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Adam (my son) was getting stir crazy after a few weeks of Sabbatical, so he decided to burn some free air miles and come down for a quick visit. I picked him up at the airport and we headed straight to the hot tub with a couple of Old Fashions and stayed up way too late catching up on "the latest". We would motel it one night, and camp the second night. The ride-plan was to ride some ADV bike routes I'd not done yet, starting with what I call @Mr.JAJA's track from Ramona to Big Bear. I bypassed some for the sake of time and miles as needed. So we hot footed it up Wildcat Canyon, Old Julian to Santa Ysabel, and on to Warner springs where we put it in dirt-mode at the Indian Flats turn off. I love this track, from there to Anza. It's scenic, fun and has a lot of playfulness to it. Both the old broken pavement and the white dirt trail have about a hundred wheelies built into them. These should not be wasted! Occasionally there's an area here and there where you can wander a bit and explore. North of the crossroad we ran into about 7 or so honest dirt bikers and stopped for a chat. They were part of the Flying Monkey gang out of Temecula. Good folks. I've ridden with them a couple times in the past. One fella on an orange bike warned me twice that the road ahead was in pretty bad shape and had roughed him up a little. I let him know that I ride it 6 or 8 times a year. In hind sight I should've said I'd heard there was a Starbucks up here and needed an Iced Carmel Macchiato. But I usually think of something cute to say long after the moment's past. This was going to be a sort of dirt shake down test for my sorta healed up leg. Any goof ball can gimp his bike around the street, but I needed to see how dirt worthy the leg/ankle/foot was. And . . . . . . sure enough, I took a heavy dab in a tight sand corner and yelped like a whipped coyote. Holy schmokes that stung. Thought I might have really boogered things up again so we took a scenic break for awhile and then moseyed forward to a great breakfast burrito in Anza. I got robbed of a LOT of great adventures last summer by a stupid broken clavicle. And I NEEDED to make sure I didn't have a repeat this summer. So over a smokin' hot sauced breakfast burrito I decided no more dirt. We would stay on the roads and just tour where there was very little risk of furthering the mornings setback. Udo's track would have to wait. Next stop Idyllwild. Off we went. And I gotta say, if you're bored riding pavement from Anza to Idyllwild, you're either on the wrong bike or you're just doing it wrong. Sometimes sight seeing mode is just fine. Of course the Pines-to-Palms highway all the way over to the 10 is just dreamy. Both visually and sweeping all those turns. There's something magical when you ride the perfect line, at the perfect speed, getting slung through and out the end of the turn only to line up for the next one. Left right, left, right, .... I love the dance. We were blessed with little to no traffic on this road and pretty much the whole trip. Figured we roll through Joshua Tree backwards, going south to northwest on our way to Big Bear. I purposely didn't take much for pics here as we could have lost the day to it here alone. If you've been, you know. If you haven't, you must. Of course Pioneer town was sitting smack in our path, so, there's that. All this was new to Adam, and was a reminder to me of how much cool stuff we are surrounded by in So Cal. This looked like a good spot to take a break, so we did. After a few songs from the live band and an appy at the bar, we toured onward and made the counter clockwise loop through Johnson Valley to Big Bear for the night. We checked in and then wandered the village for a cold beer and a great dinner. All in all a great day of riding, sight seeing, telling stories over the Cardo's for about 350 miles. Adam remarked that it felt so good to just soak up "the joy of riding". For the last 2 years he's been training daily for the GS Trophy and hasn't really gone out to just ride. This was going to turn into three days of really good medicine for both of us. To be continued . . .
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