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| Manride Part 2 |
| Sun May 23 18:31:26 2010 PST, by Testcase |
| [email] [webpage] |
Manride Pt 2 :PLANNING THE PLANNING PLANS
I have a lot of friends who have done long and longer rides. I got a lot of good tips from them about preparing for this trip and gear I could pick up to make things easier. The internet forums I hang out on for motorcycles also had a lot of good info. I spent time gathering info together and getting lists together as to how to prepare for the trip. I had a small headstart as I used to do a good deal of camping while in the Boy Scouts and so I had the benefit of that knowledge and experience. The big upshot was that I don't think I overpacked for the trip, which is something a lot of people may be prone to their first time out. I had a good idea of what I needed, at a minimum, to support myself for three nights of camping. I've done a lot of packing for backpacking back in the day, and the ideas translate pretty smoothly across.
We paid more attention to the route. I'd been sweating over this more then Kevin had and when he finally got around to seeing the map I had, his first reaction was, "That's a lot of miles." In my head, it didn't seem to be. I had planned on covering roughly 1500 miles over a span of four days. This kind of mileage on bikes essentially meant lots of riding during the day. Certainly not much meandering or sightseeing. In its first incarnation, Manride was about riding and lots of it. The Iron Butt riders can do 1500 miles (or lots more) in 24 consecutive hours. With Kevin on board, and the agreed goal that we wanted to see what we were riding on, not just cover miles. That meant ratcheting back on the miles.
The first casualty of this new philosophy was Alturas. That first idea was to travel there and back, but it just didn't seem feasible with the schedule I was envisioning. One of the funnest parts of doing a longer ride is planning the route. I took on the role of designated route-maker for Manride because I loved doing it so much. I'd spent the year before plotting out tons of potential trips all across the country. Poring over real or online maps and envisioning the road, connecting dots on a map, working out where you're going to want to go. There's a real nice feeling of control while you're doing that planning, even though, you really don't have anywhere near as much as you think. Road travel on a motorcycle is never as neat and simple as filling in 'start' and 'finish' locations in a Google map and clicking "Directions." I learned that the interesting way one night when I spent 3 hours on the roadside of Interstate 15 waiting for a tow truck that was supposed to be "less then half an hour away."
With Alturas no longer a destination, the question of route opened back up. Since Kevin was coming from Las Vegas and I would be riding in from Salt Lake City, the first thing that we needed to establish was a meeting point. A true starting point for the joint ride. Looking at a map of Nevada, one town on the eastern side stands out as an all-points kind of place: Ely. Two of the big state-crossers, 50 and 6, run directly through Ely while 80 and 15 are connected to it via the 93. Even better, getting to Ely was about even for both of us. That settled it for me. Ely was where Kevin and Chuck would join up and start the Manride. From there, it was a really short jump from making a loop of going west on 50 (the claimed 'loneliest road in America') from Ely across the state until Fallon, where we would turn south on the 95. Once we hit the 6 (the actual 'loneliest road in America'), we'd turn east and head back towards Ely, where we would split up and head back to our homes. It'd be a nice big oval loop across Nevada far away from the presumed meccas of Las Vegas and Reno.
The nice thing about this route is that it offered a lot of flexibility if we needed it. There were a number of roads which connected the 50 and the 6 if, for some reason, we wouldn't or didn't make it all the way across to the 95. One thing we talked about doing was coming across ghost towns in Nevada and poking around them. I consulted several websites that listed ghost towns along with their coordinates and fed them into my GPS. I originally thought about forsaking taking along an electronic GPS and relying instead on a flat map, but that was pretty short-lived. I didn't expect us getting into any situation where we would get truly lost so having the GPS versus a flat map wasn't like trying to take an easy way out. Along with the ghost town locations, I also fed in a list of campgrounds so that we would know where to pitch tents for the night. It occurred to me, in a bit of a hopeful way, that we wouldn't even make it to an established campground and actually camp out 'in the wild.' Even roadside somewhere desolate.
What that made me think next was something about self-defense. Camping in an established campground, I wouldn't worry, but being out somewhere away from everything and everybody. It occurred to me we might need some sort of defense, either against animal or humans. Speaking with Kevin about it, we agreed that it might be a good idea to take a gun along. I don't have one with me in the house, and Kevin didn't own one. Because my wife is pretty stridently opposed to firearms, Kevin and I agreed that he would go shopping for one. As I continued to pore over the map and calculate rides and mileage, it became pretty clear to me that we were pretty much always sure to be near a campground of some kind at the end of each day, so the idea of a having a gun became less of an imperative and Kevin dropped it from his to-do list, though up to near the last day, he considered maybe getting a taser/pepper spray device. Fortunately, it turns out we didn't need anything along those lines.
I researched several things for the route: locations of attractions, locations of ghost towns, and locations of campgrounds. I programmed all this stuff into my GPS with the hopes that as we ambled about Nevada we could just pull over and check out things that popped up on the GPS, like Nevada's Lunar Crater or the orphan Big Boy of Tonopah. There is a huge wealth of ghost towns in Nevada and the idea of poking around several was just too good to pass up. Campgrounds were self-explanatory. There were plenty of those. I looked forward to the second night on the trip where I planned for us to be camping lakeside on the western side of Nevada, within spitting distance of California.
to be continued... |
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