Bajaedition
New member
or how 2 guys just wanting to do a blitz turned out to be 14 hours of fun..
I had called my friend to see if he wanted to do the palms to pines hwy and we agreed to meet in the morning at the base, well for me that is a 75minute ride to get there so I left the house around 7am, toured the 10 freeway into Palm Desert and cut down to our meeting place, that would give me 15 minutes to fuel up and get a drink of water.
Well Bobby showed up with his wife on their Road King with a Brian and his wife on his Suzuki Boulevard, Now both these guys have nice sports bikes and can push these their cruisers really good.
oh, here is a vid of the palms to pines, not me, found this on You tube[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=83S1vwvH-xY]Quick Ride Up Highway 74 (Palms to Pines) - YouTube[/ame]
sorry need to figure out how to embed a youtube vid here
here is a pic of the switchbacks highlighted
here is a night time pic
got those off the web also, I was riding all day and never snapped a pic
anyway the plans changed to riding down to the north San Diego county area and getting lunch at a casino.
this means some killer roads as Bobby is the king of backroads in the area.
We shot the Plams to pines, cut down to the Temecula area and had a coffee and bagel and shot off to "cruise" some roads.
we set off and spent till 2 o'clock doing some killer roads when we stopped for lunch and after that decided to go exploring. As I said both of them push hard and we were doing a clip that kept me satisfied all day.
This was the first day I had really pushed the bike and the more I rode the more I got to really like this bike. It has a power band as wide as my 1200cc ZZR and that says a lot, it may be down 30 some HP but it really has a torque curve, from 3 grand, picking up around 4.5 and all the way up it puts up a band of power that is smooth as silk. Yamaha really did good when they decided to make it a stroker.
I did have to stop a few times to fiddle with the suspension, I dropped the preload on the front down tighter 2 steps and loaded in some more damping, the rear I had already set in some preload but I found it rally needed to crank down on the damping.
Now I am a large guy, push past 250, and I had the thing dialed without going to the bounds of the factory suspension, I found on hard cornering if you have a bump the rear bottomed till I got the damping set up besides that it does move more than I like but found this also gave me the ability to have it nicely compressed for when I committed to a curve and decide that was where I would drive out. In other words when I decided to drop the bike into the curve, the rear was set up to slide and cut the corner and the acceleration out it unloaded smoothly. Nothing wrong for street use here, at the track I would change it. I had replaced about half the fork oil in either fork with 7.5 weight and that is why the front works so well I think.
so much for that
well around 7:30 we were back across the mountain and I stopped off a Bobby's place to grab a few purchases from his saddle bags and shoot home.
I did a final fuel up, decided this bike need about an extra gallon in fuel capacity, and did the 75 minute scoot up the 10 to my little town in the middle of the desert. Wife met me at the door and I sated her with presents of fresh Sourdough bread from the bakery we stopped at and a slice of white chocolate cheese cake from where we ate lunch.
nice ride and finally have the bike set up real nice.
I had called my friend to see if he wanted to do the palms to pines hwy and we agreed to meet in the morning at the base, well for me that is a 75minute ride to get there so I left the house around 7am, toured the 10 freeway into Palm Desert and cut down to our meeting place, that would give me 15 minutes to fuel up and get a drink of water.
Well Bobby showed up with his wife on their Road King with a Brian and his wife on his Suzuki Boulevard, Now both these guys have nice sports bikes and can push these their cruisers really good.
oh, here is a vid of the palms to pines, not me, found this on You tube[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=83S1vwvH-xY]Quick Ride Up Highway 74 (Palms to Pines) - YouTube[/ame]
sorry need to figure out how to embed a youtube vid here
here is a pic of the switchbacks highlighted
here is a night time pic
got those off the web also, I was riding all day and never snapped a pic
anyway the plans changed to riding down to the north San Diego county area and getting lunch at a casino.
this means some killer roads as Bobby is the king of backroads in the area.
We shot the Plams to pines, cut down to the Temecula area and had a coffee and bagel and shot off to "cruise" some roads.
we set off and spent till 2 o'clock doing some killer roads when we stopped for lunch and after that decided to go exploring. As I said both of them push hard and we were doing a clip that kept me satisfied all day.
This was the first day I had really pushed the bike and the more I rode the more I got to really like this bike. It has a power band as wide as my 1200cc ZZR and that says a lot, it may be down 30 some HP but it really has a torque curve, from 3 grand, picking up around 4.5 and all the way up it puts up a band of power that is smooth as silk. Yamaha really did good when they decided to make it a stroker.
I did have to stop a few times to fiddle with the suspension, I dropped the preload on the front down tighter 2 steps and loaded in some more damping, the rear I had already set in some preload but I found it rally needed to crank down on the damping.
Now I am a large guy, push past 250, and I had the thing dialed without going to the bounds of the factory suspension, I found on hard cornering if you have a bump the rear bottomed till I got the damping set up besides that it does move more than I like but found this also gave me the ability to have it nicely compressed for when I committed to a curve and decide that was where I would drive out. In other words when I decided to drop the bike into the curve, the rear was set up to slide and cut the corner and the acceleration out it unloaded smoothly. Nothing wrong for street use here, at the track I would change it. I had replaced about half the fork oil in either fork with 7.5 weight and that is why the front works so well I think.
so much for that
well around 7:30 we were back across the mountain and I stopped off a Bobby's place to grab a few purchases from his saddle bags and shoot home.
I did a final fuel up, decided this bike need about an extra gallon in fuel capacity, and did the 75 minute scoot up the 10 to my little town in the middle of the desert. Wife met me at the door and I sated her with presents of fresh Sourdough bread from the bakery we stopped at and a slice of white chocolate cheese cake from where we ate lunch.
nice ride and finally have the bike set up real nice.