CSC Blog

What a day…it’s just been grand!   Our first annual Destinations Deal tour is underway, and we are having an absolute blast.  There are nine of us on this ride and we have enjoyed the entire day.  I’ve been dropping photos on Facebook with my cell phone all day long, and now it’s time to put a few of the best ones on the CSC blog.

Gresh and I just came back to the room after sitting at the Colorado Belle’s River Bar, enjoying a few brewskis, and listening to what has to be the world’s best ‘60s Motown band.  But I‘m getting ahead of myself, so….back to the beginning.

After that great La Tolteca Mexican dinner last night, we were all at the CSC plant early today.  These are good times, folks, and here are just a few photos from the gathering this morning before we hit the road…

Orlando and Velma, two real troopers!

Good buddy Leighton!

A man, a motorcycle, and America…my good friend Rob!

An RX3 in the fastest color!

Driving up through the Cajon Pass was rough…the wind was gusting at what I’m guessing was 60 to 70 mph, and we were being blown around big time.  Once we were up in the Mojave’s High Desert, though, things got a lot smoother.  We stopped at the Barstow Del Taco (one of Ed Hackbarth’s original three) for coffee and more.   It was good!

Enjoying a mid-morning coffee break in Barstow!

Orlando and Velma enjoying original Del Tacos!

We picked up I-40 and headed east until we crossed the Colorado River into Arizona, and then we stopped for a late lunch at Topock.   It was incredible!

Say Cheese!

A Topock chicken wrap and onion rings!

A Topock chili dog!

A Leighton lunch!

Good times!

After that fabulous lunch at Topock, we rode old Route 66 to Oatman.   It was beyond incredible.  Check out a few of the photos from the CSC Oatman invasion!

RX3 motorcycles in Oatman!

Dan and Willie in Oatman!

A donkey checking out my RX3!

Arjiu makes a new friend!

Inside the Oatman Hotel!

Next up was a quick trip north into Arizona’s Bullhead City, a jump back across the Colorado River into Nevada (yep, we’re in Laughlin tonight), and life just kept getting better.   I met a nice young lady in the motorcycle parking area in front of the hotel and we had a great chat.   Folks, meet Debbie, a Harley-riding cocktail waitress at the Colorado Belle.

Say hi to Debbie!

I know what you are thinking, but it’s what they pay me to do.   Riding motorcycles through some of the best parts of America.  Great food.  Beautiful people.  Awesome scenery.   I mean, you know, hey, somebody’s got to do it!

That brings us to tonight, and we just wrapped it up after listening to an incredible band…

Rocking out in Laughlin at the Colorado Belle!

Life is good, folks.  It’s what happens when you ride a CSC motorcycle.   Trust me on this.

Tomorrow, we’re off to the Grand Canyon.  Stay tuned!

The crew is here and we’re ready to roll.  We had our pre-ride dinner this evening at La Tolteca (one of my favorite Mexican restaurants) and it was awesome. Starting fr0m the left it’s Joe G, Willie, Leighton, Orlando, Velma, Rob, Gary, Dan, Susie, and Joe B (that’s me!)…

And from the flip side, it’s Rob, Gary, Dan, Susie, Joe, Willie, Leighton, Orlando, and Velma…

This is a great group.  I can’t wait to get out on the road in the morning.  It’s Oatman and Laughlin for our first day’s ride (we’ll be staying at the Colorado Belle tomorrow night), and it’s going to be fun!

It’s great to heading out again and it’s especially fun to be riding with world famous motojournalist Joe Gresh.  Joe is staying at my place tonight, and every time Sue starts a sentence with “Joe,” we both answer.   We suggested she use Dajiu and Arjiu to eliminate the confusion, and it’s working!

Wow, this just popped up in my email from Motorcycle Classics magazine…my story on the Tillamook Air Museum!

Kyle and Lester at the Tillamook Air Museum, one of our stops on the 5000-mile Western America Adventure Ride.

The Western America Adventure Ride was one of several tours we’ve done with our RX3 and TT250 riders, and it was grand.   It was also nice for me because I sold several magazine articles (like the one above) about the places we visited.  Good times, grand adventures, and great stories.

We’ve done the 5000-mile Western America Adventure Ride, the 2015, 2016, and 2017 2000-mile Baja adventure rides, the 1500-mile TT250 Baja ride, the Andes Mountains circumnavigation ride in Colombia, and our epic 6000-mile ride across China.  It’s been grand.  And we’ve done all of this on stellar 250cc motorcycles built to our specifications by Zongshen, one of the world’s great motorcycle manufacturers.  No other motorcycle company does this.  Your ticket in is your RX3, your RC3, your TT250, and in the near future, your Cafe Racer.  It’s all part of the deal when you buy a CSC motorcycle, and we’re happy to bring this kind of fun to you.

You know, doing the CSC tours is a lot of fun.  It’s also a lot of work (on our part).   There are mileage, route, hotel availability, weather, schedule, safety, and other considerations.   You don’t get to see that because we take care of the details, but trust me, a multi-day group ride is not something that just happens on its own.  We’ve learned a few tricks along the way, like the pre-ride safety and logistics briefings we always do now (to get everyone on the same sheet of music), establishing our practices for on time departures, when to take care of the preventive maintenance on your bike (it’s not when we stop for gas), safe riding practices, and the like.  We’re lucky…our CSC customers are good folks, and we have as much fun on these rides as you do.   And we’re about to embark on another one…just a few more days and we’re going to see some of the prettiest scenery the Southwest has to offer.  We’re excited about the nine folks who are going on this ride, and we invite you to join in the fun by following our adventure on the CSC blog.  I promise you great photos and great stories…so stay tuned!

We’ve got a lot of cool accessories on sale right now, folks!  Check this out…

Give us a call at 909 445 0900, or check out the website at www.CSCMotorcycles.com.   The sale is good through the 21st of this month, so don’t wait!

More good news…we’re just a few days away from liftoff for the Destinations Deal Tour.  It’s going to be grand and  I am really looking forward to this ride.  The forecast is for generally good weather (although I am bringing my heated jacket with me) and we are going to have a great time.

We’re getting close to liftoff on the Destinations Deal Tour, and the decal for this, the 7th or 8th big tour we’ve led on our CSC motorcycles, came in this morning.   Check this out…

This is cool stuff, and I’m looking forward to riding with the group for the next week as we visit Laughlin, Oatman, the Grand Canyon, Zion, Death Valley, the ExtraTerrestrial Highway, and more.   You’ll want to keep an eye on the CSC blog for nightly updates as the ride progresses.

I grabbed another photo of Roland’s championship RC3 bike while I was at the plant today, too…

That’s it for now, folks.   Ride safe!

I’m up super early these days as I’m adjusting back to US time, and a short while ago while checking my email at 4:00 a.m., I received a nice note from my good buddy Sergeant Zuo.  That’s Sergeant Zuo in the photo above.  I took that shot somewhere in China when we rode across that great country in 2016.

Sergeant Zuo is about to participate in another long ride through China on a new Zongshen model.  We wish them the best of luck and our blessings on their upcoming journey.  Ride safe and have fun, guys!

We’re home, and things are looking great at the shop.  The new showroom is coming along very nicely…

We’ve added a bunch of accessories, new helmet lines, and more.  We’d love to have you stop by and check us out.

Roland’s race bike is on display in the showroom.  That’s quite a thing to see…as you know, Roland won his WERA class for the season, taking first place in nearly every race he entered on his CSC RC3…

Our Destinations Deal Tour is right around the corner, and I’m excited about that, too.   California, Arizona, Utah, and Nevada.  It’s going to be grand!

I mentioned Thai motorcycle taxis in an earlier blog, and on the way back from Wat Arun today, Susie and I grabbed a few photos just outside our hotel…

I shot all of these photos in the space of maybe 5 minutes (Asok is a very busy street).  Good times.  You can have a lot of fun with a camera over here (and a motorcycle, too).

If you’re thinking there are a lot of motorcycles in the above photo and video, you’d be wrong.  I shot both of those in the middle of the day on a Sunday here in Bangkok, and traffic was substantially lighter than normal.  During the week, the crowd of bikes at any stop light might be four or five times the size of the groups you see above.

So what’s this blog all about?   Hey, I promised I would tell you a bit about the different kinds of motorcycles and motor scooters here in Bangkok, and this is that story.

Bikes dominate Bangkok’s urban landscape.  I know that sounds like a catchy thing to say (it’s snappy writing, if I do say so myself), but it wasn’t intended to be literary lavishness.  It’s just the way it is.  In traffic, the bikes filter by on the left and on the right.  In front of any business or in any parking area, there are hundreds of bikes.  And at every stop light, a hundred or more bikes filter to the head of the line.  The excitement builds as the countdown stop light nears green (they tell you how many seconds until the light changes over here), and in the last few seconds before the red goes away, a hundred motorcycle engines start revving.  It is glorious.

There are no big bikes in Bangkok.  Oh, you’ll see one now and then, but they are a rarity.  Over here anything over 200cc or 250cc is just wasted displacement.   I’ve been here a week and of the tens of thousands of motorcycles I’ve seen (and those are not exaggerated figures), there were exactly two big bikes.  One was a Harley Sportster and the other was a Triumph Bonneville.  There’s just no need for more displacement.

Here’s a lone Triumph Bonneville, tucked away in a Bangkok parking spot…

One moto thing that’s noticeable right away are the orange vests.   When you see a rider with an orange vest, that means they are using their bike as a taxi.  Yep, they give short rides (the folks here tell me typically under 2 kilometers).  The riders have to wear the government-sanctioned orange vests and a helmet; passengers don’t wear any safety gear.   A lot of the female passengers wear skirts and ride side-saddle.

I’d say roughly 10 percent of all the bikes are being used as taxis.  Most of the drivers are men, but you do see women riders occasionally.

Surprisingly, it’s rare to see more than two people on a bike.   You do see it, but not like I have seen in China or Colombia (I once grabbed a photo in Colombia of a motorcycle carrying six people).  Here’s a shot of one of few times I saw this sort of thing here in Thailand…

Bikes are working vehicles over here.   I mentioned the taxi thing, but it’s also very common to see bikes weighed down with all kinds of freight…

There are scooters (you know, the things that are styled like Vespas), step-through motorcycles (like the old Honda Cub), small sport bikes (small displacement CBR or Ninja type bikes), plain old motorcycles, and (surprisingly) a lot of Grom-styled bikes.

The flat black bike in the front is a scooter.  The orange, red, and blue bikes to the right are step-through motorcycles (these are very popular over here)…

A blue scooter and more step-throughs…

A Vespa.  If you’re thinking it’s from Italy, you’d be wrong.  Zongshen produces these for Vespa in the same factory where our RX3s and TT250s are built.

A Ninja.   Honda, Kawasaki, and Yamaha are popular over here.  Surprisingly, I didn’t see too many Suzuki motorcycles.  We did see more than a few Suzuki automobiles, though.

When I was last in Bangkok 6 or 7 years ago, I saw a few Kawasaki motorcycles that looked a little like the Honda Grom.   Today, the Grom style is very popular in Thailand, with motorcycles of this style from several manufacturers.  Here’s a guy on one that looks a little like a Ducati.   I’m pretty sure these are made in China, as we also saw them for sale on our ride across China last year.  The bike in the photo below sells under the “Demon” name.   We saw a lot of them…

Here’s a photo of a motorcycle taxi, a regular rider, and a motorcycle guy delivering pizza.   There’s a helmet law in Bangkok, but it’s not enforced…

I’ll close this blog with a three photos of a bike I spotted yesterday that I thought was pretty cool.  It’s a CG-based regular old motorcycle, but the owner evidently has a sense of humor…

Today is our last full day in Bangkok.   We’re up early tomorrow for out flight back to California.  It’s been grand.  We’re staying in the top floor of a 5-star hotel in downtown Bangkok (the Pullman Grand Sukhumvit) and we’re living in the lap of luxury.  The room is awesome, there’s a pool and a gym, there’s a free tuk tuk ride wherever we want to go, there’s free booze and breakfasts and dinners, and it’s costing less than what a Holiday Inn might cost in the United States.

We’re going for a dinner cruise up the Chao Phraya River tonight with our good friends Kevin and Nan, and we’re going to hit another one of the temples today.   More photos, more good times, and more fun.   We took a grand long boat ride on the Chao Phraya yesterday and if I get a chance I’ll post a few photos of our adventures yesterday.  That’s a big if, though.  I may be having too much fun.  We’ll see.

Later, my friends.

Today was another exciting day in Bangkok, and another exciting new aspect of this fascinating city I had never heard of.  Susie and I took a tuk tuk ride to the train station and we made our way on Bangkok’s elevated inner city railway system to our destination du jour:   The Jim Thompson House and Museum located squarely inside the city along a remote canal.  Tucked away, you might say.  And that’s entirely appropriate.  Read on and you’ll understand why.

You might wonder:  Who was Jim Thompson?

Okay, here goes, and when I’m done giving you the Reader’s Digest version of this amazing tale, you tell me if isn’t something that might be the story line of the next Indiana Jones or James Bond adventure.

Jim Thompson was a young east coast guy born into wealth who went to Princeton University and became an architect.   He joined the Army just prior to World War II, he jumped out of airplanes while he was in the Army (hey, I like this guy already), and he ended up in the Office of Strategic Services during the war (the OSS was the forerunner of the CIA).   Toward the end of the war, Thompson ended up in Thailand where he found interesting and previously unknown artisans doing amazing things with silk.  To make a long story short, Thompson is the man who made Thai silk famous.  Seriously.   He designed silk clothing for royalty, elites all over the world, and folks in Hollywood (including costumes used in the The King and I).

Along the way and with his background as an architect, Mr. Thompson starting collecting classic Thai teak homes and Asian artifacts (like I said above, the guy had money).  He built a compound comprised of six teak homes he moved from ancient Thai cities to Bangkok, and there he made the complex his home.

Then, to make this story even more interesting, in 1967 Jim Thompson disappeared in the Malaysian jungle without a trace.  I know, it sounds like a story line from a movie or one of those adventure novels you buy in an airport bookstore, but folks, no one can make up stuff this good.  A former US Army paratrooper/OSS officer/CIA agent turned wealthy silk magnate, complete with an ancient Thai compound on a canal in Bangkok who goes missing deep in the jungles of Malaysia.  What was it?  A tiger attack?  An assassination when the bad guys finally caught up with him?   Or something else?

So, with that as the backdrop, here are a few of our photos of the Jim Thompson House from earlier today.   It was truly an amazing visit…

I would have liked to have taken more photos of the inside of the home and the amazing ancient Thai artifacts it held, but no photography was allowed. You’ll just have to take my word for it. This is one amazing place and one amazing story.

I did grab one more photo as Susie and I were walking back to the train station…

So, trust me on this: If you ever find yourself in Bangkok, the Jim Thompson House is a place that has to be on your “must see” list.