Julian Motorcycle Trip November 15 – 16, 2018

I started riding motorcycles when I was 12 or 13 years old. And have loved them ever since. As I was underage and did not have a license for riding on the street, I rode mostly in the dirt in wide open deserts. Although I did ride often enough on the street that I got stopped by the police when I was 14 and received a ticket for riding without a license.

At the time I started riding, Steve McQueen “The King of Cool” and his buddies were blasting around the Southern California deserts on modified Triumph Scramblers. I always wanted to be cool and to own a Triumph Scrambler. I am still not cool, but I do own a Triumph Scrambler.

Sometimes I feel an overpowering urge for no specific reason to hit the road and get out of town. So one autumn day at the end of apple season, I took my Triumph Scrambler for a ride up to the apple capital of the San Diego Mountains - Julian - for a piece of apple pie ala mode and a cup of coffee.

Julian is a quaint old mining town and an official California Historical Landmark that has reinvented itself as a tourist town centered on apple pie. There are some good restaurants, a couple of cute hotels (one of which I stayed in overnight), a few mountain tourist shops, a local blues festival and some good hiking trails outside of town. But the main attraction is the apple pie. Julian apple pies are available in the markets in San Diego. However, they just do not taste the same as a hot piece of pie with vanilla ice cream melting over it served with a hot cup of coffee in the funky Julian Café and Bakery at a table overlooking Main Street – delightful.

The ride up to Julian is almost as good as the pie. Starting out from coastal Cardiff-by-the Sea, the route winds though the tree lined streets and past the multi-million dollar homes of Rancho Santa Fe, then out past Lake Hodges along the Del Dios Highway before encountering the sprawl and congestion of Escondido. After navigating the Escondido traffic, you are rewarded with a ride through countryside in the San Pasqual Valley past the San Pasqual Battlefield and the San Diego Wild Animal Park before arriving in Ramona. Ramona is a unique town about as different from Cardiff as a town in the same county can be and may be worthy of a trip of its own sometime in the future.

Outside of Ramona the road starts heading up into the hills through Santa Ysabel and Wynola and finally past apple orchards and into Julian itself where the lure of apple pie is enough to cause even the most diehard desert rat to stop for a while before dropping down the Banner Grade on highway 78 into the Anza Borrego Desert State Park.