Escape from Los Angeles!

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Trip Start Jun 21, 2008 Trip End Sep 03, 2008 Next
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  El Centro, California, United States
Sunday, June 22, 2008

Today is the day! We've been staring at this date on the calendar for over a year. Months of dreaming, planning, and preparing and the day is finally here! We can't back out now!

Oh wait, let me introduce myself: Hi, my name is Jess and I'm a motorcycle junkie. I'm 35 years old and I have ridden and raced AMA National Hare n' Hounds, National Enduros, Observed Trials, you name it, I've done it...or will do it...or want to do it, or just haven't done it yet, but will do it someday...blah, blah, blah.

When I was a little grommet, my mom and dad didn't want me to ride motorcycles...so of course, I was determined to ride them...the engine noise itself makes my blood boil, makes the hair on my arms standup, my legs tingle, my eyes swell up, and I just feel like screaming! Literally, I can barely control myself...let me tell you...the first time I heard a 990cc MotoGP bike, I had an out-of-body experience...it's a physical manifestation that I cannot suppress...it's a living part of me, and I intend to continue to feed and nurture the beast!

My partner in this heist is my ol' lady..her name is Malin. She is a super awesome, kind, smart, beautiful bundle of Swedish whoop-ass who loves --- well, why don't I have her tell you...here's Malin:

Hi, well I'm 31 years old and moved to Los Angeles from Sweden 9 years ago after meeting Jess in Spain. I just graduated from UCLA with a master's degree in social welfare, and I'm proud to be able to call myself a social worker.

Bye bye house

Needless to say I have a passion for traveling and a growing fondness for motorcycles and motorcycle riding. Planning this trip has been so much fun and it's hard to imagine that today is already here.

Ok, it's Jess again - our plan is simple: Take our motorcycle and all of our gear from Hermosa Beach, California to the Panama Canal....and back! Our route will take us through Baja California, hugging the Sea of Cortez all the way down to La Paz. From there we will take the ferry to Mazatlan, and continue down the Pacific coast more or less to Panama. Our return route north will be along the Caribbean coast up through Belize and the Yucatan Peninsula, and back up through El Paso Texas. All this in eleven weeks!

Now a little bit about our steed..we riding a 2007 BMW GS 1200 Adventure that I have prepared for the trip. Malin calls it our Dream Machine...I'm kind of partial to the name Globe Stomper, but regardless, I've put about 13,000 miles of road and dirt beneath this bike in advance of our trip to make sure I know it inside and out...I've done all of the servicing and tire changing myself, and I've brought along a killer set of tools for roadside repairs and service. I'll have some detailed bike updates for my fellow moto-heads.

But all this great stuff is of no use if we can't escape LA!!

Here's Malin again - the ride from Ventura to El Centro: One thing that worried me about this trip was the heat. Sitting on a motorcycle in all the gear when it is over a 100 degrees outside is almost unbearable. However we thought we would have to wait until Baja for those temperatures...but we were wrong. Riding down from Ventura to our friends' house in Hermosa Beach we found ourselves on the 405 and the outside temp gauge showed 114 degrees!! Jess is used to desert racing and is fine with those temperatures, for me however it was a pretty rude awakening to things to come. The drive from Hermosa to El Centro was beautiful but hot. I think the gauge showed 113 degrees almost the entire way and the trip took us about 4 hours. When we finally arrived in El Centro the sun was setting but the temperatures remained the same. We checked in to our nice air conditioned hotel feeling so excited and happy that our trip had finally begun.

It's Jess again...yeah, the ride was kind of brutal...but every journey needs to start with a single step, so for us, that step was El Centro, CA...the 113 degree weather, coupled with the distinct smell of crap uniquely associated with the El Centro area, I thought for sure Malin wasn't a happy camper...but I was wrong! We holed up in the Comfort Inn for the night and planned our early morning border crossing while munching on our last meal in America...Double-double cheeseburgers from In-N-Out. Too excited...can't sleep...every morning is going to be like Christmas for the next 3 months!

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Thai Food at the Loders

The Guys

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