Bob & Linda's 4 Corner's Tour

2005 Four Corners Tour

We've been talking about doing the Four Corners Tour for several years - well actually I've been talking about doing the tour and Linda's been listening. We have tried to do the tour each of the past two years but have had to delay it both times. The first time due to illness in the family and the second time due to some contract work I was doing at the time. Hopefully this will be our year.

The idea of the Tour is to visit the four corners of the US in a period of 21 days. The corners are Blaine, WA, San Ysidro, CA, Key West, FL, and Madawaska, ME. The 21 days starts when you visit the first location and ends when you visit the fourth location. You do not have to return to the first location to complete the tour. At each corner you need to get a local gas receipt, take a picture of your motorcycle at an identifiable landmark, write down a phone number from a local phone specified by the tour rules, and send all this info back in an envelope postmarked from that location. After the trip, all of this information is compiled and reviewed by the committee before your certificate is awarded.

Our current plan is to leave Everett, WA mid August and travel to Madawaska, ME at a relatively liesurely pace taking as many secondary roads as possible and stopping to visit several old friends along the way. Once we reach Madawaska, we will formally begin the tour and from there travel to Key West, San Ysidro, and finally Blaine.

Using Rand McNally's Trip Maker software, they recommend this route with a mileage of 9870 miles for the entire trip. They also calculate the distance for the actual tour as 6530 miles. I'm sure we won't take their exact route but do plan to try to average about 400 miles per day on the days we travel. That leaves us several days of cushion in case we have any problems or just want to stop for a day to rest. We also plan a day at Epcot Center while in Florida and hopefully a few nice rides along the Blue Ridge Parkway. Finally we also hope to stop and see friends along the way.

We're also planning to take a laptop with us and post daily reports to this website. Our son Jason has done this on several trips with us in the past - see links below to previous trips. We're going to try something a little different this time. I recently purchased a Garmin Forerunner 201 which I use for my Triathlon training. The 201 is a GPS that you wear on your wrist. It can constantly track your location, speed, distance traveled, and elevation. After a training session or a day of traveling, you can upload the data to either a training log like SportTracks or to an Internet site like MotionBased. Once uploaded you can then produce detailed information from your data - including a map of your route. Another great site for these GPS maps is GPSVisualiser. We'll probably upload these maps each day so that people can track our progress and for this trip we will use SportTracks because it's my favorite. We plan on several short trips during the summer to get our system worked out.

As we get closer to the date, we'll post more info. Stay tuned.

Well it looks like we are really going to do it this time. We are planning to leave Wednesday, August 10th. I've prepped the bike, we've stopped the paper and the mail, we've made arrangements for the grass to be cut, we've made lots of lists and I think we're ready. I even installed a Roady2 XM Radio this last week. We took a 250 mile checkout ride to Mt. Baker Sunday and everything seemed to be working great. The plan is to update the website each evening with a map of the days route as well as a short description of the days ride. I don't know if we will make it every night or how long this will last, but we'll see how it works. The links below will take you to the page for each day. We'll also be getting email along the way so feel free to contact us if you would like using the link at the bottom of this page.

Statistics and Wrapup