Moto Camping with Jade
A great weekend with the wife and the bike.
Jade and I spent the weekend (along with buddy Coakley) riding up the 33 and camping at Reyes Creek campground. It’s December though, so we had to load up on gear… here’s Jade and I on the V-Strom:
The great thing about off-season camping is that you generally have your pick of open campsites. Of the 30 or so at Reyes Creek, only one other was inhabited. We gathered a bunch of manzanita and had ourselves an enormous campfire, drank some beer and some liquor from mini-bottles, and retired for a good night’s sleep.
Just a few hundred feet before you get to Reyes Creek, you pass a funny little town encampment called Camp Scheideck, which contains lovely little bits of eccentricity like this faux graveyard, complete with noose:
We enjoyed the campsite so much though that we didn’t break camp until nearly three - which resulted in a fair portion of the long ride home happening in the dark (and worse, the cold). Coakley’s thermometer dipped to 38 at one point on the 166… it was viciously cold. We pulled over for gas in New Cuyama, but they were out (happens a lot out there), so I went around back to throw on some long underwear - instead I managed to throw out my back. So now that it’s freezing cold and I can barely move, what else can happen, right? Oh yeah, the police could pull us over for speeding… ;) Luckily the cop was nice and could see we were only hurrying because we were quickly becoming popsicles. He advised us to take it easy, and then made sure we did by tailing us for about 20 miles.
Despite all that at the end, it was a fantastic weekend.
