Summer 2005 Motorcycle Tour

Sometime in April I decided that we really, really needed to christen the ST1100 with a substantial tour. I'd never traveled west of the Rockies, and Pam had never visited California, so that decided the general direction. My son Robert's birthday is June 26th, so being in El Paso for his birthday was a prime objective.

After kicking it around a bit, we decided that we had to fly my daughter Dana in to El Paso, to make it a reunion. We also opted to make it a fly-n-ride for Pam: she'd fly from Memphis to Denver, where I'd meet her, then we'd continue on to El Paso.. via California. This served dual purposes in that it'd let her skip that first 1000+ miles of flatland, and also allow me to wring the bike out good and proper, sort of get it out of my system before picking her up.  On the return stage, she'd fly from El Paso to Dallas, then meet me for the last leg from DFW to Memphis. This let her bypass another tedious bit, but was mainly designed to give her an extra day or two with her friend Connie, who lives in the DFW area.

Here's the final itinerary, as it stood on the morning of my departure:

On a motorcycle tour, of course, an itinerary is best treated as guideline, not as gospel. With that in mind, here's what actually transpired:

[ click the links in the 'Day' column to randomly access the daily entries, or click here to start reading chronologically ]

The main deviations were that we bypassed the Death Valley side-trip, and that I broke the El Paso - Plano leg up into two days, vs. one. And, I suppose, that we returned home a day ahead of schedule. All things considered, though, we actually stuck pretty darned close to the plan!

Random statistics:

• 5,025.2 miles in 114.48 hours comes out to a 43.9 MPH average speed. The "Distance" field was computed by taking an odometer reading each morning before we rolled, and so it includes short evening dinner jaunts and such. The "Time" field was taken from the time we rolled in the morning to the time we arrived at the day's destination. The "Time" does not include these evening jaunts,  nor does it include layover days. It does include fuel / rest / meal stops, and sightseeing stops of less than an hour. In any case, the average speed is a bit skewed, obviously. 'tis a fair representation though, I think...

• Total fuel used was 129.34 gallons, for an average 38.85 MPG. Oddly enough, I do better'n that in local riding. But we were riding mostly two-up, remember, and heavily laden. Nor was I sparing of the throttle.. 

• Total cost of fuel was $297.35, for an average price of $2.299/gallon. I had to add one quart of oil (in Las Vegas), and I changed the oil & oil filter during the layover in El Paso.

• We spent 9 nights in hired lodgings, at a total cost of $512.78, making the average price of a room $56.98.

• The grand total of my expenditures was $2,650.29, for an average of $132.51 per day. Note that I say my expenditures because, while Pam spent at least a couple of hundred bucks of her own, she didn't feel the need to keep a precise record. Hey, what can I say? Some of us are just more thorough (and/or anal-retentive ) than others.

A note on the content and format of the daily entries: they're taken in situ from posts I made during the trip to an online forum, The Poor Man's Watch Forum. So if you find the content overly wristwatch-oriented.. well, just remember the original target audience! Also, you may find the format a bit.. well, inconsistent. If you view the underlying HTML, you'll no doubt think it downright eccentric. While my original code was lean & mean (I swear!), it was uploaded to the forum, crunched by the forum's automatic code-generator, downloaded back to my laptop, then tweaked with NVU.. so while it should render OK, it is, underneath, a real mess. In fact, just forget I mentioned it.. do not view the source! 

Thanks for lookin'. Hope you enjoy the li’l travelogue as much as we enjoyed the tour!