Musings

After riding our motorcycles 2,400 miles and driving KC's truck 3,000 miles from Homer to Denver and back plus another 800 miles in the Colorado Rockies, Tour the Rockies has come to a close.  I've checked off the bucket list items and am now trying to collect my thoughts and images of the trip.

This blog has been a great way of documenting the sights and experiences encountered along the way.  KC and I agree that without it we'd have lost track of many of the trip details.  It also helps to clarify the things I learned in the process of planning, preparing and executing the trip.  Maybe it will make the next trip easier to pull off.  I'm sure that as time goes on new memories will emerge of our trip.   I find it helpful to begin writing them down as soon as I can.  Time, for sixty-six-year-olds, is famously unhelpful with the details.  

The drive to Denver, our time with Lucy and Ethel, the motorcycle ride itself and the drive home were all very different experiences.  It made the trip more complicated to prepare for, but it broke the trip into four bite sized sections, each of which was very different. I especially enjoyed having the girls join us.  We had a lot of laughs riding around in KC's truck.  Lucy and Ethel are fun to be with, plus they are hot.  KC and I try our best to be seen with them in public.

When senior citizens take long motorcycle trips eyebrows are raised.  As they should be. There are undeniable risks.  Though the odds of a mishap are low, the penalties are very high.  But the rewards for taking these risks are off the charts.   It is an experience that is so valuable, so rich and so unforgettable that it justifies taking those risks.  I will never forget the sights and sensations of this trip...the thrilling ones and the boring ones too.  To call it "the trip of a lifetime" is not an exaggeration.  I question whether I'll ever have the stones to tackle something like this again.

Very few things "went south" on us...they amounted to less than 1% of our attention, energy or time.  Overwhelmingly, things went well.  The bikes were fantastic, the weather was what you'd expect in the first fall days in the Rockies over a 1,200 mile range (hot, cold, rain, snow, dry, wind, sun and clouds), the crowds were tolerable and the sights were insanely beautiful.  The Aspens were a crapshoot...some were bright green, some were dying on the branch without a color phase (too wet soil I'm told)...others range from pale yellow to bright yellow and even orange.

Finding hotels was a challenge in some towns once we started the motorcycle trip.  But we adopted a practice of never leaving a hotel without a reservation (more on making hotel reservations later) for that night somewhere down the road.

Speaking of roads, the roads were generally excellent-we had less than 10 miles with surface issues.  The mountain roads were clean and smooth...Kudo's to the highway guys!!

The weather was always an item of great interest to KC and I.  The iPhone weather apps worked well enough and we usually had a satellite TV with the Weather Channel, so with good forecasting nothing snuck up on us weather wise.   There was only one pass (Beartooth) that we were closed out of due to weather and we found a way to re-do it on a later day under ideal conditions.

Still, we had two full days (out of eleven) of riding in the rain.  Eventually rainy riding becomes old hat, but uncovering and loading our bikes in the rain meant that my pannier's contents were exposed, my helmet and gloves were exposed...it goes on.  Fortunately, nothing was wet enough to prevent me from riding. My bike cover was wet all over and by the time I got rolled up it clearly needed to be packed in its own dry sack.  Which, of course, I had.  So all we needed was a covered gas station to totally recover.  Good preparation here, I had several dry towels on the bike so drying off the inside of my helmet and the few things not packed in a dry bag inside my panniers was easy to do.

While most of my pannier's contents were packed in dry bags, the experience of loading panniers in the rain has convinced me that everything needs to be in a bag. And several dry towels is not overkill.  I tried to pack in a way that left some capacity in my bags and panniers and this turned out to be helpful.  There are times when careful packing can't be done (like on a rainy morning) and throwing stuff in a pannier is the only way to get it done quickly.  Extra space inside a bag or pannier makes rapid haphazard packing easier to do.  It also allows space for the inevitable stuff one acquires on the road.  Pack loose, pack light and leave empty space, Grasshopper.

It also occurs to me that having a lightweight dry bag for the helmet and gloves would be a very smart choice for a rainy loading.  Keep helmet and gloves dry until the very end, then woooosh...out comes the dry helmet and gloves.  Roll up the dry bag and ride on.

I strongly preferred to keep our daily mileage limited to 200-250 miles because I think it is safer to do so.   2,400 miles in 11 days equals 218 miles average.  We rode more miles when we needed to...our longest days were our first day and our last day.  Still,  I found that riding for 11 straight days, even at these moderate distances, was surprisingly physically draining.   The was especially true for me after a hot and windy and we had several of those.  I know the cold days were tough on KC.   

Three week trips with a single travel companion is not for everyone.  Little things can easily blow out of proportion and cause a meltdown.  Each of us has annoying traits that we are unaware of or that we find charming as hell, but with time and repetition, become all that another is able to see or hear.  If you don't have the ability to tolerate this kind of thing and to shut it out of your mind, I'd suggest going for a much shorter trip.  Or go with a group or go alone.  Again, I think KC and I did well together and we never once got sideways.

I saw things in the Colorado Rockies that make me want to go back...Million Dollar Highway, Imogene Pass, Ouray and Telluride...all beckon to me.   Aspen?  Not so much....it's for a socioeconomic segment to which I do not belong.  It is what I call mountain fussy or western pretentious.   The yuppies with the children running wild in the Limelight Lobby typify this.   Makes me puke.

I saw lots of new places in Montana, far more than on any of my previous trips and I saw its most amazing natural wonders....Glacier National Park and Beartooth Pass.  We did not see the best of Wyoming, but we did have some crazy cool experiences there (See Monster Lake Ranch).

Most important to me, I rode the road of my dreams....Going-To-The-Sun Road through Glacier National Park.   If I had three weeks to live, riding my BMW motorcycle through this park on this particular road on a weather day like this would have been on my list of things to do.

It was epic.