Table of contents
Henniges
18th pictures
Henniges
1/18
An adventure-hungry editor and companion in search of the American dream.
Henniges
2/18
Intersections in the USA: Right before left does not apply here. Whoever arrives first is allowed to drive first.
Henniges
3/18
Refuel “Cool Springs” in retro style.
Henniges
4/18
The faces of Route 66 are varied: two cars (Hook and McQueen) as a reminiscence of the film “Cars”.
Henniges
5/18
Rattlesnakes? “You have to expect that on every corner”.
Henniges
6/18
Brad and Nate: Their bikes together have covered almost 250,000 kilometers.
Henniges
7/18
Star on the Walk of Fame, Hollywood.
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8/18
Big US dreams that have come true: Rap legend Ice Cube in Las Vegas.
Henniges
9/18
Big US dreams that have come true: American bikes like the Harley E-Glide
Henniges
10/18
Scarborough Saloon in Beatty: westernlike, meeting place for all automobile testers worldwide.
Henniges
11/18
End of the American Dream: Stop at the Ghosttown Rhyolite, Death Valley.
Henniges
12/18
The American dream comes true: surfing, partying and exercising in Santa Cruz.
Henniges
13/18
Pimped cars at the Las Vegas car show.
Henniges
14/18
While dogs are buckled up in Europe, they enjoy the wind in California.
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15/18
“Baby on board” stickers are frowned upon by the Americans. There is another way.
Henniges
16/18
Sunset on Highway # 1.
Henniges
17/18
Meditating sea lions on Highway No. 1.
Henniges
18/18
Present almost everywhere: America’s national flag, the Stars and Stripes.
to travel
On the move: through California by motorcycle
On the move: through California by motorcycle
In search of the American dream
In search of the American dream. What’s left of the dishwasher millionaire chance, that “land of the free” and Obama’s Messiah Hope? To find the answers, we will cross California and a small part of Nevada and Arizona on two Victory motorcycles.
Rolf Henniges
05/01/2012
The police siren is uncomfortable and cuts through the darkness. Even more uncomfortable, however, is why it was launched. Because the siren is for me. It is 9 p.m. on Friday evening.
I’m standing in the middle of the four-lane access road to Los Angeles Airport and was about to cross it. Someone had given me the tip that there would be a drinks machine in the parking garage across the street. I’m terribly thirsty. The police car stops in front of me with a squeal of tires. Blue-red lights rotate on the roof, and instead of a bumper, a sturdy ram is mounted at the front, which appears to have been bent from railroad tracks. So much for personal protection in American police cars. “Hey you! What’s wrong with you? “An officer yells as he dives out the door. A baton, a pistol and a thing that looks like a hand grenade dangle from his belt. “Sorry, sorry,” I stammer, intimidated. From the way I stammer, the officials conclude that I must either be drunk or be a foreigner. It quickly became clear that these are basically my first steps on American soil. You point to a zebra crossing, not 30 meters away, and tell me petrified: “Sir, we cross roads on crosswalks like this.” Thank you very much. Welcome to the USA.
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We set out to look for the American dream. Or what’s left of it. We, that’s me, an adventure-hungry editor, and my travel partner Anna. Our question: What is left of the dishwasher millionaire chance, the “land of the free” and Obama’s messiah hope? To find the answers, we will cross California and a small part of Nevada and Arizona on two Victory motorcycles. They are around 60 kilometers from the airport, so by American standards just around the corner. A taxi takes us there via freeways as wide as the runway and highway-like back roads. Everything is huge in the US. Distances, roads, cars, bellies. So are the motorcycles. When we pack the bikes the next morning, the petite Anna with her 1.61 meters can see Victory Vegas lost out. 320 kilograms, two meters wheelbase, 640 millimeters seat height. At least the seat height fits. I take a seat on the Victory Hammer and we head for Hollywood.
Stop at a gas station. Everything is here. From the pan and soups for the minute to hair ties, nub condoms and hubcaps. At the equivalent of 70 euro cents per liter of super, the fuel is extremely cheap. And that’s how it should stay, predicts the gas station attendant. No wonder the Americans are interested in oil.
“I wouldn’t eat that if I were you,” advises a heavily armed security man who suddenly stands next to me at the refrigerated shelf and points to my left hand, which is clutching a shrink-wrapped sandwich. “Packed in Washington! Do you know how long it will take to get this here? It can’t be fresh at all. Better buy products from the region. ”Crazy! The Americans, who chew as fast food, pay attention to health-conscious and fresh food. I want to tell him that in Germany we even eat apples from New Zealand, but I’ll leave it.
Henniges
Sunset on Highway # 1.
Hollywood in the afternoon. Fantastically winding roads in the hills, but unfortunately limited to 40 km / h. Eccentrically dressed people on the boulevard, what felt like 120 tattoo shops and 580 pubs. 2,450 stars with celebrities from film and music, spread over 2.5 kilometers of sidewalk, form the Walk of Fame. Somehow I had imagined the dream world to be different. More hectic, more glamorous, more pompous, more crowded. Maybe like in the coverage of “People Today”. Berlin at four in the morning seems busier. But maybe you only experience this at the premiere of a new film. We orientate ourselves towards the coast, and Charles Bukowski’s words come to my mind: “… I sailed down Sunset Boulevard, a dead, glass void …” Lifeless? A fully occupied restaurant on the other. Rush hour, an endless stream of metal from cars pushes its way through Bell Air, Beverly Hills, Melrose – the cars certainly do not represent the merits of ordinary Americans. Porsche, Lamborghini, Ferrari, Mercedes, Audi – nothing goes below 80,000 dollars. Did some of the inmates actually wash dishes? It costs nothing to ask. Traffic light stop. Next to me is a white Audi Q7, 22-inch rims, black-tinted windows that I knock on. They go down and reveal two women in partner looks: black mini dresses, deep necklines, necklines like Dolly Buster, high heels with pin heels. Ex-dishwasher women? No questions asked.
Santa Monica, finally by the sea. Hotel castles, posh villas, hectic rush. The weekend caused motel prices to skyrocket, you pay an average of 40 percent more than on working days, and we only find affordable accommodation 30 kilometers deeper inland. And a pub that closes at 1.30 a.m. and kicks me into the night air with a hungry stomach. I go straight to McDonalds. “Who let you in here?” A cleaning lady hisses at me. “Nobody, the door was open.” The old woman takes a deep breath and yaps: “Then someone forgot to lock it.” Thrown out. It doesn’t matter, right next to it is “Jack in the Box.” They are also closed, but their drive-in is still open. I line up between two cars. As a pedestrian, mind you. “Hey you! I don’t serve you, you’re walking! This is a drive-in! ”Please? Where is the difference? Okay, that’s how they want it. I stomp back a few steps, ask a couple of guys in the car if they’ll let me get in, and we hum three meters forward. This time I get a cheeseburger. It’s the worst ever. It tastes like a moving box that has been left in the cellar for too long.
With ketchup. And cucumber dummy. Good night. We follow Highway 101 north. It cuts through gigantic vegetable-growing areas. Skeletal irrigation systems scratch banks of fog, including Mexican and South American farm workers with ant lugs who brace their bodies against the harsh coastal winds and their shovels against fertile soil. Although at the end of September, the mercury column only oscillates around 15 degrees. The sobering experience of last night, thank God, remains an isolated case: No matter where we stop, the Americans start friendly conversations, are interested in us and, above all, the bikes. A first breath of the “land of the free” blows towards me after turning onto Highway No. 1 near Las Cruces. After all the neon signs of Los Angeles ’, the rugged, barren hilly landscape with its yellow fluff of grass looks like the Wild West for beginners, and I suddenly feel free.
Kris Kristofferson dedicated a world-famous song line to exactly this feeling: “Freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose.” I hum it and think: The boss, the woman, the bank loan at home – none of this has any room in my thoughts. I see myself pulling the door and mumbling “Sorry, honey, but I have to go to the kiosk”. Unfortunately, he’s at the end of the world. In this case in California. I enjoy and seriously ask myself: “What does a man really need more than his bike, blue jeans, leather jacket and two boots to live in?” Time doesn’t flow here, it doesn’t run, it doesn’t hollow a stone. She stands. Apparently only we move in a magical setting. Vultures circling above me, in front of me the shimmering asphalt carpet, below me a booming V2. 1730 cubic meters, 90 km / h, sixth gear. Two piston-like tankards that toast each other 2000 times a minute. For life, for freedom, a state that rolls out the beauty of the world in front of me as a red carpet. In short: the opposite of Hanover. Sorry, Lower Saxony.
In Lompoc, Harley dealer Ray, a white-maned sun boy who is immediately trusted to be able to sell pack ice to Eskimos, tells us about the business of the last two years: he has 32 Harleys from the early 1940s in a container along with a ton of spare parts reimported from Russia. The machines were in an old Belarusian warehouse, fully fueled, oiled, little rust. Sometimes zero kilometers on the clock. They were part of a delivery of relief supplies that the United States had sent the Russians to help them fight the Nazis. Probably they were simply forgotten. Ray and his team dismantled the machines, checked every screw thread, and sold the 70-year-old new motorcycles for $ 18,000 each. Nevertheless: Business is bad. Since the banking crisis three years ago, new Harleys have been in America’s showrooms as if they were pegged, because customers mostly financed through loans. And the banks have become cautious. This has not changed since Obama changed power. In general, Obama. “That was only hot air,” mumbles Ray and waves his hand.
More reports from MOTORRAD on motorcycle trips in the USA
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Henniges
Pimped cars at the Las Vegas car show.
There are not many more jobs, still war and no prospects. An old Ford Falcon is parked outside with a huge sticker on the rear window: “So, what did all that hope and change brought for you?” The following day, the Pacific pushes thick fog to the coast, and our drive on the much-vaunted section between Morrow Bay and San Francisco becomes a blind flight over dreamy winding curves. The fog is so thick that you can’t see 20 meters away. We move forward centimeter by inch and poke through towns like Lucia, which are noted on the map, but basically only consist of three or four houses. Two bikers from Nebraska chat with us at the gas station. Brad drives a 1200 Sportster, Nate a BMW 90/6 with a mileage of well over 200,000 kilometers. He swears by and raves about “German engineering” and the reliability that goes with it. In addition, he says, he drove a 5-series BMW for a long time: “All the girls wanted to ride in that part.” Now Nate Mitsubishi is driving. Less consumption, cheaper to run. “But no more women,” he complains. Buddy Brad stands next to his oil-dripping Harley, shrugs his shoulders and says, “22,000 miles on the clock. That it oils everywhere – it doesn’t matter. I just tip over. American engineering is also not bad. “
Days later we swim in the traffic of a four-lane road to downtown Santa Cruz – it smells of salt water, youth and hashish. Here the gap between rich and poor is extremely wide. Every few meters, bums and jesters beg for a few cents. Most of them are long-haired, colorfully dressed ex-hippies who look as if they had just migrated from Goa / India to here. They shape the street scene as well as masses of stray nerds and surfers, young party people and the wonderful, detailed murals on many house walls. With its beaches, students and bars, Santa Cruz has a youthful charm of new beginnings, which the old hippies give with their magic of freedom and joie de vivre. We stay a few days and at some point we find ourselves in a dump called Tracy in front of a Mexican snack bar and a constant problem: The country is huge, the map is wrongly scaled and the orientation is sometimes difficult: Where do you go to Vernalis? Nobody knows this place, which according to the map is only 16 kilometers away. Imagine asking a hamburger where to go to Norderstedt. And he says: Never heard of it. Finally someone calls out: “Woorrnaliss!” And types it into his iPhone, whose navigation system shows us the way. We must have always pronounced the name incorrectly. The guy tilts his head, squints his eyes like Clint Eastwood before the final shot and growls: “Vernalis – man, what’s over there?”
Nothing. Honestly. An hour later we are there. 400 residents according to the town sign, 70 excavators, ten dump trucks, 45 residential containers. And not a soul. We thunder across the lonely 132 East through Modesto, Waterford, La Grange and finally land in Mariposa. Autumn mood, 30 degrees, golden light. But tomorrow, according to the Americans, there will be a “cool breeze”. What this is all about, we feel the next day in the heights of Yosemite National Park: Icy wind digs through our clothes and cuts furrows in our faces. On the 3030-meter-high Tioga Pass, the cold is so extreme that you can no longer feel your hands and think you are about to pass out. One day later the passes are closed. Two meters of fresh snow. California in September. How was that again?
Henniges
The American dream comes true: surfing, partying and exercising in Santa Cruz.
“It never rains in southern California …” That’s right. It’s snowing! Days later at a gas station in Lone Pine on 395 South: A note flutters on the wooden counter with a photo of a man in uniform with a muscular torso. “Jim Jimbo Broghman – shot in Afghanistan May 2010” is written underneath and that he will never be forgotten. “He was one of us,” grumbles the gas station attendant. “Father of a family, three children, great woman.” I want to know what he, and indeed all of America, is doing there. “We are punishing the assassin from September 11, 2001,” growls the gas station attendant, looking like a bouncer who has just been threatened to take his girlfriend off the ground. “Bin Laden is already dead,” I reply. “For us, the war is only over when everyone who wears a turban is in jail,” says my counterpart. I pay the fuel, sit back in the saddle of the Victory and think about whether this American ever thinks about the fact that Islam has 1.5 billion followers. And most US prisons have long been overcrowded. The United States is so huge, takes itself so seriously, you get the feeling that nobody here is interested in what is going on on other continents. This also explains the serious claim made by a waitress in a diner a few days later: France is the capital of Europe.
Death Valley. A ranger stops next to us. Storm drives tufts of grass over the endless landscape. The sky is ash gray. It’s lousy cold. “This is the sierra,” he says. “Be strong or die.” This is probably what the entire automotive industry thinks, too, when it chases its prototypes through Death Valley’s up to 50 degrees hot hell in the summer to check when cooling systems collapse. The walls of the Scarborough Saloon in Beatty, a gold digger’s nest on the way to Las Vegas, are decorated over and over with auto parts and one-dollar bills with the names of the test drivers immortalized. A museum in the desert. Each part has a long story. What a country. Despite its contrasts: I love it. Its vastness. The diversity. People’s strong belief that nothing is really impossible. The unaffected friendliness with which we are met. And the constant small talk. Everyone has a few kind words left for everyone. Nonsense to anyone in Germany. If you are lucky you will get an answer. If you’re unlucky, hit it on your face or have a jacket with the sleeves sewn upside down, I guess as the Victorys’ wheels roll down Route 66.
This is where they belong. Dream wedding: big engine, casual seat married to streets that cut a swath into the horizon. Las Vegas is behind us. We gambled away a dollar. Knocked us over the ears for two nights. Marveled at a lowrider car show with a concert by old rap master Ice Cube. And now we are rolling back towards Los Angeles in the footsteps of the emigrants. . . Some Europeans think that the American dream has long been a nightmare. Some Americans claim that the European dream has long overtaken the American dream. I say: all of life is a dream. Only: how long can you travel until you wake up?
Info
Werel
Travel time: 23 days. Distance covered: 3780 kilometers.
The trip described took place from the end of September to mid-October and 90 percent of it led through California. Only 200 kilometers each were covered in Arizona and Nevada.
Getting there:
Flights to Los Angeles are usually available all year round for around 600 to 700 euros / person. A visa application (ESTA) submitted electronically in advance is compulsory and costs 14 dollars. Money: Due to the constantly fluctuating exchange rate, it is advisable to get cash by debit card in the USA at the ATMs that are everywhere. The fee for such a transaction is typically three dollars.
Equipment:
If you want to ride in jeans and a leather jacket, you shouldn’t forget a rain suit and windstopper / fleece. Due to the influence of the Pacific, it can get quite fresh on the coast even in summer.
Stay:
If you like it stylish, cozy and familiar, you can’t ignore the bed-and-breakfast offers. However, the cost of a room (whether one or two people) in the mostly charming, small colonial-style houses is always around $ 100 / night. Motel rooms, which are usually even equipped with a refrigerator, microwave and coffee maker and cost between 40 and 75 dollars, are cheaper. Here, too, it does not matter whether you occupy the room alone or in pairs. At the weekend, prices soar by up to 40 percent, especially on the coast. It is advisable to make a reservation in advance, as this makes the price slightly cheaper.
Traffic:
Right-hand traffic like in Europe. The big difference is intersections with stop signs. Right before left does not apply here. You generally have to stop first, and whoever came to the intersection first has the right of way. Then you drive alternately until the intersection is empty. The limit when driving after drinking alcohol is 0.8 per thousand.
Catering:
Fast food along the way. You can eat cheaply and well at the snack chain DENNYS, especially salads and soups are highly recommended here. If you are into burgers, you should visit the “IN AND OUT BURGER” chain. The burgers are very cheap, tastier and have fresher toppings than those of the competition. The french fries are also absolutely recommendable and more delicious than at the other chains, because they are made directly on site from fresh potatoes. California tends to be a pioneer for the USA, because even in medium-sized cities there are now small diners or restaurants that offer vitamin-rich food that is far removed from the fast food image.
Motorcycles:
The trip took place on two Victory bikes. The manufacturer, based in the USA, is largely unknown even in the United States, so you are always surrounded by curious people who are interested in the motorcycles. Because almost two thirds of all motorcyclists are on the road with a Harley-Davidson. You can find information about renting motorcycles at www.eaglerider.com.
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