April 2009 – Detailed Planning Begins

Having now got an overall very rough route worked out, it was time to start the detailed planning stage for the tour. I had stuck pins into my big map of the USA which showed the places I definitely wanted to go to. I had previously marked onto the map the rough position of the roads from the “Most Scenic Drives In America” book. I had an overall plan, but now I needed to start the detail. I knew roughly where I wanted to go, but it was now time to join up into one continuous route those places I knew I wanted to visit.

I did consider whether doing detailed planning was appropriate for my tour. Of course, I could have taken a chance just gone from place to place using my gut feeling without any detailed planning and I must admit, there was an appeal to that. The freedom that this type of touring would give could be very exciting. Not knowing what you would be doing or where you would be going from one day to the next could undoubtedly have its benefits. However, the thought of having missed something really good very close to where you have been because you didn’t know it was there would (to me) be very frustrating. This being a once in a lifetime tour, I would want to make the most of everything I could. So, for me, detailed planning was a must.

To do this detailed planning, I took the overall route I had worked out and then looked at each State in turn that I would be travelling through. For each State I had purchased a road map of that state which showed all of the main roads, cities, towns, and key features of the state. The maps I purchased are by Rand McNally and they cost about £6 each. These are folded maps which are all 9 inches x 4 inches, or roughly 230mm x 100mm when folded. The scales vary depending on the actual size of the state. The ones I have vary from 7 miles to the inch to 21 miles to the inch.

To help you find these maps, if you enter the following ISBN number in Amazons website, you will find the map for New Hampshire and Vermont. This will lead you to the full range of Rand McNally maps. ISBN 978-0528856068

There is one really important point about these maps. Some of the roads have green dots shown alongside them. See below.



These green dots signify what Rand McNally consider to be scenic roads. I found that very often when doing the detailed route planning that I had a choice of many roads that I could take from city to city, or across a particular state. Given such a choice, I always selected a road with these green dots, as they will gives the best views, run alongside rivers, through valleys, over mountains or similar – all very tempting when on a motorbike!


So, all I did was to look at which roads I wanted to travel on and marked these in pencil on the maps. I did every State like this, forming one continuous route that matched (as near as I could) the overall rough plan on my big map.

This didn’t take too long, but it became obvious to me that having the route marked on the maps was all well and good, but practically speaking, having to constantly refer to a map when on the bike was not going to be a very good solution. I also needed to write down what roads I would use, mileages and the like. That would be the next stage of the detailed planning, State by State. But, that would have to wait as the tour of California was coming up!

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February / March 2009 – Decision time!

For the next month or so, I talked to a few people about the potential of really doing the tour. Firstly and most importantly, my wife. Being away from home for 3+ months isn’t what most husbands plan to do, but Jackie knew that I longed for the adventures that I had missed out on in my early life. I was relieved when she thought the idea was a good one and was fully supportive. We talked about her coming to meet me at certain points on the tour and staying a few days. Jackie is an American, so that helped a lot – I sensed a sort of national pride that she was happy that I wanted to do this tour in her country!

Jackie does go on the back of my Harley-Davidson Road King occasionally, but the idea of doing the tour with me wasn’t really her idea of fun. I would be doing it without her.

I also spoke with a few pals about whether they wanted to join me for part of the tour. A few said they were interested and one or two were so keen, they wanted to sign up then and there!

I was working part-time during 2009, but at the end of this year my intention is to fully retire, so getting time away from work was luckily not an issue for me.

Ok, I had the route worked out, I had the time to do it, I knew how many miles it was likely to be and roughly how long it would take. I had the support of my wife. It was decision time – would I do this tour or not? I needed to know for sure and it was a big decision........

The next day, I bought a whole load of maps of each of the individual States I would be visiting.........!

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January 2009 – What sort of tour did I want?

The beginning of 2009 saw a change in my own personal circumstances which meant I would have more free time. I was very lucky that my plans to retire were coming to fruition and I was able to semi-retire at the end of that 2008. I was now only working about half of my time and the New Year saw me itching to get back to planning the tour.

So, in January 2009 I started to find the time to think about the main tour of the USA once more. I had put the previous abortive attempt behind me and instead of rushing in, like I did last time, I decided to go about this more methodically.

I knew that I wanted to do much more than just a motorcycle ride. I wanted to take in the best that America had to offer and for me, that meant stopping a lot, talking to people, learning about what I was riding passed, seeing the countryside, the towns and cities. I didn’t just want to experience the tarmac and the roads.

For some motorcyclists, it is all about the journey, the ride. I can understand that and indeed I enjoy just the ride sometimes, but to do that on this once in a lifetime journey I was planning to me seemed to miss the point. I recently read an American bikers website and the guy who wrote the site said that when he goes touring, he does 450 to 500 miles per day, every day. For some people this is fun. For me it isn’t. In the UK after those sorts of mileages, you could go the entire length of England and Scotland in 2 days, within 80 miles of 50 million people and end up knowing nothing about the country or the people. Whatever floats your boat I suppose!

For my tour, I was planning to ride an average daily distance of 125 miles. This would give me about half the day riding and half looking and learning. Depending on the area I was in, some days I would do much more than this and some days I would do a lot more. At this average, I could also easily afford to spend a few days in one place if I really liked it.

The next question was where would I stay at night – what sort of accommodation did I want to use? In America the choice is enormous, anywhere from 5 star palaces to camping. My needs are simple as providing I have a bed that is clean and comfortable, I am generally happy. That rules out the two extremes – top end hotels and tents are not for me. Regular hotels and motels are what I would go for. I would try to avoid the very low cost motels, as they can attract (in almost every country in the world) the wrong types of people. I don’t think I am a snob – I just don’t like getting into certain situations with certain people. Mid-range family run type hotels are my preference as they also give you the greatest chance of meeting people along the route.

Next, what were the absolute must see places for me? The list was not that extensive;

• California, especially the Pacific Coast Highway
• Chicago (one of my favourite cities)
• Death Valley
• Las Vegas
• Maine
• Milwaukee (home of the Harley-Davidson)
• New York City
• Niagara Falls
• Route 66
• San Francisco
• Sturgis (the best motorcycle rally in the world?)
• The Rockies, especially in Colorado
• Utah – cowboy film country
• Vermont
• Yellowstone

I got out my big map of the whole of the USA, stuck in pins in these places and a pattern very quickly emerged. Generally, these places were in an east-west line across the top of the States, or in a north-south line that roughly follows the line of the the Rocky Mountains Range.

I began to see a picture emerging that the route would start in the top right hand corner of the States n the Atlantic, head south down the coast to New York, then head west about two-thirds of the way across, then head most of the way down south, then head west again to hit the Pacific coast.

I did a very rough estimate of the mileage and determined this was about 10,000 miles. At an average of 125 miles a day, that would mean 80 days riding. Add say another 10 for rest days and I was looking at a 90 day tour, which seemed about right for me.

The route looked something like this.......
















I ended January 2009 which a much better idea of what my USA motorcycle tour might comprise. The route might have only been in outline, but I knew roughly where I would go, how many miles it was and how long it would take.

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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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May 2008 - Russian Olympics get in the way!

So, it was now May 2008 and I had spent 4 months developing a route that clearly wouldn’t work. I dumped the idea of the tour going to all of the individual States and to be honest, I didn’t have the heart to look at this again for many months. In fact, I had started working in Moscow assisting the Russian Government with their preparations for the Sochi 2014 Winter Olympics, so I didn’t have much time to do any planning of the motorcycle tour. As it often does, work had to take priority and this prevented me from spending any decent amount of time on looking at the bike tour.

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January to March 2008 – Overall Route Planning

Where to go, for how long, what mileages and what type of touring?

These are, without a doubt, the biggest and most important questions I needed to ask myself, for they help shape everything about the tour.

Did I want to do as many miles as possible each day thereby covering as many miles as I could in the time available, thereby making the ride itself the most important part of the tour, or did I want to do take it easier and take in what the country had to offer along the way? My personal preference was to do the latter – for me, being a keen photographer as well, meant that I did want to stop and find out about the places I was riding through. How could I possibly just pass by places I would never see again without knowing about them?

It was time to consult a map. I had a 1:3450000 scale single sheet big map that covered the whole of the USA and this was good for looking at what was where. New York – top right. California – bottom left. Great Lakes at the top. Rockies down the left a state or two inland. I found Yellowstone and decided that must be on my route. I saw Milwaukee and thought I should go there to see the Harley-Davidson factory and museum. I saw the Florida Keys and thought that must be included on my tour. It went on like this for a few days with me looking at some of the places on the big map and working out what I might want to see and where I might want to go.

Hang on! This was useless, for I was like a kid in a sweet shop – eyes darting everywhere, not deciding anything. This was not the way to plan a long tour. I needed to be more methodical.

The problem I had was that I simply didn’t know the USA well enough to plan such a tour. I knew a few cities and a few places that I might like to go to, but I just didn’t know enough and the big scale map I had only showed the main roads. It certainly showed all of the Interstate Roads but like most bikers, I don’t like riding on roads like motorways as they are mainly characterless and boring eyesores that are only any good if you are in a hurry.

I decided to buy two things – a pin board to put the map on and a couple of books about touring in the States. The first was easy – a quick trip into Stevenage to one of those stationary superstores and an hour later my big map was firmly attached to a big pin board.

Finding any good books about touring in the USA was not so easy. Sure I found a few on the Internet about touring the States in a car, but touring on a motorbike is a different thing altogether. A couple of the books I purchased have hardly been used at all since I received them. These are the type that concentrate upon listing great places to see, but hardly discuss possible routes, road types, scenery, twisty roads and all the other things I was interested in. I could only find a couple of books that seemed to be useful.

The first is “The Most Scenic Drives In America” which is a large Readers Digest book of 400 pages. It gives maps and descriptions of 120 road trips of varying length and it is not only incredibly useful, but it is well laid out and gives as much information about the route itself as it does the places along each route. The book is divided into 4 sections; the Western States; The Rocky Mountain States; The Central States; The Eastern States. Each section has between 24 and 41 routes and each route begins with a simple map showing which roads the route takes and numbered highlights to see along that route. Each trip is described on about 4 to 6 pages.

The second book was the Guide to Scenic Highways and Byways (the 275 best drives in the U.S.) which is a National Geographic book. At 463 pages it is thicker than the other book and crammed full of the same sort of information - routes, small maps, what to see along each route etc. Although it has more pages, the size of this second book is smaller and could be taken with you on a motorcycle trip. The amount of information it contains is huge and I have no doubt it would be very useful during such a trip.


These two books were the catalyst for deciding where I might go on my own tour. With a pink highlighter pen I drew on my big map all 120 of the routes the Most Scenic Drives book. I put different colour pins in the map to indicate the places that I definitely wanted to go to. Next I used a very high-tech method to begin to plan my intended route – a ball of string! Like many things in life, simplicity is the key and I simply used the string and pins to join together those pink routes that I wanted to go on and very soon I had developed an outline overall plan of my tour. At that time, it meant I would ride in every one of the 48 contiguous (all except Alaska and Hawaii) States and this felt just right – seeing the whole of America – fantastic!

This overall plan took quite a long time to develop, about the first 4 months of 2008 in all. I started to list out the roads I would take and the places I would visit. It wasn’t until I took the string off the pin board and measured it against the scale of the map that I realised I had a problem, indeed an enormous problem. The total mileage of the tour was about 30,000 miles which at 150 miles per day would mean 200 days, or over 6 months!

For my circumstances, that would be wholly unrealistic. I knew that I was soon to retire, but 6 months away from home and my wife was never going to work. Time to think again!

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Christmas 2007 - The idea for a Motorcycle Tour

There are many great things about Christmas; seeing family, spending time relaxing from work, giving and receiving of gifts; seeing or telephoning those relatives you don’t see very often and of course the timeless repeats on the television. This is quickly followed by the New Year celebrations. Out with the old, in with the new and then as quick as a flash, it is back to work and another year in our lives has started and we generally don’t give it another thought – we just carry on as normal, trudging back to work on those cold Monday mornings. Ho hum.

It wasn’t as simple as that for me at Christmas 2007 though. Something was different. I had passed my fiftieth birthday earlier in the year and I felt I needed a change. I needed to do something different and the Christmas break away from work that year gave me time to reflect. Time to think about what I wanted to do.

I have a great family with Jackie my wife and my three sons, Charles, Jeremy and Richard, plus my step-daughter Mish and her family. My lovely wife Jackie and I live a comfortable life in rural England, plus we have recently bought a house in Spain which was then being modernised to our tastes as a future place to spend time in. The boys are now in their late teens and early twenties and have all reached the stage where they are beginning to want to shape their own lives. They are making their own decisions. That christmas, it seemed like time was nearly right for a change.

My career has been successful and I am very lucky that I could soon retire. I had worked very hard since leaving school at sixteen and my work had given me a huge amount of satisfaction, but being honest with myself, I was tired. I had been in the same line of work for over thirty years. I had spent so many years of getting up early, so many years of the hectic pace of work, so many years of my life had centred largely around work, that it really was time for a change.

My work life had been about working out how to construct large construction projects – how the construction would be undertaken from a very practical point of view. I had worked on some fantastic projects including the preparations for the London 2012 Olympic Games. Looking ahead and setting out how things would be done was what I did and I was very good at it.

Christmas 2007 however had given me time to think. I am not sure if it was a mid-life crisis, but I felt I needed to do something else, but I wasn’t sure what. Then it struck me – since leaving school at a young age I had plunged headlong into work. Sure, I had enjoyed holidays every year and I had seen some great places in the world, but this was as a regular tourist. What was missing was I had never had any sort of an adventure that so many of my contemporaries had; no trekking around the world; no gap year excitement; no years of enjoying growing up as a young man in college environment, not even the school trip to China that one of my sons was about to enjoy. I needed an adventure!

With the potential for retirement in the near future, I spent that Christmas trying to decide what would fulfil that need for adventure. It surely had to involve travel of some sort, but what?

In my teens, I had loved motorbikes. I loved the sense of freedom, the independence, the mechanical side of the way motorbikes were built and to be honest, they were just damned great fun. From a Honda C70 to a 350cc two-stroke Yamaha through to a watercooled GT750 Suzuki, my teen years and early twenties had been about speed and having a lot of fun going fast, popping wheelies and doing all those things a young man takes a lot of pleasure from. However, lifestyles have to change and like many others before me, the early years of marriage and children meant that for me, the motorbike had to go – traded in for a series of bland but very practical cars.

That was until one day about a quarter of a century later, I was driving down the Kings Road in Chelsea, when being early for a business meeting, I decided to pop into Warrs, the Harley-Davidson dealer, just to have a look at what big motorbikes were like these days. I liked what I saw and I just had to try one of these huge shiny machines.

A few days later I was back at Warrs. I liked the look of the touring bikes, but these were much heavier bike than I had ridden many years earlier. Would I still like to ride? Could I actually ride such a big bike? I had to find out, so with some degree of trepidation, I rented a Road King for a few days and headed out onto the busy London streets to see if I still had the passion that I had once enjoyed.

It only took about an hour.

I loved the Harley. I loved its noise, its comfort, its image, the way people gave it admiring glances. I even loved the way the huge V-twin engine vibrated. I loved just about everything about it.

A day or so later saw me returning the rental bike to Warrs and ordering my own, brand new Harley-Davidson Road King. Black. Lots of extra chrome. Loud pipes. New leather jacket. New crash helmet. I was a born-again biker!

For the next year or so, I rode the bike a lot. I took it to France, Germany, Lichtenstein, Austria and just into Italy. I loved riding it!

So, Christmas 2007 had arrived and after the turkey had mostly been consumed, presents given and received, early episodes of the Two Ronnies and that ever-lasting duo, Morecombe and Wise had been watched for heaven knows how many times, thoughts turned to adventures. That first adventure had to be on a motorbike, but where to and for how long?

Two main locations became obvious front-runners – Europe or the USA. The USA pretty soon became the favourite. My initial idea was to ride in all of the 50 States, but after map consultations, a quick bit of route planning and a rapid mileage calculation, it became obvious that this was a tour that would take in the order of 6 months! Fifty States at, say, just half a week per State is 25 weeks! Half a week per State would hardly be an adventure, more an endurance race and not really what I had in mind. Time to think again.

I would need to visit less places over say three months and this was far more realistic. Where would I choose? How would I choose? Would I take my own bike or rent? Should I do this on my own, or in a group? So many questions, but I was determined to do this, so I called upon some of the skills and experiences I had been doing in my career for many years – time for some planning!

This blog sets out how I achieved my adventure, what route I planned, what I took with me, what I saw, what worked well, what didn’t work and records some of the highs and lows of the tour. I have written it for two reasons – firstly to record my own adventure and secondly, to help anyone else planning to do the same sort of tour. I hope that you enjoy reading at least some of it.

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