Well we're about to head out on our next motorcycle trip. We're not exactly sure where we're going or what we will be doing so we don't have any kind of snappy or distinctive name for this trip. I guess we'll wait until the trip's over and then see if we can give it a name. The general plan is to head east over the mountains and then travel generally south towards warmer weather and sun. We'll probably check weather forecasts each night and then use them to determine where we'll go the next day - we'll see how that works. We think we'll eventually end up in Las Vegas and may even head down to Casa Grande to look around there a little. We're also hoping to visit Great Basin National Park since it's one of the few on the left side of the country we haven't visited yet. A side trip to Bryce (we love the Hoodoos) and/or Zion might also be in the cards.
As usual we're not quite as well prepared as we have been in previous years. We had originally planned to leave in late August after I had done a triathlon - my first in 2 years. Unfortunately I made the mistake of waiting until the last minute to register and I missed 2 different events because they were both full. I finally ended up doing the Black Diamond Sprint Triathlon in Enumclaw, WA. The race was September 14th and then we had several things we needed to finish the following week. So here it is almost the end of September already. Although September wasn't too bad - until the last few days - the month of August wasn't too great and we're looking forward to warm weather.
For the trip last year we purchased a pair of Gerbing heated vests and, while we only used them once last year, we expect we may get more use out of them this year. When we did use them last year, they worked great and we have a lot less concern about running into cold weather. We also added a new seat since last year. We purchased a Russell Day Long seat and are looking forward to seeing how it will perform. We had it down in Arizona last March and put about 2000 miles on it so it should be pretty well broken in for this trip. The only other thing new this year is our GPS logging method. For the last few trips we used my Garmin Forerunner 201 and, although I recently purchased a Garmin Forerunner 305 for my training, it still has some of the same drawbacks of the 201. The answer was a purchased OEM type Garmin GPS module and a newly designed Data Logger that integrates with my Volt Meter Display and logs data to an SD Card. Besides the GPS data, the logger also logs temperature and elevation. Although I have tested everything out on short rides, this will be the first major test. I hope it goes well.
Like previous trips, we are planning to track our route using the GPS and will be taking pictures using a digital camera. We'll try to post a map and the pictures each evening but I'm not sure about the running commentary. I'm sure we will post a few comments if we encounter something really interesting but may not be as verbose as in previous years. Since the data is there anyway, we'll probably post elevation and temperature profiles for each days ride along with the map.
Just to refresh everyones memory, there are links below to each day of the trip with a starting and ending location for that day. Clicking on the link will take you to a page for that day with stats for the day, an interactive map, and pictures for the day. The route will be overlaid on a fully interactive Google Map. That means you will be able to zoom in on any section of the route, pan around the entire map, and do this over a street map background, a satellite image background, or a hybrid view. The map also incorporates a few new features this year. You can double click on a spot to center and zoom in on that spot and you can also use a scroll wheel to zoom the map. We hope this will be more interesting. Secondly, our pictures will be geotagged - that means each picture will be tagged with the exact location where it was shot. Each picture will be indicated on the interactive map as a small pointer. Clicking on a pointer will display a thumbnail of the picture and, clicking on the thumbnail, will display a full size image of the picture. Finally there is another link below for a Trip to Date Map. We will update this each evening as well to show an interactive map of the trip to that point. To do all this, we will be using my Volt Meter/Logger, a Canon A620 digital camera, and a very cool program named RoboGEO. If we do separate web pages for a special reason like a group of pictures for a National Park, we also use Web Picture Creator. We also use Fast Stone Photo Resizer to resize the pictures for faster loading and a few other VB6 programs that I wrote to combine GPX files or extract data from the GPS files.
| Day 1 - 9/23/2008 | Everett, WA to Pendleton, OR |
| Day 2 - 9/24/2008 | Pendleton, Or to La Pine, OR |
| Day 3 - 9/25/2008 | La Pine, OR to Baker City, OR |
| Day 4 - 9/26/2008 | Baker City OR to Everett, WA |
Statistics and Wrapup