Second half of May 2009 – California warm up trip

The 14th May saw the seven of us doing the tour of California gather at Heathrow for the long flight to San Francisco. Without writing a long piece about what happened on this trip, here is a list setting out some tips and hints about the California trip that I found to be useful and I will certainly take forward in my main tour of the USA........

• Some airlines do not allow you to take crash helmets in hand-luggage (carry-on luggage). Put them in your main checked luggage
• When you are on your trip, where will you leave your suitcase? We stayed at the same hotel on the first and last night’s of the trip, so were able to leave these with the hotel
• Clearly carrying enough clothes for two changes a day is un-realistic. Each afternoon, when I arrived at that nights hotel, I showered and changed meaning I had fresh clothes for that evening. I then put the same clothes the next morning.
• I did take enough clothes for 14 days – a change of clothes for each day. This was bulky and I could have taken half that amount and simply washed them half way through the trip.
• We stayed in good but quite expensive hotels. This is a very much a personal issue, but booking ahead (before we left the UK) gave us almost no flexibility to change what type of place we stayed at. We could easily have stayed at cheaper places, but we liked our comforts.
• We bought really cheap waterproof saddlebag liners so all we had to do was to lift these out when we arrived at the hotel for that night.
• Booking ahead took away lots of hassle, but it also took away some sense of freedom to do what we wanted.
• Due to the heat, I couldn’t ride in my thick protective riding trousers or my thick FXRG leather jacket. I wore a lightweight leather jacket and Kevlar jeans.
• Due to riding in that lightweight gear, I chose to ride relatively slowly and defensively. I generally do this anyway, so no problem.
• I did however had to carry my main thicker bike gear on the bike which took up a huge amount of space – a real mistake
• In the intense sun, protect your neck! A small bottle of sun-tan lotion solved this.
• We used bike-to-bike radios to communicate with each other. These were great but the batteries generally only lasted about a day or so. It would have been much better to hard wire these into the bike.
• I took quite a few tools. I didn’t really need to carry quite so many.
• In the USA put the items you might need during the day in your right hand saddlebag – then when you need to access this you won’t be standing next to the moving traffic.
• In a larger group, agree what time you will leave each morning and stick to it. Try not to keep each other waiting!
• If riding as a group (we did) and you get split up by heavy traffic, red lights or similar, don’t stop every time. The others will soon catch up. But, make sure you all know the route you will be taking so you can wait somewhere and re-group knowing that everyone is on the right road.
• Try to get like minded people as fellow riders. Some might want to just ride all day. Some might want to stop a great deal to take photos etc. This can be difficult to achieve though, so try to agree how your group will ride each day.
• We did 168 miles a day average, including days with almost no riding. Highest mileage day was 369 miles which for our group was about the limit we could do. Even that was probably too much.
• We tried to keep away from cities, which was a good thing. Riding in a group in a big city is a pain.

















I will write more about these sorts of issues later in the part of this blog about preparing for the main USA tour, so this list is just a taster.

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First part of May 2009 – Preparing for California

Back in November the previous year, I had agreed to join a bunch of guys (that I didn’t know) on a two week tour of California on rented motorbikes. I was now preparing for that trip and I was struggling with the decisions about what to take. Everything had to fit in the two panniers (or are they called saddlebags?) on the bike and a specialist piece of motorcycle luggage made by Nelson-Riggs.

One of the problems I had to consider was what bike clothes to take. The route we were planning included coast roads, inland roads, mountain passes, near desert conditions and just about everything else in between. Checking on the internet showed that we could expect a pretty large temperature variation - anything from snow in the mountains to high temperatures in the glorious California sunshine.

Being a lover of writing lists (it drives my wife mad) I wrote out everything I thought I might need to take. I will write more about this later in the part about preparing for the main USA tour, but for now, it’s enough to know that I found this very helpful. This list was split into the main sections of clothes, bike clothes, tools, bathroom stuff, electronic gear etc. Weeks before I was due to leave I laid everything out on a spare bedroom floor and needless to say, it didn’t fit into the luggage I was able to carry on the bike.

I set aside those items I didn’t think were really necessary and eventually it did fit without having to leave behind anything crucial.

Regarding the logistics of the trip, I was lucky that two of the guys worked together and they used their brilliant secretary to find and book hotels, flights and all the necessary paperwork. There was quite a lot of this as I found out when I was presented with a file of what I would need.

For the trip of California, we rented bikes from a company called EagleRider. They can rent a wide range of bikes from Harley-Davidsons to Honda, BMW’s, Yamaha’s and many more. Harleys are their speciality and we paid around $135 per day, plus a little more for top-up insurance. This bought unlimited mileage and a wide network of rental locations that meant we could have returned bikes to a different location than we started from if we had wanted to do that. I went for a Harley-Davidson Electra Glide.

As we were on a fixed timescale we pre-booked accommodation ahead of time. I had mixed views about this – it was good that we didn’t need to worry about this at all during the trip as we knew exactly where we would stay each night. The bad point was (and this happened a few times) we arrived at out designated hotel way too early in the afternoon and it would have been better to carry on riding. As we were a sizeable group (seven of us) on the whole it was better to book in advance to make sure we had somewhere to sleep.

The preparations seemed to go ok and there was only one last thing to do – meet the guys in a local curry house about a week before we left. It was a good job I liked them as 2 weeks with people I didn’t get on with could have been somewhat challenging!

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November 2008 – Two week bike trip to California?

The rest of 2008 was very busy for me. I spent a lot of time that year working in Moscow and we finished renovating a house in Spain that we would use as a second home. We spent our first few long weekends in Spain and these wiped out any time that I might have had to start planning the main USA tour again.

In 2007 I had heard about a company called Brett Tours (http://www.brettours.co.uk) that organise excellent road trips in Europe for Harley-Davidson owners. I decided to go on one of these and chose a trip to Le Touquet in France. These are highly organised tours for about 20 bikes led by an experienced road captain where everything is done for you. The routes are planned in advanced, the hotels are booked and this means that all you need to concentrate on is enjoying the riding!

On this trip to Le Touquet there were about 20 riders and as you can imagine, we spent the days riding and the evenings eating and drinking together. One of my fellow riders was a guy called Mike, who hearing that I was having a custom bike built for me, gave me the name and phone number of his brother (Russ) who already had a custom bike and who lived very close to me. I learned that Russ sometimes organised local bike rides for him and his friends and I contacted him with a view to joining him once I had my own custom bike. Not much came of this until the second half of 2008 when Russ let me know he was organising a two week tour of California and did I want to join him and about 6 others?

Yes was the answer. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Please.

So I had just agreed to do a two week trip in May 2009 on a rented Harley with 6 guys, none of whom I had met before! As well as being really good itself, this trip would be a great taster for my main USA tour and would probably teach me a lot about preparations, what to take, what type of touring etc.

I was looking forward to this!

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