.   I’m guessing by the time I get back to the US they’ll all be gone.

Oh, I can’t forget about the secret mission in Turkey a few months ago when I met with  several Turkish RX3 riders (the “Young Turks,” I call them).   That was a hoot, too.   One of these days we are going to do an RX3 circumnavigation of the Black Sea.   That will be another stellar motorcycle adventure ride.   It’s what owning an RX3 is all about!

Of course, there was the grand-daddy of them all, the magnificent ride across China last summer.

The China ride was the grandest adventure of my life, and I’ve had more than a few grand adventures in the six and a half decades I’ve been on this planet.  I find myself thinking about the ride across China, the Colombia ride, our Baja rides, and more stuff related to my moto adventures these days when I am not on the motorcycle.  Daydreaming, I guess you’d calling it.

China was just incredible.  It was real Indiana Jones stuff.   The recently-discovered Eighth Wonder of the Ancient World (that would be Xi’an’s Terra Cotta soldiers).   The not-so-Asian-appearing folks from Liqian (where the lost Roman legions settled 2000 years ago).   The mystical town of Seda, high up on the Tibetan Plateau.   The lost Buddhist temples carved into the cliffs at Mo Gao.   Camels in the Gobi Desert.   The food in China…spectacular is not a strong enough adjective to describe it.   And lots more.   Those 6000 miles spread across 37 days covered some of the best riding of my life.

The best part of all of the above?   Hey, that one’s easy to answer:  It’s knowing that there’s a lot more coming.  More Baja rides.  Our ride across the US this summer.   Maybe even Africa this summer.   All of it on CSC motorcycles.   Hey, you!   Yeah, you!   Don’t you want to put yourself in this picture?

I’m off to Singapore on another secret mission tomorrow (don’t tell anyone).  Singapore is an interesting place…it’s kind of like Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills.  Fancy stores, exotic cars, fancy hotels, and more.   It’s a quick trip (I’ll be in and out), and hopefully I’ll be out before my body adjusts to Asia time.   Last time after I came back from Asia (after the 6000-mile China ride) I turned right around and flew to Turkey for a few days.   When I returned from those two back-to-back trips, it took a solid 6 weeks for me to adjust to California time.  The insomnia was rough, but I finally got over it.

I’m reading another one of Sam Manicom’s great books (this one is Distant Suns), and I am thoroughly enjoying it.  I’ll finish Distant Suns on the plane tomorrow.  Sam sure tells a great tale.  Part of Sam’s ride was in Colombia (he covered nearly all of South America), and Sam visited many of the same cities I did on my Moto Colombia expedition.   Colombia is an awesome place and Sam’s book is an awesome read.  I recommend you get a copy; I know you will enjoy it.

I spent a little bit of time on the rifle range shooting my .45 70 Marlin earlier this week, and I have the shoulder to prove it.  Wow, that puppy can kick!  After shooting a few groups to get the sights dialed in (I had not fired this rifle in several years), I shot three more 3-shot groups and I am feeling pretty good about my Marlin.  I love the 1895 Marlin and I am a big fan of the .45 70 cartridge.    The .45 70 is nearly 150 years old (it was originally a US Army round starting in the 1870s) and it’s still a great performer.   The story is that if your gun breaks, you can use the cartridge as a club.  Good times.

Back to motorcycles for a minute….we’re down to a handful of 2016 RX3s and TT250s, so if you want one with our no shipping/no setup/no doc fee deal, don’t wait.   Oh, one more cool thing:  The test RZ3s will arrive in California while I am in Asia.  I’ll get photos and a video of the RZ3 up on the blog sometime late next week.

That’s all for now, folks.  Watch for the photos from Singapore!

Joe Gresh topping his tank prior to riding into the Gobi Desert.

I like to ride, I like to write, and I like to read.   My favorite reading always involves motorcycles and it’s been that way as long as I can remember.   Videos are okay, photos are cool, but a well-written piece about riding is just what the doctor ordered.   My favorite writers?   I like Dave Barr’s books about his adventure travels (Riding the Edge is easily the best adventure travel story I’ve ever read), my favorite magazine is Motorcycle Classics (a real magazine with lots of high gloss pages and real stories about classic motorcycles), and my favorite columnist is Joe Gresh.  It’s not just that I know Joe or that I’ve traveled with him; the guy is just flat good and his stories are funny as hell.  Consider this line from one of his first pieces about a ride to Alaska, when he and his dad performed major surgery on Joe’s Honda in an Alaskan dealer’s parking lot…

The dealership’s mechanic buoyed our spirits by saying things like, “Last time we ordered a part, it took six weeks” and “Two guys on motorcycles were killed by a grizzly bear a mile from here.”

If you want a free treasure trove, I found a compendium of Joe’s work online and you can get there by clicking this link.   It’s good stuff, my friends.  Enjoy.

…and it was a cool place.  The crowds were jam packed (lots and lots of shoppers), and security was heavy because of the nature of the world we live in.   I was there with my family and my trusty D3300, and I grabbed a few photos for the blog.

One of the more interesting things I saw were the motor officers.  It was a cool night up here, but a good night to be on a motorcycle.  The SFPD uses Harleys and (get this) DRZ-400 Suzukis (“because we can go up and down stairs on them”).  Cool stuff…

We had a good time, including a dinner in Chinatown.  It wasn’t nearly as good as the dinners in China I enjoyed with my Chinese brothers, but it was pretty good for an American Chinese restaurant.  I bought a new wallet (a Tumi, the best there is) because the humidity did mine in on the China ride last summer.   I had a lot of fun walking around.  I love San Francisco.  I am definitely looking forward getting home, though, and riding my TT250.   I’m not going to ride up and down any stairs, but I’ll bet I could if I had to…

I hope your day was as nice as mine.  Time with family is always time well spent and I sure enjoyed the day…

We’re visiting family in northern California and our dinner today was fantastic.  We opened a bottle of Doffo Malbec and it was superb…easily the best Malbec I’ve ever tasted!

You’ll recall we visited the Doffo Winery recently.  As I mentioned in an earlier blog, the Doffo winery has a superb collection of vintage small displacement Italian (and other) motorcycles.  That visit was a great one.   Sometime in the near future we’ll organize a CSC ride there.

I’m off to Asia early in December (more secret mission stuff) and I’m looking forward to the trip.   There’s lots of great riding coming up, too…our next CSC Baja trip in March, several shorter trips before that, our planned across-the-continent RX3 ride this summer (we’re hoping many of you can join us for portions of that one), and it seems I may get to ride Africa this summer as well.  Wow, that will be an adventure!

That’s our Black Friday sale, folks, and it’s underway now.   You know, it’s kind of funny…we sent out an email about our Black Friday sale with pictures of a few of the items that are on sale.   The sale is going fabulously well, but the items we showed in the email are the bulk of the items we’re selling.  The sale is not limited to just those items; it’s everything we have except the bikes. 

Yep, everything but the bikes.   Pick anything you want on our website, and the price will be automatically reduced when you add it to your cart.   Everything but the bikes, folks!  20% to 60% off!

Wow, this is exciting.  Folks, meet Roland Wheeler!

Roland is the real deal…a real motorcycle racer!  He’ll race the CSC RC3 you see above in the 2017 road racing season, campaigning in WERA West competition and possibly in AHRMA racing (in the SOS 3 category) starting next month!  Wowee!

This is very cool stuff, and I think it’s one of the most exciting things we’ve ever done.  Roland lives nearby and we’ll be bringing you cool stories on the bike’s preparation as Mr. Wheeler rolls on the street break-in miles and incorporates competition modifications.   This will generate some real excitement about the CSC RC3.   Wow!

Folks, don’t forget that the remaining 2016 RC3 bikes are going out the door for just $2988, including freight, setup, and documentation.  There’s no time like the present, and if you have an interest in a red, white, or blue RC3, the time to act is now!

More cool RC3 stuff…we considered a lot of colors before settling on our current slate of red, white, and blue motorcycles.  I like the look of the solid colors best, and I think we made a great selection with the colors we are offering.   We sure considered a bunch of different combinations, though, along with two or three additional solid colors.  Take a look…

The boss sure had the color guys busy on the RC3.  My favorite?  I like the blue best.  I think it’s the fastest RC3 color.   We’ll see.   I’m betting Roland will confirm that!

Yesterday morning I went for a ride on Glendora Ridge road with my good buddy Marty.   Marty has a superbike…a BMW K1300S…

I took my KLR instead of either the RX3 or the TT250, mostly because I haven’t ridden the KLR in months and I wanted to color match Marty’s bike.   Nah, I’m just kidding about that color thing.   Truth be told, I like the handling of my two CSC bikes much better than the KLR.  But, I still enjoy riding the beast…and it is running better than it ever has!

I was really surprised at how top heavy the KLR felt yesterday.  I guess I’m just used to more nimble bikes like the TT250 (the air-cooled TT250 is incredibly light to the touch…you just think where you want to go, and the TT250 is there).    Don’t get me wrong; I still enjoy riding the KLR (especially after Gerry made it a new bike again for me).  It’s just that the RX3 and the TT250 are so much better motorcycles.  And a note to all of you guys out there who ride KLRs…if you want to get your Kawi purring better than it did when it was new, Gerry is your guy.   He went through my bike and touched everything, including:

• Cleaning and adjusting the carb.
• Installing a new air filter.
• Installing a new battery.
• Changing the oil and the filter.
• Flushing the radiator.
• Replacing the fork oil.
• Replacing the brake fluid front and rear.
• Adjusting the clutch.
• Checking and tightening the spokes.
• Installing new fork seals.
• Fixing and remounting the windshield (the KLR cracks windshields on a regular basis due to its high vibration levels).
• Installing a new chain.
• Adjusting the valves (actually, Gerry just checked my valves; they were still in spec).

I probably missed a few things in the above list, but you get the idea.  The bike runs extremely well now.

When we were about halfway through our ride in yesterday morning’s crisp and cool mountain air, we stopped for the photos you see above at the intersection of Glendora Mountain Road and the East Fork Road, and to my surprise another guy on an RX3 rode by.  It was my good buddy Mike, who was out doing the same thing we were…

Mike has over 16,000 miles on his RX3.  He’s done that in just a little over a year.  In contrast, I have just under 15,000 miles on the KLR and I took 11 years to do it.    And for those of you who are wondering, I have about 12,000 miles on my RX3 (and maybe another 12,000 on other RX3s, like the ones I rode in Colombia and China).

That’s it for now, although I may post another blog later today.   There’s a lot happening around here.  I’m wrapping up an article on the China trip for one of the motorcycle magazines, and I’ve got another cool topic to tell you about in the next blog.   The writing thing is a hobby for me, and there is a lot more to it than just sitting down and banging out stuff on the keyboard.  Writing is both a joy and a burden…I love the writing, but I hate it when I’m not happy with what I write (which is what always happens with the first draft of anything).

There’s an old saying in the keyboard-punching business:  There are no good writers; there are only good rewriters.  I sure agree with that.  I don’t write anything without rewriting it multiple times, including every one of these blogs.  I always worry if I am clearly stating the message I want to communicate, if the writing flows, if the paragraphs make sense, if I screwed up the spelling anywhere, and on and on it goes.   When I do the “Destinations” pieces for Motorcycle Classics, they are only about 600 words, but I put an enormous amount of time into those 600 words.   And then there’s the actual visits to the places I write about and the photography.  I’ll send the magazine the 15 or 20 photos I like best, knowing that they are only going to use two.   It’s always fun to guess which two photos my good buddy Landon at MC will select.   I’ve been doing it long enough that I can usually nail which ones he’ll pick.  The latest issue of MC (the one hitting the stands now) has my story on the Naval Air Museum in Tillamook, Oregon (one of our stops on the 5,000-mile Western America Adventure Ride), and the next issue will have my story on…well, you’ll have to buy the magazine to read all about it!

This writing and rewriting business is the same with the magazine article I’m doing right now on the China trip.  It’s only 2,000 words, but I’ve spent several weeks trying to select the perfect 2,000 words.   And I took about 7,000 photos during my 40 days in China.  I’ll pick the best of those and give the magazine maybe a hundred to pick from.   The photos help, but the real story will be the article.   We’ll see if the editor likes it.  I will when I’m done with it, but it’s not my vote that counts.

So I got off track for a bit and I didn’t mention the most important development of our ride yesterday.   After our morning ride, Marty and I stopped at the CSC plant, and there’s exciting news there:  We’re going racing!  Yep, we are, but you’ll have to wait just a bit to read about it.  Stay tuned, and I’ll tell you about that in the next blog!

…has already started at CSC.   Everything (other than the motorcycles) is on sale at a 20% to 60% discount!    That’s either in person or online, so don’t let these deals get away.  Helmets, luggage, jackets, fluids, tires, accessories, parts, books…you name it, and it’s been steeply discounted for our Black Friday sale!  Even yours truly picked up a helmet (a cool neon green number you’ll see in future blog photos), as the Black Friday sale knocked the price to something even lower than my “official CSC blogger” discount!

Don’t let this one get away from you, folks!