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Published: November 14th 2012
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So I left Jack and San Francisco behind a week ago Tuesday. The riding south of San Fran was pretty sweet; lots of turns, just above the ocean. I spent two days making it down to LA, where I timed it perfectly arriving for rush hour traffic. 8 lane freeways and I was crawling along in 1st gear. Luckily LA is a small place and I only had to spend about an hour and a half doing this. I met up with my friends Tony and Josephine for dinner and we checked out Downtown Disney and grabbed dinner.
Thursday, I continued on to San Diego where I would be hanging out with my buddy JP and his girlfriend Heather for the weekend. JP had ordered me the soft cases for my side panniers that could not be shipped up to Canada. With the soft cases, I can pack up the side panniers much better and everything inside them won't be loose anymore.
San Diego was a good time. JP showed me around Pacific Beach where he lives, I ate some oysters (gross!), spent all of Sunday at a bar watching NFL football, Heather cut off all my hair, and
the soft cases for my side panniers arrived on Monday. Also on Monday, I picked up my bike from a shop where I was having a valve clearance check done on it (don't really know what that is but I was told to do it in Seattle when I got the bike serviced there). This turned out to be a good thing as a couple valves were really out and had been adjusted. Also got the spark plugs replaced.
When I picked up the bike late Monday afternoon, I noticed on the ride back to JP's place that the engine heat indicator wasn't working. I googled the issue and the general response was a wire getting jostled during spark plug replacement. Yesterday morning I loaded up the bike for Mexico, took it back to the shop and they solved the problem (pinched wire) within an hour. Then it was off to cross the border into Mexico which I did at Tecate, east of Tijuana, as recommended to me by a couple bikers I met on the road.
At Tecate, I picked up Mexico vehicle insurance (because that's all they recognize down here) and drove up to the border.
Where I was just waved through. No ID check (I didn't even have to take off my full face helmet with tinted visor). Spent a couple hours driving down to Ensenada where I checked into a hostel.
The Baja 1000 is happening this weekend, a crazy off-road race with motorbikes, volkswagon bettles, and 2 million dollar super trucks. I saw one of these last night doing 360 spins in the middle of a street. The race starts from here Friday morning and goes about 1150 miles south to La Paz. I'm heading south today to find a good spot watching the race on Friday, hopefully. Apparantly they don't close off the roads to regular traffic so if you're in the wrong place at the wrong time, you could find yourself in the middle of just about the craziest race on earth, with dune buggies flying by you at over 100 mph. That's it for now. Later,
Andrew
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Alex Elofson
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Haha, glad you got the valve clearance checked out, total hunch on my part. Hard to tell except by the mileage of the bike. Its funny about the coolant temp sensor, that was a common problem that i totally forgot to tell you about (even moreso when riding through wet areas, the connection at the radiator gets corroded easily, simple fix, unplug clean with something abrasive, replug). Dont forget to check your oil level regularly! Certain KLR's burn a lot of oil, especially when riding through lots of climate changes! Good luck and have fun!