The rumors are true

I am the very hap­py own­er of a 2004 Moto Guzzi Cal­i­for­nia Stone. It was pur­chased new, but all the paper­work says ’04.

This bike is as dif­fer­ent from the Vira­go as day is to night. They both are black, they both are V‑twins, they both have a cruis­er pro­file, but the sim­i­lar­i­ties end there.

The most imme­di­ate­ly obvi­ous dif­fer­ences are size, weight, and pow­er. The Stone at a quar­ter throt­tle in first gear accel­er­ates hard enough to give me ver­ti­go and destroy my sense of up and down. It weighs almost twice what the Vira­go weighs. What’s sur­pris­ing is that despite how much heav­ier the Stone is, it’s far more sta­ble and well-bal­anced. I can near­ly track­stand on the Stone at stop­lights, keep­ing bal­ance even when bare­ly inch­ing for­ward at speeds I’d have put my foot down on the Vira­go. being wider and heav­ier I have to be a lit­tle more care­ful maneu­ver­ing. Park­ing takes a greater degree of fore­thought and skill.

Rid­ing the Guzzi… I’m wary of mak­ing any state­ments that a bike could improve my skills, but this bike does­n’t stand in my way. I rode on Sun­day with a friend who has rid­den with me on a few oth­er Sun­days. He said I looked like I was rid­ing much more in con­trol and much more inside my com­fort zone, and yet I was­n’t that far behind him. My sec­ond day on the bike and I fell into a groove with it. Sure, I’ve still got too much upper-body ten­sion and I still tend to pan­ic in blind cor­ners, but even with only a few hours on the Stone I was rid­ing way beyond my pre­vi­ous capa­bil­i­ty on the Virago.

Almost every Moto Guzzi review ever writ­ten has some ref­er­ence to intan­gi­bles like “spir­it” and “char­ac­ter.” Review­ers often list the faults of the Moto Guzzi and then pro­ceed to tell us how they fell in love with the bike. Well, there’s some­thing to that. There’s a lot of his­to­ry to the Moto Guzzi and it comes through in the ride. I swear it feels like I imag­ine fly­ing a Sop­with Camel must feel. It’s spare in feel and unapolo­getic for being a motor­cy­cle. Blip the throt­tle and the bike lurch­es to the right from the torque of the dri­ve­shaft. Lean on the throt­tle and feel the echo of the pis­tons through the frame of the bike. These are things that fre­quent­ly get engi­neered out of motor­cy­cles, and to be sure a lot of effort went in to mak­ing the Stone com­fort­able, but not by hid­ing the nature of the bike. I don’t know if that makes any sense at all.

I cyn­i­cal­ly won­der if I’ve fall­en for a bit of clever mar­ket­ing-in-engi­neer­ing here with a bike whose quirk­i­ness is cel­e­brat­ed because it’s eas­i­er to fea­ture the bugs than elim­i­nate them. OK, well, I would­n’t be the first to find the cake tastes bet­ter when I add my own egg. This bike does seem to speak to me. And hell, if I weren’t a super­sti­tious roman­tic, I’d be dri­ving a sta­tion wag­on, not a motor­cy­cle, right?

Any­how, that’s the news from here, and why I’m not post­ing much late­ly. Spend­ing too much time rid­ing. My first overnight trip will be this week­end and I’ll try to report from the road.