On a typical sunny Southern California day on Saturday July 25, 2020, I went on a day ride starting in Ramona, California, up the coast on Pacific Coast Highway in Orange County and then to Santa Monica and Los Angeles for a night time ride for a total of 337 miles.

Ramona, California to Orange County California

I was heading to a family baby shower for my brother in-law that was being held at my mother in-law’s home in Gardena, California (Los Angeles area) that was starting in late afternoon. I decided to ride Dexter (my 2005 Harley Davidson Ultra Classic motorcycle) and take the opportunity for a scenic ride and capture some video along the way.

Departing from Ramona, I headed towards Escondido, California on California State Highway 78. The area between Ramona and Escondido is still mostly rural portion of San Diego county with numerous low mountains, valleys sprinkled with agriculture consisting mostly of orchards and cattle operations.

I enjoy this section of California Highway 78 with it’s sweeping curves and majestic scenery created by the hills and valleys. The only downside to this section of road is that traffic is consistently frequent. It is not uncommon to have someone tailgating you as they want to test the limits of physics as they drive on the mountain curves. I have to admit, that I do drive faster myself on this road in a car than I do on Dexter. Some of the curves are marked at 20 MPH which I normally take at 30 to 25 MPH. The curves marked at 30 MPH I will take at about 40 to 45 MPH which is fast enough for me.

Check out my ride of this highway in the YouTube video below

In Escondido, I jumped onto Interstate 15 North and back to California Highway 78 West through the communities of San Marcos, Vista and Oceanside. In Oceanside, California I merged onto Interstate 5 North to California Highway 1 – Pacific Coast Highway.

Pacific Coast Highway – California State Highway 1 – Orange County California

The first beach city encountered on this section of Pacific Coast Highway (abbreviated PCH) is Dana Point, California where the freeway section of PCH ends and turns into a 4 lane avenue / boulevard. This section of roadway tends to get very congested as the constant flow of beach goers, sight seers, and recreational drivers bottle up from the first traffic signal.

Lane splitting (often called filtering) is legal in California. However, I have decreased my practice of lane splitting due to the high hazard potential of the practice. But in many areas of California with it’s well deserved notorious reputation for insanely terrible traffic, lane splitting is pretty much required. It is no fun sitting on a hot idling motorcycle combining with the heat radiating from hot asphalt. It does not take long before you feel like a rotisserie chicken cooking. The cooking effect is even greater when on an air cooled motorcycle as Dexter is. So, I decided to lane slit until traffic was rolling. I believe the safest situations to lane split on a motorcycle is when the automobiles are either at a dead stop or congested enough where there is little to zero opportunity for them to change lanes (and taking you out in the process). And of course, there has to be enough room to safely split the lanes, which can be a real challenge when riding a full size bagger like Dexter.

Dana Point like all of the beach cities in Orange County are well groomed, clean, and attractive. The sidewalks are clean and crisp white. There is little to no garbage to be seen on the streets. There are numerous palm trees lining the road or down the center boulevard. There are numerous shrubs, bushes, and green grass lawns (all presumably watered with recycled water). Of course we won’t discuss the cost of living in this area of Orange County, but it’s nice to visit :).

Other communities and points of interest encountered on PCH in Orange County include Laguna Beach, Crystal Cove State Park, Corona Del Mar, Newport Beach, Sunset Beach, Seal Beach, and Long Beach. I left Pacific Coast Highway in Long Beach to jump onto the faster I-405 freeway to Gardena, California so that I would not be late to the baby shower. Why was I running late?

Harley Davidson Shake and Bake – Dexter is showing his age a bit

Dexter is a 2005 Harley Davidson Ultra Classic with about 70,000 miles on him. I purchased Dexter used and abused in November 2017 to replace Jolene a 2006 Honda VTX 1300C I crashed in August 2017. Dexter only had about 39,000 miles on him when I purchased him but those must have been some hard miles. The previous owners of Dexter really did a poor job on maintenance. Since I have owned Dexter I have replaced the motor (about 4 months after I purchased it), calipers, rotors, exhaust, stator, starter, primary tensioner , fork seals, fork suspension, replaced windscreen, replaced headlights with LED, and a few hundred other things I can’t remember right now. While some of the items were upgrades, there has been quite a few issues with Dexter since I have owned it.

Prior to my USA West 2020 trip, allot of work was done on the bike. After the trip, I did some more work to upgrade and fix issues discovered during the rip. Right now, Dexter is probably in the best shape he has been in for a long long time.

But, like during my USA West Trip, the one thing that will break and fail will be something I didn’t even think about (I guess that makes sense when you think about it lol). This time it was my saddlebag cover detaching from the saddlebag.

Now, Harley’s in general tend to be shake machines and will shake your body and itself apart over time while idle. You actually get used to it and it rarely comes to mind…..except with stuff starts falling off the bike. My saddlebags are an older style (so I have been told, I have no idea) and unless I lock them, they tend to pop open quite allot. I ran into this quite a bit during my first two days of the USA West trip until I finally just started locking the covers on bags. Cool, no more issues.

During this ride, I didn’t bother locking the cover as I had my Saddleman fitted bag with everything contained in the bag. I was not worried about losing anything. While I was lane splitting on PCH, some guy in a nice SRT8 Charger .yelled something at me and started honking. I didn’t hear what he was yelling but the tone was not a “Hey you A-hole” tone. It was more of a OMG you are on fire tone. Well, thankfully I was not on fire. I continued to slowly lane split to reach the traffic signal. While stopped at the traffic signal, I reached back to check if my cover was loose, yep it was. Once the light turned green, I rolled through the intersection and then pulled over to the side of the road to re secure the cover with the plan to go ahead and lock it. To my surprise, what I discovered instead was that all of the screws that secure the cover to the bag had fallen out. Wow, OK then. I took a few moments to ponder the situation and see if I could do anything to MacGyver it on the roadside. Ultimately that answer was no. I did not have any bungee cords, rok straps, or anything with me to secure the cover to the bike, so I put the fallen body part into Dexter’s trunk to deal with it later. I was a little nervous about the my bag catching wind and becoming road carnage. But, all was fine for the remainder of the ride.

• 

• 

Here is video of the incident.

And amazingly, I did not swear at all in this one (I was more surprised than upset)

Onward to the Baby Shower and Beyond!

I had planned to diverge from California Highway 1 and take a detour across the Vincent Thomas Bridge from Terminal Island to San Pedro and then head to Gardena. However with the PCH traffic and my roadside diversion, I was running out of time to continue my planned route and still make it on time to the baby shower. So, I detoured in Long Beach and jumped onto Interstate 405 North to Gardena, and yes, I was on time for the baby shower and celebrated the forthcoming addition to the family (Update: He came into the world during the wee hours of the morning on 8/4/2020)

After the baby show festivities concluded, I rode over to Santa Monica for a ride by of the Santa Monica Pier and rode down to Venice Beach. Sadly, my GoPro footage of Venice Beach while riding was not worthy of sharing as traffic was mostly stopped and at best walking pace (also less than fun on a big motorcycle). I did manage to capture a few quick photos and some decent footage of the beach walk area in Santa Monica that is featured towards the end of my PCH video below.

West Cost Jersey Shore Dudes

Both Santa Monica and Venice Beach consisted of the typical assortment of interesting people out and about, many without face coverings in close proximity to each other (yikes). One area where I briefly got off the bike near the pier (where I took the few photos below) there was a white BMW convertible (you can see the rear in one of the photos below) packed with 5 dudes that I can only describe as West Coast Jersey Shore Dudes. They were all about trying to look cool and glam which I found annoying but at the same time let people be what they want, really doesn’t effect me What did bother me was ferocity in which they were smoking blunts, at least two bongs, a few bottles of corona and what looked like a whiskey bottle. yes, I was studying this disaster freak show closely as I was changing into some warmer shirts, back into my leather jacket and swamping my summer warm weather gloves for insulated gloves. Yes, it gets chilly once the sun goes down along this part of the Pacific, especially on a motorcycle. So, my concern with the West Coast Jersey Shore boys again was not so much that they were trying real hard to be pretty or even that they were consuming product to lubricate their brains. No, it all had to do with the fact they were consuming in the car to include the driver. The car that shares a road with myself and others. Which then of course made me wonder how many other West Coast Jersey Shore Dudes were doing the same thing in their four wheeled ballistic missiles. It was then I decided to roll onward to roll along the beach area a bit and get out of there.

Santa Monica near the Santa Monica Pier

• 

• 

• 

• 

Check out my video of the ride on Pacific Coast Highway – California 1

Night Ride – Los Angeles

One of the reasons for the ride up to LA was that I wanted to see how the GoPro would perform with recording some city riding during the night time. From Santa Monica I jumped onto Interstate 10 to La Cienega Blvd to Santa Monica Blvd in West Hollywood. From there I took a .meandering route through Beverly Hills and Hollywood. The traffic on Hollywood Blvd was actual pretty heavy and SLOW!! It did not help that there was road construction of some kind and much of the BLVD was reduced to one lane in each direction. It took me over an hour to travel the 2.4 miles on Hollywood Blvd from Thai Town.

I was surprised to see many of the clubs and bars open packed with people who mostly were not wearing face coverings. With what the current rate of COVID cases popping off in Southern California, I wouldn’t feel comfortable being in such close proximity of a sea of intoxicated people, potentially hacking Rona towards me….as my two year old son would say when he doesn’t want or agree with something “No Thank you” as he waves his hands back and forth. It is each to their own, but I wouldn’t risk it.

Downtown Los Angeles

Once I escaped the traffic snarl of Hollywood I headed south onto La Brea Ave to Olympic Blvd which I rode into Downtown Los Angeles. I proceeded to zigzag around Downtown to record the city center at night and just milling around really.

Downtown Los Angeles at night is actually quite beautiful with a variety of lighting effects illuminating the buildings and bathing the cityscape with a good sampling of the color spectrum. It is not Las Vegas at night but it is very nicely done. Downtown was also very clean. This stood out to me (and not to upset those who actually like / love LA…..aka my wife) I find most of Los Angeles to be a gritty, dirty city with interesting places to visit and good places to eat. Before I moved to California from Minnesota in January 2017, my wife (then girlfriend) was lobbying for me to move to the LA area. We moved to Chula Vista (San Diego). 🙂

Once I felt I had enough of this, I circled back to where I saw a shell gas station to top off Dexter’s fuel tank and drink a Monster energy drink myself. I was blown away at the cost of gasoline in Downtown LA. I mean, I live in Southern California and have become uncomfortably numb to the California price of gasoline. But this was crazy even for California standards. In Ramona I have been paying about $3.25 per gallon for 91 octane. These gas pirates were charging about $4.44 for 91 octane. I guess it must be really hard to get a tanker truck to such a remote location as Downtown….good grief. And of course, i paid it and fueled up because I just could not be bothered with the task of finding another gas station with my internet at the ready smartphone, hmmm it almost makes you think they know people will pay the ridiculous price for convenience sake….nah, that would never happen (cough).

After recovering from the gas pump sticker shock, guzzling down my Monster, and declining the request of the shirtless profanity spewing angry man to give him a ride somewhere on my motorcycle (yeah, not even tempting lol) I started the final 138 mile leg of the trip back home to Ramona with a water / nature break at a rest stop on I-5 near Oceanside, California.

Quick Note about recent Headlight and Passing lamps upgrade,

About a week before this ride, I had finally gotten around to upgrading the OEM headlight and passing lamps on Dexter. I purchased the HogWorkz LED 7″ Headlight and 4.5″ Passing Lamps kit. While the OEM lights work and I have ridden at night with them quite a few times, I always felt like I needed more light and quite often felt I was riding beyond the capability of my lights. This limitation was very apparent during the couple night riding portions of the USA West 2020 trip. Especially on Day one riding north on I-5 and later on Day 10 riding in Kansas both on Interstate 70 and the rural back roads.

This ride was the first actual ride (not counting a very short night test ride in Ramona) with the new LED lights. The new lights work amazingly well as can been seen in some areas of the night videos below. I highly recommend this upgrade. HogWorkz LED 7″ Headlight and 4.5″ Passing Lamps Kit for Harley 1994-2020.

Los Angeles Night Ride Videos

One video has night footage of Beverly Hills, Hollywood, and Downtown Los Angeles. The second video is highlights of Downtown only.