After playing in Tomas's garage we ripped down Cachagua in the rain. It was pretty cool...a true supermoto road. It turns to dirt towards the bottom and it was slicker than snot in the rain. At least, it was on our streety tires. It was pretty fun chasing Tomas on his knobbies. Slidey action! I brought home a bit of the nice dirt...
We hooked up with the crew at the Running Iron, had another lunch that couldn't be beat, then we all said our good-byes. Eric and I headed north to Salinas. We didn't want to slab it all the way back home in the rain, and we didn't want to camp in the rain, so we got a place to stay for the night. With the PGA going on at Pebble Beach it was hard to find a place closer. We didn't get more than a few miles out of Carmel Valley before a familiar scenario started playing out...
At first we thought it was a catastrophic failure of some sort when Eric took off the air box cover and motor oil started pouring out...
A little looking around, though, and we found the culprit.
Sigh...deja vu' all over again...
The little specks of water are the beginnings of another round of good rain...of course
I guess the piece of broken slide plate was holding one of the valves open or something, hence all the motor oil in the air box
At least this time we weren't down in a canyon on a dirt trail with street tires

And we learned something after that trip: check the spark plug gap! Yep, it was smashed so Eric re-gapped it. We also learned another trick on that trip: carry a spare slide plate...
This plate was from the WR426 and had slightly larger shoulders. A little work with the file on the world's finest Swiss Army knife and we were good to go. The motor fired right up, sounded horrific for a few seconds while it digested the rest of the metal and spit it into the pipe, then ran like a top all the way into Salinas. Hell, the sun even came out for a few minutes
Once we got into Salinas we cranked the heater and hung up all our sopping wet gear to dry. We then soaked away the chill from all the wet miles we'd done...
We bombed home early the next morning and 2 days later there was a link to the movie trailers in my inbox! These guys don't mess around! Each of the 3 had to make a trailer. Doug's ended up being really short due to hard drive issues, but they're all really good!
I don't know how to embed vimeo but here are the links...
Doug's short trailer...
Jeff's trailer...
View: http://vimeo.com/36793843
And Sal's super-slick production...
View: http://vimeo.com/36803040
Can't wait to see the final product! These guys were a total blast to work with. They all love what they're doing and have an infectious enthusiasm about them. Very youthful and bright, and just a lot of fun to be around. The whole experience was way more interesting and rewarding than I'd imagined it would be. I'm thinking it will be even more so when I can see the fruits of our labors. Heh..."labors"...it was probably one of the most fun things I've ever done

I hope we get the chance to do some more work together in the future
Kind of a strange ride report, for sure, but I enjoyed sharing the experience and I hope y'all enjoyed it a little bit, too!