For the past several years I’ve been able to shake free for a week or two in the summer to take an extended motorcycle trip. Those are all documented in painful detail in this forum, and at http://edcallahan.com/TripReports (I whittle away winter migrating them there).
This year I was able to take two full weeks. I have a cool wife who doesn’t mind (sometimes I almost get the feeling she’s eager for me to leave?), and I have the time off from work, and my health, so I’m lucky.
The last couple years I’ve met up with my Dad so we could ride together, but this year our schedules didn’t work out. So, I was free to put on more miles than he likes. I dipped into the bucket list, and pulled out a trip to the Rocky Mountains. Glacier, Banff, Jasper and Yellowstone. The Bighorns, the Black Hills and the Badlands.
I’d go solo. No one to compromise with that way, and no one to blame but myself if I stopped having fun. I would drive a fellow rider crazy with my constant and random stopping and too frequent U-turns.
I got some good help planning the trip at http://www.triumphrat.net/ride-trip-reports/689538-planning-wi-to-banff-to-yellowstone-to-home.html. It was going to be more miles and more heavily scheduled than I usually like. But, I decided to try and pack in more parks and get pretty far north in Canada. So I’d be driving past some stuff without time to explore. And since I’d be in national parks I needed to reserve campsites, so there wouldn’t be too much room to wing it.
I followed the plans pretty closely. It ended up being a 5,127 mile trip over 15 days. Some struggles and some awesome moments, somewhere between an Adventure and a Vacation, but either way, definitely worth doing.
http://edcallahan.com/TripReports/Maps/2016RockyMountains.html
This year I was able to take two full weeks. I have a cool wife who doesn’t mind (sometimes I almost get the feeling she’s eager for me to leave?), and I have the time off from work, and my health, so I’m lucky.
The last couple years I’ve met up with my Dad so we could ride together, but this year our schedules didn’t work out. So, I was free to put on more miles than he likes. I dipped into the bucket list, and pulled out a trip to the Rocky Mountains. Glacier, Banff, Jasper and Yellowstone. The Bighorns, the Black Hills and the Badlands.
I’d go solo. No one to compromise with that way, and no one to blame but myself if I stopped having fun. I would drive a fellow rider crazy with my constant and random stopping and too frequent U-turns.
I got some good help planning the trip at http://www.triumphrat.net/ride-trip-reports/689538-planning-wi-to-banff-to-yellowstone-to-home.html. It was going to be more miles and more heavily scheduled than I usually like. But, I decided to try and pack in more parks and get pretty far north in Canada. So I’d be driving past some stuff without time to explore. And since I’d be in national parks I needed to reserve campsites, so there wouldn’t be too much room to wing it.
I followed the plans pretty closely. It ended up being a 5,127 mile trip over 15 days. Some struggles and some awesome moments, somewhere between an Adventure and a Vacation, but either way, definitely worth doing.
http://edcallahan.com/TripReports/Maps/2016RockyMountains.html