Flying Horse Over the Grassy Valley: Aprilia's Pegaso 650 in the Carrizo Plain National Monument.(Evaluation)

Publication: Rider

Publication Date: 01-JAN-02

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COPYRIGHT 2002 Ehlert Publishing Group

Give me a good dual-purpose motorcycle, a long dirt road winding through valleys and over hills, and this boy has pretty much found heaven on earth. The editor says this. Italian dual-purpose single, the Aprilia Pegaso 650, needs to have its legs stretched, which means I should find some lengthy dirt roads to travel.

I'm a big fan of not much, as in not much population density. I've been in crowds, I've lived in cities, but I prefer a limited number of people in a large space. Like three guys on motorcycles in a quarter of a million acres. That is living and riding right.

There's a lot not to like about California, my adoptive state, including the price I'm paying for the electricity to keep this computer on. But there are also a lot of things I do like. One of them is that over half the state is owned by us, the people of these United States. Most of that is pretty uncrowded territory, Thousands of square miles come under the control of the Bureau of Land Management, and thousands more are in the several dozen national forests, parks and monuments, all of which fall under the aegis of the U.S. Department of the Interior.

One of our newest national monuments, the Carrizo Plain, lies about 60 road-going miles east of my house, he plain covering the major part of a valley that is about 65 miles long, 12 or so miles wide. I had been through the valley many times on the "main" route, Soda Lake Road, which has about...

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