Spiritual Backdrop for Spirited Ride

After months of threatening to do so, we (Mark H. and Marty) drove up to the Mount Madonna Center to ride with Mark T. We set up our tents at our base camp outside of Mark’s domicile in the Garden House, watched the big, orange moon rise over Fremont Peak, and then the three of us ascended up a series of dirt and paved roads for an experience unparalleled in the long history of full moon rides.

A cruise up Summit Road brought us to our first stop, the Kim Son Vietnamese Buddhist Monastery. We were greeted by a 20 foot high statue of Buddha himself (out of respect, we didn’t do a circle around him) and saw other large scale works including a man of about 30 feet laying on his side in front of a pool of water. Pretty impressive stuff on major scale.

A few more miles of mostly climb took us to Tom’s house and amateur observatory. Tom was an affable host with a pretty cool set up of high and low tech gadgets. The top of the observatory is a converted satellite dish which is mounted on rollers with a sliding opening for viewing and light reduction. There are two telescopes (Mark T. can give you the specifications) and a computer for scientific type calculations of the happenings in the night sky. One telescope was trained on the moon, while the other, set up outside the observatory, allowed us to view Jupiter and four of its moons: Io, Callisto, Ganymede, and Europa.

CAUTION - Always view a magnified moon with a filter, as it is one bright mother fucker. Remember, Galileo eventually went blind from working with no filter (and maybe from excessive masturbation).

We left Tom’s and completed our climb to the tall radio tower atop Mt. Madonna. Like a couple of years ago when we road to the Hollywood sign, we were unable to touch the structure. A large fence with lots of barbed wire talked us out of it. So we road back down the hill to the Center for beers and a hot tub. There were no donuts, but we did make blueberry pancakes on the camp stove the next morning.

Beauty views, beauty ride and a resounding three thumbs up.

M.A.