30 Days to cross the USA

[DanielS]

We left Salida via Ouray and onto Silverton, an old town that doesn't appear to have changed much in 100 years. It's great riding around here, much like the old wild west would have been in my imagination. We also rode up the Million Dollar Highway to get there which was quote nice and gave nice views of Ouray and some waterfalls.

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We spent the night in Silverton. It was pretty quiet but you can see how it could get really busy in peak tourist season with quite a few ATV rental places.

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[DanielS]

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We stayed at the "Bent Elbow" hotel which was great. We got the "Railroad" room which is all railroad themed obviously. We had a great time walking around there, it's perhaps a little touristy but overall a great place.

We left the next day and really started feeling the hot weather as we started getting out into the sticks. We also rode up the Moki Dugway which is a nice dirt road climb up a pass where you get a great view of Valley of the Gods.

We rode through Monument Valley, saw Mexican Hat and did all that a couple of days later too. It really good around there, hot, but good. Lots of Native American type shops which were good to wander around.

Here's the approach to it.

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[DanielS]

Some more pics as we rode on.

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[DanielS]

...and finally we started to see civilisation again

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[DavidS]

Good stuff but you are supposed to stand in the middle of the road for the Monument Valley shot.
I made my wife wait for 10 minutes or so in steaming heat to get the road quieter.

It looks like you had the same culinary experience as On Hellas did.
We found it hard work in Canada, outside of towns, to get edible food or drinkable coffee. Dodgy cereals don’t count.

[paulcobb72]

Each year my friend and I try to do a big trip. We've done Russia a couple of times, Mongolia, Georgia, Turkey, Ukraine and most of Eastern Europe. We also did Iceland a few years ago. All good fun and camped along the way.

This year though has been busy with work, my friend has been very busy with his company and things just haven't worked out. So a few months ago my wife and I decided to go on a trip together on the bike, this could end in divorce! Using the Air Canada "Fly your bike" program we planned to fly into Toronto and out of Vancouver.

Being employed has pros and cons. One of the downsides is only being allowed 10 days leave in any one go, if you want more, then it goes up to board level. However, after begging, pleading and making lots of coffee for my boss, he gave me a full month off work after getting it approved. I don't think it'll happen again, but who knows, perhaps I'll get some photos of him with the secretary at the Christmas party and can blackmail him next year for more leave. For now though we were dead chuffed and got the flights and bike booked.

OnHellas has done a lovely write up of his trip (Link here - https://www.adventurebikerider.com/foru ... 04#p644804 and has done a much more thorough job than we could ever do in 30 days, so give it a read. For our little version though, here it is, there are no dangerous or death-defying moments really, just about 8,500 miles of mostly lovely riding.

I'm still tidying up the photos so will add as I go along, hopefully tonight. But for now, the start went like this on our little checklist:

1) Book Air tickets for us (Air Canada obviously to get the discount)
2) Book the "Fly your Bike" and the associated paperwork like Dangerous Goods Certs and Insurance
3) Ensure Travel Insurance was adequate for riding a 1200cc bike - My Lloyds bank account covered it and is included FOC!
4) Breakdown Insurance - ADAC would cover us in the USA
5) Bike setup - My 1200GS is an old one, 2006 and had 60,000 miles on it. I gave it an almost full service, incl the final drive and I also got the rear suspension reconditioned. I found a new front shock too, so fitted that. Then a thorough check over, new Anakee 3 tyres, pads, all that kinda stuff. It was good to go. In fact, 10 days before we left, I managed a further 4 days off work and did a 1,500 mile Scotland trip on it to ensure everything was ok.
6) Replace my old aging intercom with something better for comms. I managed to get two second hand Sena 20's for us.
7) The fun bit, routes and navigation. I bought a rugged phone a few months ago and I know it's good as it came off my bike at 80mph on the way home from Scotland, it has a few marks on it but still works perfectly with no damage to the screen! It also has a 10,000mah battery which means it lasts for a few days or even a full day using satnav and bluetooth. I ended up buying Kurviger Pro, OSMand+ and Locus all for the phone as each one has its pros and cons. To plan the route I mainly used www.furkot.com, what an amazing website and I can't recommend it enough.
8) Internet Access - I like my Internet access so found a deal where I can get a Three.co.uk Simcard, load £20 on it and get unlimited txt/minutes and 6Gb Data in the USA. Deal! As for the Canada bits, my wife has a simcard that covered that (and the USA) from Amazon so we were both able to keep up to date with things.

You'll notice I say "free", "Second hand", "cheap" and similar quite often. That's not because I'm too much of a cheapskate, but because this was going to be an expensive holiday (Expensive for my income anyhow) as there's no camping for us this time, so we needed to watch the pennies, which we did with a daily entry of what we spent.

I think that's a fair summary of the start. Air Canada wanted the bike a minimum of 6 hours before we flew, and since we flew at 8am that means it needed to be there the day before, so on Thursday 13th June we rode down to Heathrow in the pouring down rain, our gear utterly drenched, and dropped the bike at Air Canada Cargo, caught a free bus to the hotel and repacked our luggage before going to sleep as we had a 5am start for our flight.

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This is cool. Enjoy yourself together with your wife. On a lighter note, the boss might be reading the post and will be keen on your blackmail if it happens.

[DanielS]

Crikey, where does time go. Christmas and New Year!

The next few days were a good laugh, we made it to Vegas eventually after a traffic jam from hell . I know filtering is illegal there, but we had to as it was about 40 degrees and the bike kept overheating. The amount of people that actively go out of their way to block you is nuts. It was pretty frustrating and I'm sure my riding did nothing for UK-US relations

Parked up and left the bike here for a few days.



Checked into a hotel and the front desk girl said she'd put us on a top floor room with a view. Unfortunately this was the view. Doh!



Vegas is just nuts. Not my cup of tea really, but you need to experience it. We went to a Cirque Du Soleil show, did the normal touristy stuff and didn't spend a penny on gambling. We also did a day trip on the bike to the hoover dam. Despite setting off at 7am, it was just sweltering hot, so we only had a quick look around before retreating back to the hotel





Then it was another full day on the bike down to see a friend near San Diego. First stop though was a BMW dealership as they had the correct BMW bolt and nut for the centre stand. It was a faff filling up as I didn't trust the bold we'd bodged as it wasn't a snug fit. The bolt and nut were kindly fitted by BMW too for I think 30 mins labour which wasn't bad as they had to drill parts of the old one off.

A day on the beach (3rd of July) was great until I realised I'd got horribly sunburnt, really bad actually. And with it being the 3rd of July people were celebrating the 4th of July too, so great fireworks to be seen from my friends house.



That night ......



That photo doesn't do it justice, my legs were really bad, bad blisters and tons of aloe vera stuff was applied. Really difficult riding with corse bike textiles rubbing on the top of your legs for a few days.

My friend treated us to some great sushi too! Better than chicken apparently



Then it was time to say goodbye and start heading north. We had a relaxing drive but ended up at an awful motel. We think there were bedbugs as we were both coming out in little welts all over. Plus with my sunburn we weren't in the best of moods. We had our first tase of "Jack in a box" fast food. Don't bother.

We carried on, past LA and only stopped to see the sign, yeah, whatever ...



and even saw some sea lions...



Before eventually arriving on a Friday afternoon in San Francisco. Once again I had picked an awesome motel that we were convinced we were gonna get murdered in, and my bike wouldn't be there in the morning either. It was a hovel, but it was clean and only 10 mins walk to the sea. Amazingly, just 30 seconds walk from the motel was a lovely suburb with posh cars and fancy houses. Strange how it could all change so suddenly.



We took a walk down to the sea, saw the bridge and Alcatraz. It was a walk really to see where we'd be doing the next parkrun. Yes, we'd timed it perfectly that we could get another parkrun done in America. We called it a day and didn't go out too far. San Fran seems to have a big problem with homeless people, a lot of whom see to have mental issues as well. Very sad, and it meant we stayed inside. I wedged my bike next to the pimps (Owners) office and hoped it'd still be there in the morning.

[DanielS]

Well, when in "distancing mode" may as well write some more up.

The next day was a Saturday, my birthday too I seem to recall. We took a walk down to the waterfront, a nice 10 minute walk and joined in at the San Francisco parkrun. Our second run in the USA in as many weeks. It was a great run along the waterfront and a nice turnout too. No personal bests for me though after a poor diet for a few weeks!

Arrived back at the brothel/motel/love shack/bug hotel whatever you want to call it, showered and got ready to start heading north up the Pacific Coast Highway and over the Golden Gate Bridge. However, as I was popping he luggage on the bike I noticed oil around the final drive and also the tyre.



My bike has high mileage I guess and the BMW final drives are known to fail. I wasn't best pleased especially as I took good care of the biek and changed the final drive oil at each service and lube the splines etc. It was about midday now and there was a BMW dealer in San Fran so we took a drive over to them. It was already scorching hot, San Fran traffic and San Fran hills made it a miserable journey. But we arrived and the very kind mechanic had a quick look and said that it was just the outer seal that was weeping and nothing to worry about urgently. He did offer to change it for us but unfortunately he didn't have any deals in stock. This put my mind at rest though so we set off north. Over the bridge and up the PCH for a few hours, stopping only for sightseeing and my favourite fast food of the trip.



Let me present to you, the "Double Double" from In-n-Out Burgers.



The day was looking better. I can't remember out destination for the day, but just on the off-chance I put in "via BMW Motorrad" on the GPS and there was a dealer that wasn't too much of a detour with an ETA of about 3pm, so we tried out luck.. It worked a charm, we had to wait a bit, but we were looked after, watered and fed while Joe, the mechanic, sorted the bike out with a new seal and fresh oil. I couldn't imagine a UK BMW dealer helping you out at 3pm on a Saturday when you turned up unannounced. A funny coincidence was that Joe, the mechanic, was finishing that day for two weeks as he was heading to the UK on holiday.

It was a long day in the end as we arrived at our motel at about 10pm, we made it a long day as we had a friend from Canada riding down to meet us and ride back. We met up, I think he'd done about 800 miles that day too grabbed a big motel room and fell asleep to the sounds of the ogre upstairs shagging his wife/bimbo/prostitute, it was pretty uncomfortable! Not as horrible as breakfast though ... ahh motel breakfasts, how I don't miss them.



Over the next couple of days we meandered up the coast northwards. Not too many photos really sadly as we were now three and just having fun exploring. Oregon is probably one of my favourite places though (When it's not raining) and we avoided major roads and just kept along deserted roads and places like this:







Eventually after a few more days and dodgy motels we arrived to the ferry to Victoria, Canada! Sadly also only a week or so left of our trip. What was nice though is that our friend had taken all the time off work, as had his wife and they looked after us and gave us great experiences and riding, more to follow...