Our "10 in 10 Dead Butt Ride" - July 2009
 Our VStar 1300 |
My wife and I are getting ready for a long ride this summer and will document our preparations and our trip (when it happens) on this page. We'll add pictures and commentary on the places we visit and sights we see. We hope you enjoy our journey as much as we know that we will.
Our plan is to ride this July, with our fellow NW Cascades Chapter #154 members, to STAR Days in Billings, Montana. Our route to STAR Days will take us over the well known and twisty Lolo Pass in eastern Idaho. |
After four days of fun and rides in Billings, we will turn southeasterly and visit the Little Big Horn National Monument in Montana and Devil's Tower National Monument in Wyoming. We'll ride the winding and scenic Spearfish Canyon in South Dakota and visit the Mt Rushmore National Memorial in South Dakota. From Mt Rushmore we'll ride south through Custer State Park and Wind Cave National Park. |
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| Next, we'll ride northwesterly into Wyoming towards Yellowstone Park with three other bikes. About half way to Yellowstone we'll leave our friends
and head south into southwestern Colorado where we'll meet up with another friend and fellow rider from our STAR Chapter. We'll head into Utah and visit Arches National Park before we ride west into Nevada. Crossing Nevada, we'll travel northwesterly to Susanville, CA then to Redding, CA and from there to the coast. Once at the coast we'll ride US-101 north, along the coast, through northern California, Oregon and back to our home state of Washington where we'll head for the Port Townsend ferry and home. All in all, 11 states and a bit more than 4,100 miles in 2 weeks. For the second part of this ride, we'll actually do 10 states in 10 days after leaving Billings, MT; hence the name my wife gave to this ride - the "10 in 10 Dead Butt Ride". We've never attempted a ride of this length and we're very much looking forward to it. We won't have a lot of time to spend in any one place but it should be a great ride and a lot of fun. |
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We've begun making some changes to our bike in preparation for our ride. We've added a Mutazu trunk (visible in the picture of our VStar above) and replaced (temporarily) our nice, but smaller, leather saddlebags with some slightly used Yamaha hard touring bags. These two additions will give us considerably more storage space but, to ensure we'll have enough, we also purchased a duffelbag from RoadGear that will ride atop our new trunk. Maybe we should just purchase a trailer! :>) We've added a TomTom Rider 2nd Edition GPS unit to our bike. Hopefully, this will minimize our wrong turns and keep us pointed in the direction we want to go. I'll also load it with the locations of all the Yamaha dealerships along our route so, in the unlikely event that we experience bike trouble, we'll know where the nearest dealer is located. |
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| We've also installed an Audivox Cruise Control to make those long straight stretches of highway easier. This is a full vacuum cruise control and functions very well on this bike. Another recent addition is an Asus EEE Netbook which should allow us to connect to the Internet at some of our stops and allow us to update our pages with content and pictures as we travel. Only 30 more days 'til departure! |
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