Riding Into the Sunset
Today I decided to take a Sunday ride since Kim is not home and my dance card was wide open. The weather was just about as perfect as it can be, and I took full advantage of it by heading out at 7:30am to catch the best of the clear morning sunshine and cool temperatures. I had a minor snafu in that my BMW R1250 GSA came up with a low voltage situation which made it not want to turn over. I knew putting it on the battery charger would cure that but decided that I didn’t want to delay my ride and my BMW R1200 R-Nine-T was just sitting there in the garage waiting to be called into service. The R-Nine-T is more of a cafe-racer than a road bike and my sitting position is a bit more cramped, but I figured a morning ride was still quite doable. I chose to not wear a jacket or riding pants, preferring a more casual jeans and white t-shirt, giving me that California Dreaming feel. But I have a new, very comfortable, Schuberth Bluetooth full-coverage helmet that I chose to wear instead of my casual Sena Cavalry Bluetooth half-lid. The full-coverage helmet, with built-in sunglasses shield, is both more protective and more comfortable in a broader range of riding conditions, especially given the reduced wind fairing of the smaller R-Nine-T bike. I had put on my high compression riding socks expecting to wear my riding boots, but about three miles out I realized I had forgotten to kick off my black Crocs and put on my boots. Once again, I opted to keep to schedule and just carry on with the Crocs…not an easy call given that those Crocs could just come off in an accident and leave me running around on hot asphalt in my socks (or what might be left of them). So, off I went on my ride.
I probably drive up to the Ortega Highway a couple of times per year since it is a nice ride that keeps me closer to the Ocean and therefore in cooler weather than heading east into the desert. I ave my desert riding for the cooler times of the year and this seemed like a good day to do the Ortega even though i knew Sunday it would be more crowded than during the week. I had actually taken the time to plot out a route through Fallbrook this time since on other occasions I would find myself wandering through the large rural community trying to get up to Lake Elsinore without heading over into 15 too soon and riding the slab more than I liked. If I followed De Luz Road in a counter-intuitive direction, heading more West than I thought I should, it should work. The R-Nine-T doesn’t have a built-in GPS, so I keep a RAM-X mount on the handlebars and have a pre-wired charging cord waiting for me to put my iPhone in it, using my Apple Maps function to guide my way. I don’t know why I haven’t done it that way before, because it worked like a charm.
That allowed me to take a 47 mile ride through the back areas of Fallbrook up to the Lookout Cafe on the Ortega Highway, overlooking Lake Elsinore. That road and this beautiful cool Sunday morning made for a great hour of riding where I encountered maybe two other motorcycles and about as many cars. I was riding pretty calmly and not trying to do any knee-scraping. It was early and I figured getting to where I was headed too early would not work well for a planned lunch stop, so I just rode those roads like a Sunday driver and it was as pleasant as it sounds. As I turned onto the bottom of the Ortega Highway, there was suddenly a bit of a traffic jam. It seems a Corvette club was starting a rally so the other cars were letting them get all lined up together for the run through the Ortega. Given my leisurely approach to the morning, I didn’t mind dogging it behind a line of Corvettes, but when we got up to the Lookout Cafe there were so many bikes parked at this local watering hole that I just kept going, noticing that there was a “For Sale” sign on the cafe. A few miles later when I passed the other mountaintop cafe I noticed it too was closed up and for sale. It seems the Ortega Highway is having some economic challenges.
The rest of the ride down the Ortega into San Juan Capistrano was uneventful and as nice as ever. I stopped in town for a break and an egg salad sandwich, and then headed out down the 5 through Camp Pendleton along the coast. The ride on the 5 is always pretty if the traffic does not go bumper-to-bumper. I was good for about 18 of the 20 miles between San Clemente and Oceanside and that’s when being on a motorcycle paid off since its one of the few instances where the California lane-splitting law comes in handy. Nevertheless, I decided to take the 76, despite all its stoplights, back to my hilltop rather than the faster 78. The 76 is slower but goes past the Mission San Luis Rey, a place I try to visit a few times a year. I didn’t want to stop today, but its hard for me to pass the Mission without thinking about my father. We buried his ashes in the garden wall there thirty years ago.
I am not terribly emotional about my father and his gravesite. To begin with, I didn’t know my father very well. For my forty years when he was alive, I don’t think he remembered either my birthday or Christmas at any time. It turns out I was his oldest known son, but still one of nine known children from almost as many wives, so it might be fair to say that the man had a lot on his mind other than his children. But one has only one father as best I know and it turns out that he died at age 70, an age that I am approaching and only a few months from. That all has made me a bit more ponderous than normal as I pass by the Mission San Luis Rey. Specifically, it got me to wondering about whether Kim and I should spend a moment talking about where and how we want our final resting places to be.
When we went to Ithaca regularly, we used to have an inside joke that when Kim got old and creaky, I would be putting her into the hospice on South Hill near where my cousin Pete Massicci lives. That was where my Aunt Aggie had spent her last days and I would kid Kim that she was now linked to Ithaca for eternity. I would also always talk about the small westerly one-way bridge through Forrest Home that ran over Fall Creek near Flat Rock. It was the place where I threw some of my mother’s ashes when she died. My thinking was that her ashes would flow through Bebe Lake and down over the waterfall in Fall Creek Gorge and into Cayuga Lake. She had grown up six miles up the lake in Myers and the thought of reversing her course through the Cornell campus, through the town of Ithaca and up Cayuga Lake to Myers seemed appropriate to me. I used to tell Kim whenever we passed over the bridge that her instructions for my ash disposal was to do the same. It became a joke between us.
Now that we are more or less out of Ithaca and only visit Kim’s hometown of Wabash, Indiana only so often, the old Erie Canal route from Upstate New York into Indiana seems less of a draw for our sense of eternity than it used to. While we both spent a lot of our lives in New York City, neither of us view that impersonal place to be a great place for the ever-after. So, as I drive past the Mission San Luis Rey today, I am wondering if Kim and I should have a talk about where we want to take our final ride into the sunset. We have loved our life here overlooking the Pacific enough to suggest that somewhere out here, oddly enough perhaps the Mission San Luis Rey, might be where we should spend eternity.