Hello all!
Wow… That REALLY was CRAZY… and now I’m home with quite an amazing story to tell about all of it… as it was SO much more than I was expecting it to be… but first things first… this is just my email out to friends and family to say that I’ve made it home alive after eleven days (nine of which were ‘riding’ days) and a total of 4,045 miles through which I somehow managed to remain sane and upright on two wheels. This is where many of you may expect me to begin my rambling at great length about every little detail I experienced along the way, but it seems you may be (momentarily) in luck, because I’m flying out tomorrow to go run a race in San Francisco, so this will need to suffice for a quick snapshot of what I’ve just been through…
So, yes… as many of you may or may not remember from my pre-ride email of a couple of weeks ago, I’d basically planned out this trip day-by-day to get me to certain spots by certain nights, and from that perspective, the trip went almost exactly as planned. For those of you with the time or interest in following along, you can view that email or find the ride plan HERE. The only real changes made were to the second part of my day on Tuesday, July 22nd, as my ‘riding buddy’, Gord, decided to mix up our journey and final destination, as we stayed at his and his wife’s (Sam) family cottage on Buck Lake, rather than their home in Kingston, Ontario. As well, I decided to make a stop just outside Washington D.C., in Potomac Maryland, to see some family on Sunday, July 27th as I made my way from Riverdale, NJ to Charlottesville, VA. Other than those two changes, I followed my pre-planned ride route to the letter… And the only reason I explain this, is that for those interested in trying to make any kind of ‘here’s where you were at this point in your trip’ sense of the pictures contained in the link below, they appear in chronological order, but you’ll need to try to match up the date of the picture (which appears just below each image) to the daily events contained in the pre-ride report (which again, can be found HERE). And without taking that time to look back on those details, you may well notice many context clues in the pictures as to the where and when of it all… and I also made a point out of placing whatever I was stopping to eat at the time on the back case of the bike (or framing the sign of the restaurant with the bike)…
Until I find the time, energy, and emotional space to hash out what actually occurred over the course of this trip of mine, these pictures and the brief synopsis of what it was ‘like’ is all that I’ll have to share for a while… and that does concern me, as I’m a bit hesitant to share these pictures which, swell as many of them may be, heinously under-represent this adventure and all that I experienced. And to finish up this caveat about these pictures, let me just add this rant…. to really chronicle a trip like this in pictures is a grand undertaking… as it’s one thing to ride this trip on a motorcycle, but even another to have the commitment and discipline to go reaching for the camera amidst all that’s going on… So as I look back across these pictures, here’s what I realize… The pictures I did take were at times that allowed for me to even consider dealing with the camera; that is to say that at the trip’s most perilous points, I wasn’t in ANY kind of position to try to take pictures… So you won’t be seeing the rain and wind and hail and road conditions that created a stressful and intense and beyond memorable experience from sun up to sun down every day the likes of which I’d never imagined… but instead you’ll see a pretty random selection of the ‘better’ moments when I wasn’t wincing in fear for hours on end… and you’ll also notice that at some point, I decided to start taking pictures while driving (since I knew I was missing so much of the good stuff if I didn’t!)… which was probably only because by that point in the trip, my threshold for fear and doing things that seemed a bit dangerous had been greatly expanded…
So as it turns out, the pictures that I did take are all from the relatively ‘good’ moments, and completely fail to display the real ‘meat’ of the trip… most of the trip, in fact… when I was literally on the edge of my seat wondering what I’d find around the next turn… because, as it turned out, this trip was MUCH more difficult and dangerous than I had ever considered it might be. I usually find stretches of any trip on the motorcycle, whether on a day trip to the mountains or just commuting into town for work, that give me a ’scare’ and that involve suppressing the natural human condition of fear and self-preservation… but those were always quick, fleeting moments, and I never guessed that this trip would basically involve hours on end (day after day after day) of these kind of situations. One of the main issues of this trip was the weather… when it was good it was nice, but when it was bad, it was mean and surly and just NOT the kind of scene that was made for motorcycles… So yes, I found my way through many, MANY miles of bad roads and even worse weather, and basically never considered any other option than to keep moving, because with my ambitiously planned schedule of where I was to end up every night, I had no choice but to drive through conditions that I NEVER would have considered safe or rational to continue through….
The specifics of what happened every day of this adventure will likely appear on my blog at some point in the near future, but for now, these pictures are what will have to tell the story… along with my utterly sub-par description of what this trip was ‘like’… and on that note, I’ll try one more time to ‘paint this picture of mine’ before leaving you to the actual pictures… Okay… I’ve only had this motorcycle for a little over a year and in that time have become fairly (arguably) proficient with it’s operation in ideal conditions… but I completely neglected to realize how far less than ideal these conditions would be for SO many seemingly countless hours and days… So between the un- and under- paved roads, RIDICULOUS winds, torrential downpours of rain, hail, the tornado in St. Croix county just outside of Minneapolis I narrowly escaped, and all of the other drivers and obstacles that I faced while struggling to stay up and alive on two wheels, I did, in fact, become a MUCH better rider… but the expense of this vastly improved skill-set was that I spent MANY hours EVERY day gritting my teeth, and with a knot in my stomach, wondering what I’d find around the next curve… and just how insane someone would have to be to purposefully put themselves at this kind of risk… and when (not if) I’d be dumping the bike over… and this experience literally went on for 4,045.4 miles… all of which I earned with the kind of bravado and guts and sheer disregard for common sense that I didn’t even know I had to spare… along with my faith and the prayers and well wishes of family and friends… to get me back home in one piece… Thank you!!!
So without further ado… here are the pictures… and remember… these are only the GOOD times… and I’m hating that I don’t have the pictures from the BAD times, as they’d have been so much more interesting to view and telling of just what this CRAZY experience was really like… but here they are, and thanks for sharing in this with me… and you may find it easiest just to start with a picture and keep clicking on the picture to advance to next image rather than try to use the tiny arrows at the bottom of the page, which should make these a whole lot quicker to move through…
CLICK HERE TO SEE ALL OF THE PICTURES FROM THIS TRIP
Yes… there you have it… for now, anyway… and if you care to get the WHOLE story (not for the faint of heart or time 
… you should be able to find it on my blog in the next few weeks… Thanks again for letting me share…
Later!
Alex
CLICK HERE TO SEE MY ADVENTURE: MILE BY MILE
So… I’m off… on my own little summer sabbatical of sorts… a bit of an impromptu, ‘just because’ adventure that is as much calculated as it isn’t, and that holds just as much possibility of being spectacularly momentous as it does spectacularly disastrous… hmmm… strike that last point… as it’s actually SO much more my style to expect the best case scenario and be only casually prepared for the most likely of contingencies (of which I can almost certainly expect a few, and which also almost certainly does NOT include anything of or relating to ‘disaster’!) But either way, what lies ahead is just about guaranteed to be uniquely eventful… which is the answer to the ‘why’ question that I seem to be most often getting about all of this…
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And now… here’s just a bit of background for those of you who don’t know… My cousin, Andy Baldyga, lost his life while on his own summer adventure climbing in the Grand Tetons of Wyoming in the summer of 1999. His family and friends now join together every summer to remember his life and times and share in experiences that would have undoubtedly been very much Andy’s type of fun. His parents and brother donated money in Andy’s memory to have one of the AMC ‘huts’ on the Appalachian Trail rebuilt and renovated, and we now all make a pilgrimage to this (Galehead) Hut every summer.
Those participants not residing in the Northeast most often choose to fly into Manchester, NH and make the hour and a half drive north to Lincoln which is a small town in the White Mountains, where we all share a condo and gear up for our hike towards Galehead Hut. This summer of 2008 will mark our eighth “Andy’s Memorial Hike to Galehead” trip, and past years’ ‘Galehead hikes’ have included family, friends, girlfriends, boyfriends, colleagues, co-workers, antics, hijinks, chaos, hitchhiking, backpacking, water crossings, blood-letting, drug-induced stupors, and SO much more… All that we ever expect is that since we share in this experience in Andy’s memory, that our time together will be as Andy would have almost certainly wanted it to be… funny, crazy, the stuff that makes for great stories even many years later and that lives on in our own family ‘lore’…
So in that very effort, I decided that I’d drive my motorcycle up this year, and as I got into planning out the route and time off from work, I realized that I might as well make this an epic motorcycle trip that covers even more distance and adventures than just a straight ‘there and back’ path. So… I figured out a way to construct a trip that would get me to this year’s ‘Andy’s Hike’ and would also allow me to venture much further out and about on the motorcycle than ever before, stopping all along the way to make house calls to family and friends that I’m in most cases WAY overdue to visit.
Okay… enough of the family pretext… and on to the specifics of the trip that I’ve just…
CLICK HERE TO SEE MY ADVENTURE: MILE BY MILE
It should be noted that this entire trip of mine and certainly the daily schedule is utterly subject to weather and health ‘going my way’. I’ll be doing my best to stay flexible with regards to exact routes and speed and time on the road, but I do have specific plans to stay with the aforementioned, and soon to be specifically detailed, ‘friends and family’ along the way, so my hope is to be able to stick to this overall plan…
DAY ONE - Friday, July 18: I’ll be leaving just before sunrise for the first of my ‘long’ days on the road as I leave from my home in Atlanta and begin my trek north through Chattanooga, Nashville, Louisville, and into Indianapolis. This will be one of my ‘hard and fast’ days on which I’ll exclusively see a day full of 75 - 80mph highway cruising. I’ll be spending the night with my brother, Brian, his wife, Trish, and my nephew, Will.
States Visited: Georgia, Tennessee, Kentucky, Indiana
Travel Time: 8.5 hours
Distance Covered: 550 miles
DAY TWO - Saturday, July 19: I’ll once again be leaving at sunrise for another one of my ‘long’ days (and what will likely be my longest travel day) on the road as I leave Brian, Trish, and Will in Indianapolis and once again head north via main highways through Chicago into Robbinsdale, a suburb of Minneapolis, to stay the night with my good friends Jennifer (former elementary school classmate) and Jim.
States Visited: Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin, Minnesota
Travel Time: 10 hours
Distance Covered: 600 miles
DAY THREE - Sunday, July 20: After two days of hard, fast, long highway travel, I finally get a day to relax just a bit and will actually be able to be a normal, civilized friend and catch a casual breakfast with Jennifer and Jim before leaving Robbinsdale, MN and heading east to the peak of Lake Michigan where I end my day by setting up camp for the night at a B&B in Escanaba, MI.
States Visited: Minnesota, Michigan
Travel Time: 7 hours
Distance Covered: 370 miles
DAY FOUR - Monday, July 21: Upon waking in the early morning hours on the northern shore of Lake Michigan, I’ll be getting an early start for another day of eastward travel as I break the border into Canada and venture through the province of Ontario through Sault Ste Marie over Lake Huron and the Georgian Bay to another B&B in Parry Sound, Ontario.
States/Provinces Visited: Michigan, Ontario (CAN)
Travel Time: 9 hours
Distance Covered: 470 miles
DAY FIVE - Tuesday, July 22: Leaving my accommodations in Parry Sound, Ontario, I’ll be getting another by-this-point-all-too-typical early morning start to be back on the road and on my way eastward through my first of two days of non-highway travel (finally!) as I venture through a series of twisty, back-country Canadian roads and small towns en route to stay the night in Kingston, Ontario with Gord, an acquaintance I recently made at the 2008 East Coast V-Strom Meetup.
States/Provinces Visited: Ontario (CAN)
Travel Time: 7.25 hours
Distance Covered: 280 miles
DAY SIX - Wednesday, July 23: Leaving the home of my V-Strom friend, Gord, in Kingston, I’ll be enjoying another scenic day of meandering, non-highway roads as I again head eastward out of Ontario and through the Adirondack Park of upstate New York (where I even get to travel by ferry over Lake Champlain!) on my way through Vermont and ending up meeting up with my ‘Andy’s Hike to Galehead Crew’ of family and friends in Lincoln, New Hampshire.
States/Provinces Visited: Ontario (CAN), New York, Vermont, New Hampshire
Travel Time: 8.25 hours
Distance Covered: 360 miles
DAYS SEVEN & EIGHT - Thursday & Friday, July 24 & 25: These are the cherished days that I get to spend with my cousins, Ian, Mark, and Pete, (as well as Andy’s other family and friends) hiking in and around the Green Mountains of NH as we head towards Galehead Hut in memory of my cousin, Andy Baldyga.
DAY NINE - Saturday, July 26: After enjoying an always memorable Galehead Hut breakfast, the entire group will head back down the Galehead River Trail to our base camp in Lincoln, NH to clean up, as I get myself geared up and ready to ride once again. I’m hoping to be able to get back on the road by the very early afternoon hours and I’ll be moving southward down the east coast, around Boston and NYC, arriving to stay the night with my good friend / kinda-cousin, Harry, and his girlfriend, Joanie, at their home in Riverdale, NJ.
States Visited: New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey
Travel Time: 5.75 hours
Distance Covered: 350 miles
DAY TEN - Sunday, July 27: After hopefully catching an early breakfast with Harry and Joanie, I’ll be back on the road once again following my roots southward as I’ll by moving past Philadelphia, Baltimore, and D.C. on my way to Here I’ll be staying the night with another friend / former elementary school classmate, Tish, and her fiance in Charlottesville, VA.
States Visited: New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland, West Virginia, Virginia
Travel Time: 6.5 hours
Distance Covered: 360 miles
DAY ELEVEN - Monday, July 28: Wow… well assuming I’m still alive, willing, and have an able-bodied bike under me, this will be my final day of travel as I’ll make my final trek soutward past Roanoke and Charlotte, toward my home in Atlanta.
States Visited: Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia
Travel Time: 8.5 hours
Distance Covered: 540 miles
Total States (21) / Provinces (1) Visited: Georgia, Tennessee, Kentucky, Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Michigan, Ontario (CAN), New York, Vermont, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland, West Virginia, Virginia, North Carolina, and South Carolina
Total Travel Time: 71 hours
Distance Covered: 3,878 miles
CLICK HERE TO SEE MY ADVENTURE: MILE BY MILE
Concerns: RAIN… WIND… Freshly-Minted Lasik (circa 6/30/08)… the state and country fire arm and stun gun laws that leave me with only pepper spray and a shank that I fashioned out of an old piece of rusty flashing for my personal protection while in the course of my exposed travels… the following slightly disconcerting advice that appears as #1 on the Iron Butt Association’s (the definitive source for long-distance motorcycle treking) ‘Archive of Wisdom’…
| 1. Know your limits and plan your trip around them. |
| If the longest ride you have ever taken is 300 miles in a day, don’t plan a trip with a string of endless five- hundred mile days. Iron Butt Association surveys also warn of an important trend in long distance trip planning (see Chart A). Discounting weather or other problems; after an initial mileage peak on days one and two, daily average mileage will steadily drop during trip days three to seven. On day seven of a trip, the typical long distance rider will comfortably ride about 65% of the average daily mileage that they would book on a two day trip. If the pros have this type of mileage attrition rate, would you plan on any less?Also include large easy-to-cut loops into your trip plan. If you do get behind schedule, this is the easiest way to skip part of your trip without ruining the rest of it.Whether you are capable of riding 300 miles per day, or 1,000, the ability to make miles tends to decrease as the length of the trip increases. The most severe loss is in days 3 through 7, where Iron Butt types then level out to about 65% of their peak capacity. |
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Additional Thoughts: I’m not really sure what to expect from this trip… but that’s actually EXACTLY the idea behind it’s conception… I’ve had my motorcycle for a little over a year now and in that time I’ve put 8,000 miles on it and made a trip as long as 500 miles there and back (to Daytona Beach, FL) for a total of 1,000 round trip… So… to put this here trip into perspective, I’ll be putting 50% more miles than I’ve ever ridden total on my motorcycle in the course of these eleven days… and this 4,000 mile trip is four times longer and exponentially more cumbersome than the only other long trip I’ve taken… So all of this is just to cite the source of the uncertainty that lies before me… but I’m all about the adventure of it all, so through the inevitable miles of a painfully sore ass and that increasing vocal ‘voice in my head’ incessantly prodding, ‘are we there yet’, I’ll be doing my best to savor every little piece of the journey… and not to worry… I’ll take good notes… and many pictures… and above all else… I’LL BE CAREFUL!
So… I hope this ‘pre-ride report’ finds each of you well… and I’m sure that you all know me and ‘my ways’ well enough by now to know that you can expect a candid (and likely long-winded! ) report on what ACTUALLY occurred over the course of this adventure of mine…
Later!
AY
