I may have finally figured out what the heck my little problem is. (well, one of them… heh.)
I’ve been missing “the road” lately.
It’s time again for a long coast-to-coast-to-coast road trip!
And I have my opportunity. My employer is sending me to an industry school near Wheeling West Virginia the second week in June. This past week I secured permission from my boss to wrap that week long school with two weeks of vacation.
I’ve been looking around for good planning tools and I stumbled across Furkot from a generic Google search. This is a completely free road trip planner that’s actually pretty awesome. No banner ads, no missing features that require upgrading to “Pro” or anything like that. They make their money – well, they’re providing a road trip planner, so they make their money by presenting you with a slew of hotel booking services, along with restaurant and other travel related advertisements, but only inside the hideable side bars that you’re going to use to review your gas stops, nightly motel stops and such anyway. They aggregate more lodging and travel search sites than I knew existed, including World Rainbow Hotels, which present LGBT welcoming lodging locations (hard to find in places like eastern Oklahoma, believe me…) Otherwise, it’s basically an unlimited tool. It’s very mobile friendly and stores vital map data offline so you don’t always need an internet connection to use it. Among it’s many features is the ability to share a trip. For example here’s the eastbound trip that I’m thinking about right now.
The picture in this post is a Photoshop composite of three trip plans I’ve laid out in Furkot that show what I’m currently thinking about for “Road Trip 2016 – Motorcycle Bucket List”. Eastbound Portland to Wheeling, WV across Canada in a very conservative and comfortable 7 days – I have to check in to the event sometime on the eighth day. The next leg is from Wheeling to my friend Glen’s farm on the eastern shore of Virginia with a stop a the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center near Dulles Airport outside of DC. This is the other big portion of the National Air and Space Museum that houses a Concorde and the space shuttle Discovery, among other incredible exhibits. I’ve tried three separate times while back east on other trips to visit this place, and each time I haven’t made it. Once because of storms and flooding that closed the whole area. After an unfortunately short visit on the Eastern Shore, the westbound trip looks like it’ll be across the south, starting by crossing the Chesapeake Bay Bridge Tunnel and heading west to Las Vegas where I want to stop in to the National Atomic Testing Museum – another place I always meant to swing by on any number of annual trips to Vegas for NAB in my past life. The westbound trip lays out to a comfortable six days, but I have 8, 9 or 10 to do it, depending on when I want to leave VA and how many veg days I want before I go back to work. I may also dilly-dally in Memphis or Nashville for an evening too. Not sure.
It all lays out to a hair over 7,000 miles spanning as many as 18 riding days. Totally doable. But, I haven’t done an extended road trip in many years, so it’s time to start spooling up with some 350-400 mile day trips from home.
This will provide some nice fresh material for the “Bikestuff” pages on this site too.