On The Road, Pt. I

As has been well-documented in this blog, I was bike-less here in Denver for a few months.  Without a bike to occupy my time, I was forced branch out in my interests.  Really, that gave me time to do other things.  I did some knitting, I took a yoga class, I learned karate and studied French.

Okay, none of that is true.  All I really did was think about motorcycles and trawl the Internet looking at motorcycle pictures and parts.  So, business as usual.

Something I did do a lot of was plan trips on Google Maps.  One area that kept coming up was California.  I had been to Cali a few years ago to buy a Datsun 240Z in Oxnard.  The Z turned out to be a junk heap but it gave me a chance to take a cross-country road trip back to Pittsburgh with my dad, which was fantastic.

I initially wanted to go to San Fransisco but that turned out to be too far to go in the time I had.  Doing that trip would have required a 500-mile slab day through Nevada and I really didn't want to do that.  The next logical choice was San Diego.  This was a much shorter trip since San Diego is closer to Denver that San Fran and was doable in the time I had.  Plus there was no long slab day.  San Diego it was, then.

Once the destination was set, a route began to appear on the map.  Save for some towns and cities along the way, there really isn't much in the American southwest.  I had already been through this area returning to Pittsburgh from Oxnard, so I was sort of familiar with it.  I would be on a bike this time, so it would be different.

I could make it to San Diego in three days and I decided on spending two days there, making my trip eight days in total.  Not a bad trip, I thought.

My first night was to be in Durango, CO but the hotels turned out to be too expensive, so I decided on Farmington, NM instead.  The same hotels were much cheaper and this added about one hour to my day, which wasn't bad.  Oh yeah, no camping on this trip.  It's hotels only for this adventurer.

The next thing to decide was gas stops.  My Bonneville has a range of around 130 miles, depending on many things like elevation and how exuberant I get with the throttle.  Over the three days to San Diego and back, I had gas stops planned every 50 to 80 miles.  It may seem excessive to stop this often but I'd rather not push my bike for God knows how many miles until I reach a gas station.

All of this was planned in April and May, which meant the next step was to wait for time to take the trip to come.  I had put in the vacation time for the last week in August.  During the wait, I thought about going to other places, such as Idaho because it would take me through states I had never been before.  I also thought briefly about riding home to Pittsburgh.  San Diego sounded so much better than all of those other plans and so that's where I went.

In the next installment, we'll set off for Farmington, NM and see what sort of adventuring we can find.

Stay tuned!