Does anyone have any experience of flying their motorbikes half way around the world, riding several thousand miles on them for a few weeks, and then flying them home again?
After a lot of dreaming, and a few discussions with our employer, LincsGeek and I are going to have a bit of an adventure. It’s fair to say that while what we’re planning isn’t an expedition in the sense of those had by many of the people I admire when it comes to adventure travel, it is going to be the biggest adventure we have ever had. And might just go some way to beating that Wild West Motorcycle Tour that we have quite rightly labelled as our trip of a lifetime up until now.
Riding over the Golden Gate Bridge last Summer (read about it).
LincsGeek and I have most definitely been bitten by the travel bug in recent years. The fact is that is that ever since having motorbikes we have wanted to travel on them. Not just rides on the roads around our own front door, but further afield. We have explored Wales, Ireland, France, a lot of Scotland, and most of England. But we want more, so much more.
Next week we are heading to Germany and Austria for a tour, and as it happens it is going to be a bit of a trial run for what’s to come next year. We’ve got the channel crossing booked (assuming the tunnel is actually open when we want to use it!), and somewhere to stay on the first and last night, but that’s it. We are going to be relying on my nearly-20-year-old GCSE German and a vague idea of the direction we want to go in to explore a bit of these countries. We figured that we might as well just get on and try this credit card touring thing that so many people seem successful at; rock up at a hotel in any given town and book a room for the night before getting back on the bikes in the morning and seeing where we end up that night. We have a destination in mind, we’d like to see Obergurgl in the Austrian Alps in the summer having fallen in love with it in the winter, and a few must-ride roads in mind that will hopefully get us there and back without any major issues.
Assuming that we don’t completely hate it or end up getting divorced because we spent every night sleeping on the side of the road by our motorbikes, we will be doing very similar next summer but on a bigger scale.
Our bikes – my BMW F650GS and LincsGeek’s Triumph Tiger Explorer – in Glenshee, Scotland a few weeks ago (read about it).
The dream, rapidly becoming the plan, is to fly us and our bikes into Vancouver and ride our way around Canada and the USA over 10 weeks. We’re not going to be able to do it all with any meaning in that amount of time, so we’ve chosen a handful of places that are at the top of our combined travel bucket lists and will do our best to make the most of them – Canadian Rockies, Glacier National Park, Yellowstone National Park, Utah (as much of it as possible, including Bonneville), Yosemite National Park, Arizona and the Pacific Coast. We’ve made some notes and some enquiries and will be doing lots of thinking and reading and imagining over the next nine months, trying to get ourselves organised without over planning or getting stressed out or it being too contrived. Assuming things go as we would like, we will be on the other side of the pond with our own motorbikes in early May 2016 for our ultimate North American road trip.
There are some things we must do in order to make this happen, but I have been struggling to keep the excitement to myself so I thought I’d just blurt it all out here on Splodz Blogz so you all know where my mind is when I seem to be daydreaming. A very wise man once told LincsGeek and I that if we have something we really want to do, somewhere we really want to go, we should work out how to make it so, and we shouldn’t wait too long or the opportunity might be gone. Having done the guided tour last summer (the subject of that comment), we have realised we have fallen in love with it all, and so this is us chasing our dreams.
I’ll keep you informed…
PS: We were thinking we should have a catchy name for this North American motorcycle trip of ours. What do you reckon? Any clever suggestions?
Riding in Scotland a few weeks ago.