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.

The planned route for my first day of the trip proves that I’m an idiot: nearly 400 miles north from San Francisco, mostly along the stunning but slow-going California Highway 1. Google suggested the route might take eight and a half hours of riding, which struck my pea brain as a longish day, but doable.

Determined to avoid the previous day’s time crunch, I awoke at 7:30 AM to the gentle pings of Super Mario Galaxy music, showered, and departed the warm hostel. After just a few minutes on the road, I remembered that the pastrami sandwich in Jenner was all I’d eaten the day before and so I stopped for breakfast in Crescent City, parked next to a new KLR loaded with camping gear and a shiny KTM Adventure perched on the adjacent sidewalk.

Cool was the morning air, a relief from the previous day’s stifling, off-coast heat. The wet remains of overnight rain showers, scattered over the street and seat of my bike, were less welcome, more ominous. The third day’s ride would be my shortest of the trip, a 300-mile endurance run up the sleep-inducing I-5. Please don’t rain.

My weekend in Washington coincided with the birthday of an area friend and he wanted to mark the occasion with a celebratory moto ride to Mount St. Helens. We agreed the night I got into town that we’d make the pilgrimage only if the weather forecast permitted, and I’ll admit that I secretly prayed for rain. Already a thousand miles into my interstate journey, a day off the bike struck me as a very good idea. But I didn’t get my way. Overcast and early in the morning, the call came in that the ride was on.

Figures that the day I’d spend leaving Washington would be the only one without a drop of rain. I still hadn’t fully recovered from the aqueous trauma of three days prior, but after passing Olympia without a drop, fears of storming evaporated. Galloping west toward US-12, the bike and I found the summer Washington day I hoped for. Dry, big sky, and sweet-smelling green.