mwest
Tuned and Synch'ed
Early this year, I was flipping channels and as I was passing our local access station I saw some people talking about an old car. I was surprised to hear they were at a car museum in Hollister, which I had never heard of. I started thinking that it would make a fun destination for a group ride and sent out an email to see if there was interest. The responsive was positive so I made some inquiries. I found out that it is a private collection held inside a winery building and only open on the first saturday of every month. I originally wanted to do it in the Spring when the area was green, but some family issues prevented me from planning anything more than a week or two in advance. We finally did it yesterday.
Earlier in the week they were predicting rain for Saturday but as the week went on, the chance of precipitation kept going down and the weather turned out to be great with temps getting up near 80 but cool air made for very good riding weather. The meeting place was the Starbucks in Hollister. Since I knew there were people coming from 100 miles a way, I wasn't expecting to see many people there early. I got there at 15 till and a there was already about 8 people. By 9 there were 15 or so and by the time we left, there was a group of 20 bikes (21 people if I counted correctly) all but 4 of them Guzzis.
We did a ride out to the Panoche Inn, which is about 45 minutes on backroads. We bought cool drinks at the Inn and talked with the owner for about 30-45 minutes before heading back to Hollister. There we picked up lunches to go and ate them on the patio at the winery before touring the museum.
The museum itself was nothing spectacular but they do claim to have the largest private collection of Graham Paige's in the country and so it was an opportunity to see some cars you may not see elsewhere. I didn't know that we would have a guide for the museum and his shtick was a little cheesy. Kinda reminded me of the jungle cruise at Disneyland.
It ended up taking longer to see than I expected so by the time we were done with that it was getting close to 3 PM and most people headed out right away since they had an hour or more ride to get home.
All in all, it went pretty well and thanks to some others (who are better at organizing a group than I am) we stayed close to the planned schedule. I don't have many pictures but hopefully some others that went will add to the thread.
Earlier in the week they were predicting rain for Saturday but as the week went on, the chance of precipitation kept going down and the weather turned out to be great with temps getting up near 80 but cool air made for very good riding weather. The meeting place was the Starbucks in Hollister. Since I knew there were people coming from 100 miles a way, I wasn't expecting to see many people there early. I got there at 15 till and a there was already about 8 people. By 9 there were 15 or so and by the time we left, there was a group of 20 bikes (21 people if I counted correctly) all but 4 of them Guzzis.
We did a ride out to the Panoche Inn, which is about 45 minutes on backroads. We bought cool drinks at the Inn and talked with the owner for about 30-45 minutes before heading back to Hollister. There we picked up lunches to go and ate them on the patio at the winery before touring the museum.
The museum itself was nothing spectacular but they do claim to have the largest private collection of Graham Paige's in the country and so it was an opportunity to see some cars you may not see elsewhere. I didn't know that we would have a guide for the museum and his shtick was a little cheesy. Kinda reminded me of the jungle cruise at Disneyland.
It ended up taking longer to see than I expected so by the time we were done with that it was getting close to 3 PM and most people headed out right away since they had an hour or more ride to get home.
All in all, it went pretty well and thanks to some others (who are better at organizing a group than I am) we stayed close to the planned schedule. I don't have many pictures but hopefully some others that went will add to the thread.
At the Panoche Inn
At the Museum
