Kick Old Man Winter in the A$$ Overnighter - Outbound

Golden Gate Hogsters,

Past director and road captain Bob “Tennessee” Jones’s Central Coast Overnighter, unofficially known as The Kick-Old-Man-Winter-in-the-Azz Run, will take place Saturday and Sunday Feb. 23 and 24. As many of you know, last year the ride to the lovely Central Coast mission town of San Luis Obispo had to be cancelled due to bad weather. So we’re going to give it another try this year. My wife Martha and I now live in Tenn., but we’ll be back on The Coast to lead this ride for the ninth year. Highway 1 through Big Sur road, our usual route back home from this run, is finally open again after two years of reconstruction and we’re looking forward to re-experiencing this primo riding route. It’s not yet official, but if rain is an issue, we will use the following weekend as an alternate.

The first day will be a ride down US 101 to King City and then some backroads out to the ranchland village of Parkfield, the Earthquake Capital of Calif., where we’ll have lunch at the V6 Parkfield Inn (https://www.v6ranch.com/cafe). Good barbecue made from local beef and other foods, including homemade pie. Then we’ll travel down some awesome motorcycle roads to Santa Margarita and San Luis Obispo. Dinner will be at Gennaro’s Grill and Garden (www.gennarosgrillandgarden.com, a family-run restaurant located in a renovated old house about a block from our hotel on Marsh Street.

Saturday’s ride will start out with kickstands up at 8 a.m. at San Francisco Harley-Davidson and be about 275 miles, about seven-and-a-half hours riding time including lunch and fuel stops. Sunday’s ride back through Big Sur will be about 250 miles, about six hours including lunch and fuel stops. Both rides are designed to get us to our destinations before dark.

If you want to go, do two things immediately:
1. Reserve a room in San Luis Obispo. See below.
2. Send an email to me at [email protected] telling me who’s going and, if it’s a couple, how many bikes. This will help me stay in touch with you on updates and meal planning. I will also need to make a decision based on the weather two days in advance of the ride so we can cancel our hotel rooms and dinner reservations if need be. If you don’t contact me, I have no way of knowing if you’re going so you won’t get ride updates or a reservation for dinner.

Martha and I are staying at the Avenue Inn Downtown, 345 Marsh Street, San Luis Obispo. (www.avenueinnSLO.com), 805 543-6443. This location is near downtown and affords foot access to downtown, where all the action is. The motel doesn’t offer block rooms. The price includes a light breakfast. The Avenue Inn has been recently renovated and is a very clean and pleasant place. It doesn’t require a two-night stay on weekends like many Central Coast tourist hotels do. Its main drawbacks are its price (like almost all SLO lodging), and small rooms. It had plenty of rooms available at the time I wrote this. There are many other hotels and motels in SLO, including a Best Western. So if walking distance isn’t an issue (bike? Uber? Lyft?), you may save money going further out or going to the northeast part of town along Monterey St., which is also fairly accessible to downtown by foot. Go to Google Maps, zone in on SLO and select “lodging.”

I look forward to this ride every year. Let’s hope for sunny skies for this one.

Bob "Tennessee" Jones

Past Director

Golden Gate Chapter

Harley Owners Group