Hedonism - Lake Isabella, California

[GP Kevo]

I had planned to ride to Hedonism but plans went awry. I did ride nearly the whole way with about 7 miles to go with my scooter and I stranded on the side of a desert road. Fortunately I was followed by our own rescue team, though there were no plans to fit me into the pickup truck with so many other people inside, but I managed it.

The rally is held in the mountains above Bakersfield, California and isn't far from the southern tip of the Sequoia National Forest. The group campsite is situated near the shore of Lake Isabella at a site called French Gulch. The lake is a flooded valley hydroelectric plant that lets the Kern river flow down to Bakersfield from its dam. There are boat rentals at the local marina, so it's not a bad place for a family weekend away. I wouldn't recommend that during the Hedonism rally, though.

Hedonism is a mostly vintage and classic scooter rally billed as a Scooterist's Rally, and not a mod run or scooter convention that are the norm here. $35 included two nights camping, an unending supply of keg craft beer, dinner on both nights, a long rideout on twisty mountain roads, music, mostly ska and punk and a party on Saturday including awards and a raffle for donated gifts from many vendors including JL Exhausts, Leo Vince, and a bunch of other stuff.

My club (Diablos Scooter Cult) attended in force. I don't think that has happened since the Lambretta Jamboree in Santa Rosa. That was great because there was plenty of food, coffee, water and beer for all. I was pretty much skint before the rally Friday, having just enough for fuel for the ride up there and back.

I had planned to leave from my garage for the rally at around 4:45 am, to give a lot of time for taking rest breaks on a 200 mile ride that would take in massive LA freeways and traffic, suburbs, desert and finally mountain roads to take us up to the rally. My friend Ben had agreed to ride with me to the rally, so he and Dean trailered their scooters to my garage, then we unloaded Ben's scooter and set off. There was one problem, though. They arrived at my garage after 10:00 am. We were taking mostly freeways and highways until the turnoff to the mountain road that is CA-178. We could ride faster.

I rode my scooter in the desert before but that had been in November when it's positively cold then. We rode our scooters through and beyond LA going from cool, Pacific marine layer mist then into the sunshine of the outer suburbs and headed out into the desert where it was already 85 F and we were pushing our scooters pretty hard. Ben's scooter is powered by a CASA Performance SSR 265 and I'm still riding my TS1, albeit on a newer barrel ported especially for me by my friend Dean Suinn, of Deanspeed, who was driving Bens big diesel pickup truck towing Dean's 3 scooter trailer. My scooter performed really well. But I somehow forgot to fuel up during our lunch stop and so later, upon draining the tank at high speed, high revs and high load, the piston holed within 7 miles of destination. Such is the result of poor decision making. Now I've got an expensive repair to do. I expect to have my scooter back on the road sometime within 2 to 4 weeks. That's okay, because with the hot season bearing down rally season is almost done. I'll have time to more carefully rebuild my engine and properly run it in.

I had forgotten to bring my phone with me so I've got no pictures to share, just the riding videos. I'm getting ideas of how I want to build my GP200 into a fast tourer and what not to do, especially in the desert. There is no guarantee that petrol will be available ahead for up to 100 miles, though it's usually 60 -80 miles, so fill all the way up at every opportunity. I'm putting in the largest capacity Oiltek tank into it with a working fuel gauge. Well, here are the videos:

Escape From LA: The city and county has thousands of miles of freeways, but the road surface quality is usually poor. There are several times when my scooters tires leave the tarmac going over bumps and rises. Every bridge seam is a several inch high lump. Once out of LA proper and onto the 14, the road surface improves. I edited out a couple of sections to keep the video under one hour, that's how long it can take to ride scooters out of LA. In a car, without lane splitting / traffic filtering, add another hour.


Enter the Desert: After refueling, we're off again. I had wanted to get breakfast but that got set aside. So we're out of LA, in the outer, outer suburb of Palmdale, and headed into the Mojave desert.

[Toddy]

That’s some hard riding that traffic looks busy when you pull on like the M25

[GP Kevo]

It was light traffic, before the big afternoon parking lot they call rush hour. I had wanted to leave while it was still dark to have no traffic, but my mates got to my place at 10:00 in the morning, so a very late start. There were other ways to go to the rally, not through the desert, but since I had already been on these roads when I rode back from Joshua tree, I decided to ride them again. I was worried about road closures on the mountain paths we could have chosen, what with all the rain and mudslides we've had. And if we took the Grapevine, the nickname for Interstate 5, what Californians also call, "the five", there is a massive uphill grade to take and that with a lot more traffic that you could see we avoided by going East on the 14.

Ben's Casa had a soft sieze and lost compression. I made a fuelish mistake.


And stage final, when I holed the piston just as the scenery started getting nice. If I had filled my fuel tank in Mojave instead of thinking I could fuel up at the next town, that wouldn't have happened. Live and learn.