Routing Priorities and Setting the Start Date

As I have continued to pour over maps and other routing resources, plans have come together for picking a start date for the trip. Ben's grandparents invited us (along with Ben/Debi/grandkids) to spend the Labor Day weekend at their home in Sunriver, Oregon. So, since the trip to Sunriver is around 200 miles and in the general direction of my planned routing -- I decided to begin the motorcycle trip by traveling there on September 4. Deb and the rest will travel together by car. Then on Sunday, September 6 I'll begin the rest of the journey. With the goals identified below, I plan to proceed with nightly stops until Steamboat Springs, Colorado (about 1000 miles) where I have planned to spend two nights to enjoy an extra night off the road and get laundry done -- and then do the same thing to Osage Beach, Missouri (another 1000 miles) where I'll stay two nights. Thereafter, I'll proceed to Crown Hill, West Virginia -- Deb's hometown about 20 miles east of Charleston, West Virginia. If all goes as planned, I will arrive there around September 20 and Deb will already be there -- having flown in via Richmond, Virginia where one of her sisters lives.

I have specific routing priorities which I had fun putting into good bureaucratic form by way of a "strategic plan" below. Thankfully, this plan did not require ANY boring bureaucratic meetings:

Mission Statement: To accomplish a personal "bucket list" item: safely motorcycling USA backroads across the USA and back -- now specifically identified as Portland, Oregon to Williamsburg, VA and back.

Vision Statement: It's Not About The Destination, It's About The Ride!

Values Statement: To the maximum extent possible and practical:

1. Avoid riding in heavy rain -- allow this to be top priority when routing.

2. Avoid all interstate freeways.

3. Keep the daily riding distance under 250 miles.

4. Stop (get off the bike and take helmet off) at least every hour and a half of riding time.

5. Give priority to roads listed in Reader's Digest's "Most Scenic Drives in America" (50 of the 120 detailed here and the book shown here); National Geographic's "Guide to Scenic Highways and Byways," (detailed here and book shown here); and, those roads highly rated for scenic quality on the website www.motorcycleroads.com (which calls itself "America's Best Guide to Motorcycle Roads and Rides").

6. After all other prior goals have been considered/accommodated, give priority to the roads with the most curves.

Time Frame: Start September 4, 2009 and end in October 2009.

Trip Planning Continues

In John Steinbeck's "Travels With Charley," the then 58 year old (exactly my age now) Steinbeck writes about his plan for his 1960 trip (albeit in a truck/camper) around the USA: "In long-range planning for a trip, I think there is a private conviction that it won't happen. As the day approached, my warm bed and comfortable house grew increasingly desireable and my dear wife incalculably precious. To give these up for three months for the terrors of the uncomfortable and unknown seemed crazy..."

Yes, it is a little crazy -- and I have been often reminded of the risks and dangers of such a long motorcycle trip. When I talk of the planned trip, many feel compelled to share a story of someone they know who has died or been tragically injured while riding a motorcycle. I recognize the risks -- but they are evenly tempered with the knowledge that every day I read about untimely injury and death of people doing everything. Isn't death/injury always untimely? A dear friend and survivor of months in a coma from a brain aneurysm expressed my feeling in his observation that one could try to hide from such life's risks by trying to hide under one's bed -- but if your time was up you could end up deceased from an exploding bed spring!

And Steinbeck's view certainly expresses my feelings when he writes: "During the previous winter I had become rather seriously ill with one of those carefully named difficulties which are the whispers of approaching age. When I came out of it I received the usual lecture about slowing up, losing weight, limiting the cholesterol intake. It happens to many men, and I think doctors have memorized the litany. It had happened to so many of my friends. The lecture ends, "Slow down. You're not as young as you once were." And I had seen so many begin to pack their lives in cotton wool, smother their impulses, hood their passions and gradually retire from their manhood into a kind of spiritual and physical semi-invalidism... And I have searched myself for this possibility with a kind of horror. For I have always lived violently, drunk hugely, eaten too much or not at all, slept around the clock or missed two nights of sleeping, worked too hard and too long in glory, or slobbed for a time in utter laziness. I've lifted, pulled, chopped, climbed, made love with joy and taken my hangeovers as a consequence, not as a punishment. I did not want to surrender fierceness for a small gain in yardage ... And in my own life I am not willing to trade quality for quantity."

For me -- the opportunity to achieve this "bucket list" item has arrived -- and the risks of the trip are balanced by a deep appreciation of the circumstances in my life that have allowed me this opportunity. Trip planning is back in full swing with an expected early September departure. I've begun mapping out my expected routing -- knowing full well that weather and daily preferences will dictate the precise routing as I study the various options. More on that in a later posting.