California Love: Mount Hamilton and Lick Observatory
What better way to give your new livery a test than with a winding road? As the sun rose higher in the sky, we made our way from the cool air of San Francisco to the golden hills of Route 130 to visit the Lick Observatory atop Mt. Hamilton.
If Wikipedia is to be believed, Route 130 is said to have 365 curves – one for each day of the year. Now, I don’t know if that is true but I can tell you that the road is indeed very twisty. It took twice as many minutes to travel the 20 or so miles from the west to the observatory.
In addition to its plethora of turns, the road is also quite bumpy in some spots. Major lumps and ripples crossed large sections of the road similar to frost heaves that we get in the Northeast.
A few of the dips in the road sent the Tiger’s too soft rear suspension a-bouncing. Hitting one of those on a firmly suspended sportbike would indeed give your naughty bits quite an unwelcome surprise or possibly dislodge your spleen.
The higher and higher we climbed, the closer to the sun we got. It was 409° when we finally made it to the summit. But the view once we got there was worth the sweat. The rolling toasty hills spread out before us whispering “…come closer… we’ve got secrets to share with you…”
Never made it there. Interesting name and nice views.
Its a neat place. I wish we could have seen one of their night programs. Point of note~ James Lick is buried under under one of the telescope bases 🙂
409 degrees! Thats pretty toasty. Hope your OK.
😆 Yea, it was a rude awakening after the deliciously cool temps of SF.
Very nice.
It is awesome that you guys rented the Tigers and were able to see some sights out of the city. That road looks sweet.
What wonderful scenery – I would love the chance to ride that road – 365 curves…wondrous!
This is so awesome! I would love to visit these places. The pictures are gorgeous!!
I love that you ride a motorcycle. Such a bad-ass. 🙂
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😆 Thanks, Bonnie 🙂
You should follow your heart and visit them one day!
Everytime I read the description of one of those roads in CA my jaw drops! And there is cool stuff at the end of every one too! Did you go in the observatory at all?
We did go onside the building but not near the ‘scopes. They do have public programs that run there, though. It must be pretty neat. I can’t imagine driving down that road in the dark though.