For the last year or so Michelle has been bugging me to go back to Pismo so she can ride a quad again. The last time she rode she was in her middle teens and I wasn’t sure she liked it. She was riding a small quad in the small dunes and went down a hill that, at the time, looked fairly large. Since then we’ve learned it was actually a very small hill but it scared her quite a bit.
My buddy Scott and I had scheduled a trip last Saturday and this time Michelle finally got to go. It was Scott, Michelle, Michelle’s boyfriend Toliy, and me. Toliy has never ridden a quad but he does ride a big Harley so I recommended that he rent a 400. They were going to get a 250 but I knew he could handle a 400 and wouldn’t enjoy it as much on the 250.
In order to save money Scott let Michelle use his Yamaha Breeze which is a 125 and gets around the dunes fairly well if you don’t weigh much. Shell fit the bill on that so they went down and picked it up from Scott on Thursday before we went. They went up on Friday and spent the day at Montana del Oro about 50 miles north of Pismo. They came down in the afternoon and were planning to stay the night on the beach but got stuck in Toliy’s 2WD truck. I had told them to let the air out of the tires before they tried to drive into the softer sand but they forgot. They ended up staying at a campground a half mile from the beach.
Scott and I drove up on Saturday morning and met them at the entrance to the beach. This time they let some air out and did better but I still had to pull them out once.
They rented Toliy’s bike about 10:30 and we rode for the next 4 hours. Michelle got stuck a lot early on but she finally figured out you have to keep that little bike at full throttle if you want to not get stuck. Toliy seemed to have a great time and is now talking about getting a quad of his own. We’ll see.
After they were done Scott and I went out for a little over an hour and rode hard. When we don’t have anyone to slow us down we cover a lot of ground in a short time although we always enjoy showing newbies around. After our hard ride we were beat and went to the hotel for the night. We were both hungry for wings so we found a spot up the rode and ate.
We’ve decided it’s best to just drive up on Saturday morning, spend the night in a hotel, and then come home Sunday. It’s a much faster trip when we don’t pull the trailers and don’t camp out. We’re also getting too old to ride a lot, or at least I am. Scott is almost 10 years younger than me so he’s still got lots of energy.
You can see the iPhone pictures on my Facebook page plus here’s a couple more from my good camera.
