Voyageurs National Park 2025 Trip

Voyageurs National Park 2025

We're leaving in a couple of days and I'm not sure we have left on a prior trip when I felt less prepared. I'm not sure what happened but the summer has gone by really fast and all of a sudden the end is approaching and we wanted to get a trip in before the cooler weather started to creep in.

We are heading for North Dakota first to visit Mike and Karin in Mandan for a couple of days and then determine where to go from there based on weather and possibly smoke and fire conditions. The plan currently is to head for Voyageurs National Park in Northern Minnesota. Voyageurs is kind of out of the way but is one of the National Parks we have not visited. There are 63 official National Parks and we have visited 43 so far so this will be 44 if we make it. Although I'm relatively certain we will never make it to all of the Parks, it would be fun to see how any we can visit.

After Voyageurs things will depend on the weather and how we are feeling. We could head back to South Dakota and visit Wind Cave National Park again or take some of the great motorcycle rides in the Black Hills or even visit Devils Tower in Wyoming again. We have mostly ridden the roads in the Black Hills during one of the Sturgis Rallies we attended where we road with thousands of our best friends. Riding without all of the additional traffic might be enjoyable. We could also head for the Southeastern entrance to Yellowstone from Cody, WY. We don't think we have entered the park from that entrance although we have entered from the other entrances multiple times. Whatever we do, I'm sure it will be fun.

I think I have everything ready. I filled up our emergency 1 gallon gas can which we have taken with us since the Alaska trip. It's like insurance, if we take it with us we will probably never need it. Speaking of insurance, I realized our roadside insurance with Honda is about to expire. I visited the Honda shop Friday afternoon but the person who does policies had not done a policy for strictly roadside coverage and wasn't sure how to do it and her contact in Georgia was already out of the office so she won't be able to confirm everything until Tuesday - the day we are scheduled to leave. Fortunately everything can be handled by phone or email so I'm sure we can get it all worked out. Since we started taking these trips we have pretty much always had this insurance and have never needed it so I guess it works.

When I went to fill up the gas tank in preparation for our departure, I realized that the data logger we use to prepare the Google maps for our daily sites was not working. When I got back home I inspected it and found one of the legs of the voltage regulator was broken. I don't have a clue how that could have happened but I soldered it together and it appears to be working fine. After the trip I'll probably go ahead and replace it.

So I just finished this page at the last moment so I guess we are ready - sort of. We aren't getting an early start so we will probably only go as far as Spokane Tuesday.