Well, after this, it was basically a ride back to LA on the Interstate 5. It is a boring high speed road. We rode at a steady 70 mph non stop until a place called Buttonwillow. THere we stopped for the night and the next morning, rode on to LA. We returned by noon, in time to return the bikes.

On Interstates, there are not many places to stop and take pictures, so I basically focussed on enjoying the ride back.

guys, what happened to this thread??, suddenly stopped at Napa Vally?

@Anurag Sir - No seagulls, no beaches but still so serene & beautiful. I liked the pics especially one which welcomes you in Napa Valley.
Apart from giving us an insight into your ride, we also gain on GK front and many thanks for that.
I'm bankrupt when it comes to domain of GK.

I know Sir , well dont worry enjoy your ride and ride safe Sir, as it is once you are back things would be hell lot different, am eagerly waiting for the next set of pics and yes Sir, your pics are coming out great, was going thru the starting of this thread..... keep them coming

It's all so clean :O

Anurag, how did it feel standing underneath that gigantic tree

@Shivansu - Thanks for understanding my consternation for having to deny myself a gulp of this famous californian wine when I considered myself to be a connoisseur of the same. I am putting up this log in the lighter vein as by now, being well into 14 days into the trip, I have lost all power to think, and deliberate on the more important matters pertaining to the rat race which i will have to inevitably re-join soon. My brain is like now like a cabbage i suspect.

@Haroon - Thanks mate.. I, kinda like writing up this thread. THe trip has been awesome but I am homesick now. Rat Race beckons and I am missing my family. There is so much to do here that I think we should organize a properly planned trip to these parts sometime in the future.

@NaughtyVaish - Thanks for liking it.

@FrankPilli - I am not sure if the Honda Goldwing featured in any of xBhp trips earlier.. I know that Sunny wanted to make one on this but if he did only he knows. The bike is very smooth, powerful and agile. The specimen I had had some kind of a wobble in the front forks at mid to high speeds but it was only apparent if one leaves the handlebar while the bike was moving, otherwise, it was OK. The bike is built with a lot of features and the choices and buttons in the cockpit are one too many.... I sometimes rode it like a sports bike and the bike obliged.. When on the highways, it would cruise and be barely audible and one ran the risk of falling off to sleep - literally. The mileage is fantastic too and I guess at par with any other bike in this category, being confused between gallons-miles v/s liter-kilometers I actually have the foggiest as to what it would have been in our lingo.

@ Anurag sir, can u shed some light on the Goldwing's characteristics & handling ? after following your dream ride, i was eager to know about the bike. i think this is the first xbhp ride with a goldwing.

just wow..amazing trip story with great photos

@ Anurag- A road trip with a mix of sight-seeing, history & ancient facts is a fantastic cocktail in itself. So dont worry about missing the chance to taste some of those wines.

Great going and loving it. I told you, I am subscribed to this thread...Thanks

Nice pics Anurag Sir, though I enjoyed the pics of Seagull and Beaches more, and yes interesting log. Just feeling sorry that you could'nt taste the wine out there... keep them coming Sir

Day 7 - To Napa Valley and Muir Woods - 170 miles today

Hi Folks, I am back.... I know I am competing with the indomitable Old Fox and the Spiti trip to grab your attention, I can understand that simply because that trip has some great stuff coming.. However, I want to keep on going with the 7th day's log.

We got up at approximately 8 AM and by 10 were ready to depart to visit the Napa Valley. On our agenda was also to go and see the famous redwood trees in Muir Wood forest.

Folks, there are going to be two highlights for this post.

1. There are absolutely no pictures of a Beach
2. There are absolutely no pictures of a Seagull

Hope that this will generate enough interest among the xBhp fraternity to storm this thread and go through the post in order to enjoy no beach or Seagull pictures!

We were staying at Alameda, a city just bordering San Francisco and from here, we took the express way for a high speed ride cutting across San Francisco towards Napa. It was a smooth ride and I almost didnt get caught by the cops. In-fact, in the entire trip so far, we didn't manage to get a single ticket! I am really sad for this and at a point of time in my ride, when I was into the zone and hallucinating, I had a good mind to stop next to a radar wielding cop car and complain to them about the fact that they were partial to me, probably because I was Indian, and were not stopping me and giving me a ticket. I was convinced that it had nothing to do with my riding in the speed limits or following all the traffic rules, they were cops and they are supposed to give a guy his ticket, I in-fact at a point of time also was almost about to walk upto these partial, indian hater cops and offer to purchase a ticket so that I could take it back with me as a souvenir... My friends, who If you recall were tiring, became even more tired whenever I made the move towards the cops that this I suspect also became a reason for the pain in their butt which also caused a great deal of heartache to me.

Having addressed the serious stuff above, lets look at some normal issues, we first rode into the town of Napa.


The first thing I did was to start looking for bikers and bikes and plenty of chaps were ready to oblige me. I took pictures of two of these gents, as all bikers must be called, even if they are not from India. Here are the pics:


Then we walked around the town and saw elaborate marketing taking place... Bands were playing, people were actually carrying their wine glasses in their hands all around the main streets of the town. I felt very bad since we were riding, I could not taste any of this fantastic wine.





Ajai was as usual keeping an eye for any place where they were serving steaks! I think whenever he was not eating a Pizza, he was eating a steak! While moving around, I made a discovery of my life time.. I found a statue of a Loudspeaker with a plaque claiming that Napa was not only famous for the californian wines, but the LOUDSPEAKER was also invented here! Look at this picture, as the pic is taken sideways in my quest for experimenting to learn composition, I had to paste the picture of the plaque later so that my friends in xbhp may update their general knowledge. I will however need to check with the Russian Embassy if there was no Ivan or Vladimir from their side who also made this invention as is usually the case.. For every invention made anywhere in te world, there is a counter-invention made by a russian much before!



We then rode off towards a wine cellar of a company whose name I do not remember anymore. THis stretch of road was full of wineries who all had signs welcoming us but Sanjay did not like the welcome enough to stop at each one of them.. We went straight to one which he suspected sounded weird enough so that none of us would remember its name after we left. After purchasing a 14" golf club designed to hold a wine bottle for an astronomical 25 bucks and eating a lousy 50g potato salad for lunch; and Ajai having polishing off another steak and then after grabbing two of the best wines for our gracious hosts in Alameda, we set out towards Muir woods.





This ride took us through the Sonoma valley, another californian wine growing valleys and as there was not a single weird sounding winery here meriting a stop, we decided to continue on.. We were totally focussed on the Redwood trees and were racing against the time to reach there before the light diminished.


The forest was actually lovely, dark and deep..



The redwood trees were more than a 100 feet high it seemed and even my 24 mm full frame lens proved inadequate to take the picture in a single frame. I tried lying down on the floor and taking a picture upside down just to add drama to the image and of-course in my quest to impress Sunny, but to no avail. I had been pleading with the camera wielding fraternity in xBhp to allow me to buy a 14 mm lens but they all told me that 24 was enough.. now, how do they suggest I take the picture of the world's tallest trees!



Some authentic info on Redwoods for the benefit of the young xbhpians who might never get this question in their GK paper. Various species of redwoods have been alive on earth for millions of years. They have proven to be experts at survival. More than 100 million year s ago, during the mesonic era, members of the redwood family lived throughout the northern hemisphere along with dinosaurs and other now-extinct plants and animals. Then, some 65 million years ago, a great meteorite crashed into our planet causing geologic, climatic,, and other environmental changes that destroyed the dinosaurs and many other living things. Redwoods managed to survive the catastrophe and have gone on to survive fire, flood, windstorms, droughts and earthquakes. They have even survived the slow, grinding hardships associated with continental drift, climate change and the emergence of new life forms, including people, flowering plants and broad leafed trees. As the very tallest and among the largest and oldest of Living things in the world, redwoods are indeed giant survivors from a time of giants..



If you look closely at the rings, the inner most circle in this stump is for the year 1100 AD and the outermost ring dates to 1930 AD !

Well, I copied this part from a plaque in the forest which I suspect that my friends had also read. After this, we had to hold a meeting to discuss whether a catastrophic calamity of the proportions that left the redwoods to survive but everything else to perish was round the corner or not and whether it was more sensible to get the hell out of San Francisco by taking a plane from Oakland airport since the humans were thought to be extinction type of matter at the first hint of a calamity while the redwoods still had a chance what DEFCON level should we assign of getting the hell outta here and so, whether we had enough time available to make that journey as planned by road on our bikes. As the discussion progressed, we found that there were other more complex issues also requiring to be addressed and so we decided to sleep over it. One thing was clear ofcourse, Yosemite was out of question now even not for a day, even not just to go there and peep inside and not even to take a tangential orbital flight towards LA through the 200 via Yosemite...

Friends, let the suspense remain for now.. we will take that up in the next post.

Awesome pics Anurag Sir..
Thanks for sharing it.

Would love to lay my hands on Goldwing someday.. ..
Enjoy your ride and ride safe. and ya dont forget to add nice pics

@Anshul - Thanks
@ Haroon / @Inder - Thanks . For me this was the first trip in California and the pacific is wild and so beautiful... the entire road takes the breath away.. So much is the variation in beauty that It came to a point when what we would consider generally beautiful as not good enough and only superlative would interest us.. If I stopped every time, I would not complete this trip in a two months or maybe even 6 months !!
Alcatraz, golden gate and bay bridges were familiar because we see them in movies, but riding on them and seeing alcatraz up close is another experience.

Another set of awesome pics and text...great going...

beautiful pictures.