The famous twisty canyon roads of California prove addictive.

“Are you OK?” came the question, from below my feet. The words weren’t coming from the ground though: I was lying on the ground, in an emergency stopping lane. Isn’t that where everyone checks their brake pads?

Okay, so there is a bit more backstory to me lying next to a fairly busy byway in a Los Angeles valley, and a young Black man had pulled over to check on my welfare. He was dressed in black, adorned with gold chains, bracelets and earrings, smoking a cigar … and he drove a low-slung American sportscar.

“A friend drove past you and saw you lying on the ground, thought you might be in trouble. He called me so I came down to see if you were okay,” he explained. So not one American doing a good deed, but two, and one of them actually going out of his way not just to help, but to investigate.

“Gee, thanks for stopping,” I stammered, “I was actually having a look at the brake pads of the bike. The owner just called me and believes they might not be up to completing the trip I’m going on,” I explained.“So I’m absolutely fine.” We shook hands and my guardian angel left, me kicking myself for not asking for a selfie with this young man.

I’d actually left my helmet on, because my Sena communicator was taking the call, so it just made sense to check the pads while on the phone to Dave, the owner of the bike — a man who is also a bike mechanic, and knew the pads were low but had thought they’d be fine for at least a few thousand more miles.

Until he thought about where I’d told him I was taking the bike, and a little of my background. He added up motorcycle magazine editor, San Gabriel Mountains, Sierra Nevadas, and Yosemite National Park, and decided maybe he should replace the front pads before I started running out of brakes through a series of tight switchbacks. Checking the pads on a BMW R1200 RT, however, seemed best done looking up from below, hence lying on the ground on the edge of a Los Angeles byway. Dave and I met up a little later. He swapped out the pads, and I was on my way; my confidence in American humanity validated.

It was a little handy that my navigation app of choice, Calimoto, had directed me around the freeways, for it meant I wasn’t too far from Dave and his brake pads, because soon after they were bedded in I swept through the canyons and twisties just outside Los Angeles.

Dave had advertised his bike on Riders Share, which is most easily described as AirBnB for…