I’ve a bit of a love-hate relationship with sleep; I love to stay in bed, but I hate that sleep is such a waste of time. Leonardo da Vinci devised a torturous sleep pattern to avoid the wastefulness of unconscious nights, whereby he slept in ten minute bursts for a total of just two hours per day. Obviously, that’s insane and ill-conceived, but I’ve always had a lot of respect for people that can sleep less and wake up early and active. Usually it’s old people with such talents.

In October, I started wrangling together a group of coworkers for Sunday morning rides every week. We’ve had some fantastic days, but I get the feeling that, at least until after football season, it’s going to be harder and harder to motivate the pack to wake up at dawn for a casual back road tear to breakfast and coffee.

For many riders, a Ninja 250 is the bottom rung of a sport bike ladder, a necessary first step in pursuit of high horsepower race replicas. I can’t begin to recount the myriad times I’ve been asked about getting a bigger bike, generally with the suggestion, express or implied, that I’m ready for a 600cc super sport. With over 17,000 miles behind the bars of my mighty 250, I’ve no apprehensions about moving up. But I’d rather branch out.

In the dubious pursuit of progress, I’ve abandoned a flawless summer and hunkered down for the chillier half of the year ahead. It is officially autumn, evidenced by retreating fog and dipping temperatures. There’s no season that spells doom for motorcycling in the Bay Area, but certain months call for more clothing.

I’ve lived in California for most of my life, but Big Sur might as well have been in Greece. In my twenty years of local residence, California’s central coast remained a mystery. Is Big Sur a city? A region? A frame of mind? I intended to discover en route to a group ride arranged by my future mother-in-law–in the Santa Monica mountain canyons surrounding Malibu, more than four hundred miles south of home in San Francisco.

My real reason for being in Southern California is too embarrassing to admit (baby, ahem, shower) but I had the fortune of a good excuse to skip on the future-in-law family outing to Meryl Streep’s latest theatrical assault on masculinity. I’d been set up on a blind moto date (purely platonic) with a group of experienced gents. They were billed as “old man sport bikers,” but none of them were on trick knees or anything.