Spring Tour 2007 - part I

My husband's bike ready to be loaded.

Picking my bike up from the expediter.

Lots of gear to load!

Loaded and ready to hit the road.


Last Spring my husband and I had a lot of time off work at the same time, and decided to celebrate by taking a tour of the lower 48 states. Our original plan was to fly the bikes to Seattle then ride across the country to the East coast, visit New York and Quebec, then ride home across Canada. Life got in the way and we had to cut our plans short, but we still had an amazing tour. I'm going to break it up here in segments.

The planning was a lot of fun. My husband was out of state, so I spent a lot of time on the computer and looking at road maps planning a route that we would use as a rough guide on the trip. The one thing we really wanted was to stay on back roads as much as reasonably possible, knowing that we'd have to blow through some areas on interstate. We packed our gear into boxes and sent it all down to a friend's house in Seattle, so I wouldn't have to deal with getting boxes to the airport, and my husband was going straight to Washington after his trip without stopping off at home.

We got a lot of new camping gear to lighten our load and make the trip more pleasant than roughing it. We got a Big Agnes tent, Big Agnes sleeping bags with the integrated air mattress, a jet boil with french press, a few new tools for our maintenance kit, and miscellaneous other little things. We also got the ultimate motorcycle travel necessity. Kermit Chairs! We took our bikes into the local BMW shop for the 6000 mile service and a complete once over. We later found out that some things were ignored during this service, and other things were done wrong, but that is another story. Our expediter picked the bikes up from the motorcycle shop and put them on the plane for Seattle. My husband was already there, and picked up his bike right away. On arrival at the warehouse he found out that my brand new never even out of the box windshield that we had specifically asked NOT be put on the bike, had been put on my bike when it arrived. They had over tightened a bolt and I now had a cracked brand new windshield. We drilled the ends of the crack and decided to ride until it got worse and get a new one then. (The expediter paid for the windshield no questions asked).

When I got to Seattle I picked up my bike and rode to our friend's house where we visited, ate good food, drank good wine, and learned how to pack all our new gear. Olympic Peninsula up next...