MotoGiro di California 2025
This year’s MGdC was a strange and shining joy, the kind that makes you grin even when your hands are sore and your seat’s worn thin. I’d had plenty of time to ready my Benelli/Motobi 125 (not without Joe T’s help though!), including the most essential luxury: the Airhawk seat cushion. The bike’s saddle is old leather and horsehide, noble and cruel, and each year the ache of “Monkey Butt” grows more convincing, and the years don’t make it easier.
The gathering at the Sonora Inn and Lumberjack, now one lively, noisy beast, felt like coming home to a family you only see once a year. All a little older, all just as wild, sharing a madness that makes us sign up again and again for two days and nearly 150 miles of riding ancient Italian singles across California’s forgotten backroads (and of course, two extra bonus days if you can fit them in).
Which way are we going? Doesn’t really matter when the bikes look this good.
It takes a certain good madness to sign on for 150 miles a day through California’s rough-cut heart, on machines that belong more to history than to highways. There were challenges, as always, patched roads, long climbs, and the usual surprises. The MotoGiro di California bends, but it never breaks.