Santa Cruz, CA –
The Parking Situation
We arrived in Santa Cruz one day after the Motorcycles and Misfits / Breaking Away Rally. Dima was amazing and helped grab some parking permits for Steph and I to be able to park in the residential area of Santa Cruz for 3 days. Otherwise trying to park in Santa Cruz would have been a nightmare with the new oversized vehicle ordinances the city has. The weather was drastically different being on the cloudy and misty Pacific coast. Highs in the 60s if you were lucky.
Motorcycle Rides
The highlight of the stay aside from enjoying the wonders of Santa Cruz would be the motorcycle ride that Steph and I took with their BMW G 650 X-Country and me borrowing Dima’s BMW F800ST. We started out in Santa Cruz, took CA-9 north, then CA-35 to Alice’s Restaurant. Finally continuing on CA-35 to CA-92 until we began taking CA-1 south along the coast. We met up with Dima who was riding Charley’s Super Tenere (which had the wildest front tire wear pattern I’ve ever seen) at the Pigeon Point Light House. What an epic ride.
Motorcycle Issues
Steph had been having issues with their BMW though. Dima and I though that Steph just wanted to ride at tame speeds on the trip but chatting afterwards learned that Steph was actually going full throttle and couldn’t even hit 80 mph. Yikes. Later on we plugged it into this system Dima had for troubleshooting his own bike which involved a $50 android app that imitated the BMW dealer software. 54 errors for the idle actuator. Uh oh. It also had a small oil leak from somewhere near the top of the engine after an oil change, perhaps from overfilling. He cleared the errors on Steph’s bike so we’ll see soon if it rides any differently (spoilers: we would find out much later on it was a stuck idle air controller, resulting in the behavior that felt like the choke was always on).