Trip Report Day 1: Glendale, CA to San Fran, CA

Date: Thursday, August 19, 2010
Start: 0700 (0530 wake-up)
Finish: 2200
Travel Time: 15 hrs
Distance: 476 miles
Total Distance Covered: 476 miles

So I guess we kinda slept. It's not like we had anything to be excited about. We finally tucked in after midnight and woke up just after 0500. It was all snugly cuddly with Goda, Yobo and Brittany in Yobo's bed. The plan was to hit the road by 0630 and beat the LA traffic. We ended up rolling out around 0700. A few last kisses and hugs with Brittany and we were off. 5300 miles ahead of us with the first leg taking us to SF via the scenic Pacific Coast Highway.

It's funny how everything seems to take longer on a motorcycle on a trip like this (GPS checks, map checks, MP3 player checks, com checks, bladder checks, gear checks, tire checks). And just when you get situated, you forget something. So it felt good to finally hit the road...that is until about three minutes later. That's right, we failed our wallet check. It's better Yobo realized it now and not later, but back to Stanley Ave it was.

Now we're really off. It was a little later than planned and I got my first experience of weaving through traffic on what felt like an M1 tank. My 41L Touratech Cases got up close and personal with each passing car. Our goal was to make it through the brunt of traffic and snag a big 'ol diner breakfast. We hit up Norm's in Santa Monica and got just that. As I hopped on my ride and turned the key, nothing. Turns out, I left the lights on in the parking lot. That's right, 2 hrs into an epic 3 week motorcycle adventure, we had managed to forget a wallet and kill my battery. Neither of us had ever successfully jump-started a bike so this carried a little more weight. We pushed it up the gradual slop in the parking lot, spun it around, dropped it into second and gave it a go. Success!!! We were pretty damn stoked because at this point we were really itching to get underway.

We made it about 100 miles or so and hit up our first gas stop. We won't bore you with all of our fuel stops throughout the trip, but this one was fun because I managed to delete all of my GPS points for the Continental Divide Trail as I fumbled through some of the settings on my GPS. Now Yobo still had his, but navigating throughout the trip was one of the things I was most excited about. And as Yobo has often said..."Two is one and one is mone". Two GPS devices were critical down the 2700 mile stretch of unknown territory on the Continental Divide. No biggie, we'd just copy the data from Yobo's SD card at a Best Buy along the way. We'll revisit this at a later point, but for now we had a mission to rack up some "uneventful" miles.

It was a beautiful ride through wine country as we worked our way towards the coast. Along the way we made a pit stop at the Hearst Castle. The trip really got perrrty in Big Sur. Seriously this was one of the nicest stretches of road along the entire journey. There had to be some kind of car festival in Monterey or Carmel, because coming the opposite direction was an endless wave of open-wheel classic roadsters. Driver's and sometime passengers were often crammed together and sporting super-dope leather goggles. We snagged dinner in Carmel as the approaching weather seemed to be changing for the worse.

We left Carmel late evening as it was getting dark and started on our last leg to SF. As the daylight crept away, the rain picked up. Before you know it, we were both navigating with tiny little GPS screens in the dark, trying to clean our helmet lenses, and battle exhaustion from a long day on the road. It got really fun as the amount of traffic and number of lanes seemed to increase exponentially as we approached SF. This actually ended up being one of the most intense spans on the trip for me. We eventually made it to our Holiday Inn after 2200. We unpacked and decompressed in the room. We vowed to never ride again that late at night ...errr something.

Pretty exciting first day and I remember thinking back to everything that had happened over the past 18 hours. If this much could happen in one day during a pretty common trip from LA to SF, we couldn't imagine what the next 17 days had in store. A good night's sleep was key, because tomorrow was our longest mileage day of the trip with 650 miles planned to Portland, OR.

/s/ Goda