To quickly access the information that interests you most, use the keywords above as a table of contents. I have documented my preparations, I hope it's useful!

2011/06/08

Planning My Trip

When I first started planning this trip, I drew a big circle on around the perimeter of North America and started dragging waypoints onto it. After reading all the impressive ride reports on ADVrider.com, I identified the challenge and excitement of motorcycle travel with long days on the road, with states and countries visited. But after talking with friends and fellow riders I started to realize just how much there is to see without leaving the West. For that matter, there's a lot to see in California alone, or even Northern California or Southern California.

When there's a fixed time to work with, expanding or shrinking the scope of a trip changes its character. If you pass through a major national park in a few hours, are you really seeing it? Maybe you get a general sense of its geology and ecology, but unless you're exceptionally perceptive you need to slow down to see the trees through the forest, the birds on their branches, the moss on their trunks, the clouds precipitated out of clear air by the mountain peaks. I can't say I've really been somewhere until I get a sense for its ways of being. If you stay a while you start to appreciate the more subtle processes, like the return of an evening breeze by the coast.

In most of the neighborhoods that I've lived in, it took me a few weeks to really get a sense of who lived there and what they did, usually while working on my motorcycle on the sidewalk. Sometimes understanding comes through a rare event, like seeing an ordinary city pigeon explode mid-flight in the claws of a falcon outside a San Francisco strip club. Sometimes it is in the details, in the perfect lunch at a little hole in the wall Vietnamese restaurant, in a Chinese shop full of live fish gasping for air, or a constellation sinking behind the Transamerica Building as a conversation goes on, the rotation of the celestial sphere interjecting itself into our human affairs.



The classic short film, Powers of Ten, captures this well. At each level of magnification we are presented with a view that is vastly different than the last, but no less true and real. Often it takes no motion at all to change one's view, only a focusing of the mind's eye.

This is why I sometimes find it difficult to express where I'm going. Alaska seems sufficiently far away to capture the idea that this isn't a simply sightseeing tour. But do I really have any reason to go to Alaska? I've barely explored my own back yard, both literally and figuratively! I could write a ride report set entirely on my front lawn, stopping for every bug, or for each species of grass.

I guess committing to a motorcycle trip actually demands a certain scale to things. Riding a motorcycle around a small town reduces it to a fashion accessory, or an overgrown bicycle. A motorcycle comes into its own on remote roads and far-off trails, offering vantage points otherwise available only to ambitious hikers or bicyclists. Most motorcycles can go well above the speed limit, and you're going to have a radically different experience if you zip along at 75mph down the interstate or if you roll through towns and farmland at 35mph. Neither experience is better or worse, each is rich in its own way.

What I'm getting at is that it really doesn't matter where you go, or how fast you go, or how far you go. What matters is the inner road that you ride, both on the motorcycle and off. It's possible to go down the most remote goat path in Africa, but inwardly never leave Main St.

A GPS has no map layer for the mind, but at least it will tell me where the gas stations are.

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