My first adventure ride

So yesterday I packed up my bike and headed to malibu creek to go camping for the night.

My bike looked super sweet, so I knew I was ready to go on my first adventure ride. Ryan couldnt go, cause he was vacationing with his family. I just wanted some time to get alone and have some peace and quiet, but that is not exactly what hapened. Well the ride there wasn’t so great, cause I took the coast up, and that turned out to be a lot more complicated than I had anticipated.

Anyway, I finally made my way to Malibu Canyon Rd, but that turned out to be a very sary road, not only was it full of curves and turns at very high speeds, but it was extremely windy. I had to pull over a couple of times because with all my gear on the back i was like a sail, and it was hard to keep control.
When i finally made it to the campsite it was around 2:30pm. The lady at the kiosk told me the campground was full, but I was told to wait till 5 pm, cause sites might open up. I went and killed time for about an hour, and then thought, I better decide now whether i am staying or going to another campground, so i can get settled by night. So I prayed that there would be a site open for me when I went back to the kiosk, and sure enough there was.
I set up camp, and went for a hike. I saw about 9 deers on my hike, and got back to my camp site at dusk. You can barely see some of the deer on this picture I took with my cell phone.

Then I made dinner and relaxed till about 8pm when I went to bed. I was pretty restless though at night, it was cold, my tent was small, my sleeping pad is pretty thin, and I had to pee around 6 times throughout the night. Thats my penalty for drinking water all day long. Plus around 5am helicopters started flying over the campground like every 5 minutes.

It was really annoying, but I managed to still get some sleep in until around 8am, when my mom called to tell me there was a fire in Malibu. Turns out the fire, was just on the top of the hills south of the campground. The whole campground was under mandatory evacuation. So I packed up and headed home. On the way down Malibu Canyon Rd, and PCH, I probably saw about 30 firetrucks racing by me. It was pretty crazy.
I made it home just abour 30 minutes ago and man that was a trip, I hope that next time, I go somewhere a little more peaceful for my one night vacation.

-Nathanael Rowe

So I have had a crash course in learning how to fix up bikes. Before I started riding, I pretty much had no mechanical knowledge, and well now, I am still pretty stupid on the subject. But I have done some recent work to my 82 CM450. For one I had to replace the intake manifolds between the Carburator and the engine. That was a fun project. My Choke cable is frozen, and so I waiting for the one I bought off of Ebay to come, so I can install that. Also my battery is shot, and so I will be replacing that later this week. I will also be welding a trunk to the bumper as soon as that comes in the mail. And as soon as that is all done, Ryan and I will be going on our first adventure ride. To learn more about what that is, check out www.advrider.com.

Nathanael