I'll share with you some of my planning experiences, and we'll see how well it works out over the next several weeks.
Planning the basic route.
While I did want to leave room for sponteneity, I thought it was important to at least rough the route out. I figured it was important to have a general idea of where to be day to day so I would end up at home according to the plan. For anybody planning a road trip (on a motorcycle or not) I would highly recommend the Harley Ride Planner. You are able to customize routes more easily than Google Maps and also download your route directly into a GPS. I ended up working out this rough plan for my trip. The majority of days in the plan are 400-500km in length as I didn't want to turn it into a marathon and take all the fun out of the trip.
Camp or Motel?
To me if you're travelling with a friend it's a no brainer. Stay in motels. Splitting the cost of an inexpensive motel is the same cost or less than a campsite. But when I started planning I was under the assumption that I would be riding the whole thing by myself, so I figured camping was the only affordable way to do this. So I set out to figure out the best way to motorcycle camp. (As it happens now it will be about 60% travelling on my own and joined later by friends.)
I ended up settling on a "camping-lite" approach - I wouldn't plan to cook myself but rather get food at restaurants and the grocery stores meal by meal. My camp would strictly provide me cheap lodging.
I ended up with the following gear:
Camp Chair. You can't camp in any sort of comfort without a chair at your campsite. The trouble is you have to pack it on a motorcycle. My friend Graham is an experienced big mileage touring guy on his BMW and highly recommended the Kermit chair. It packs up tiny, it's well made, has a back (i.e. it's not a camp stool) and is actually quite comfortable to sit in. A word of warning - it's stupid expensive for a camp chair, but I challenge anyone to find a chair as comfortable, well made and breaks down to such a small package that will easily pack onto the back of a motorbike.
Redverz Tent. It's a tent designed for motorcyclists and has a motorcycle garage built in. How cool is that? Graham also recommended protecting the tent poles from getting bent or crunched when secured to the bike. I opted for a draftsmen's drawing tube cut to length and seems to work well.
Bedroll, air mattress and pillow all came from Mountain Equipment Co-op. If you've never shopped there, they specialize in a lot of back country camping stuff that all packs up small. My new favourite things are compression sacks. Great for packing your bedroll up tightly. (I also bought one to pack up my rain suit - it works great!). All the camping stuff is then packed into large dry bags (also from MEC) and secured to the bike's carrier using cam straps. I would have liked to get it all in one dry bag but wouldn't quite all fit into the largest one - so I ended up with two.
I also made sure I picked up a headlamp for around the camp at night, a leatherman and a lanyard for my camera. And I'm sure there's a million other things I will be looking for but this setup will have to do.
Bike Shipping
I checked a couple of places but settled on TFX International. They specialize in vehicle transports. They picked it up at Jacox HD in Mississauga and delivered it to Calgary HD as my starting point. The guys in Calgary tell me it arrived in perfect condition so I guess it went ok!
Hopefully some of this information will be useful to you if you're planning a trip too.
In the end I have no idea if I did enough planning or too much. I guess the 24 days following June 1st will surely tell me.
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