No Thru Traffic

So it took me pretty much all day to get all of my stuff together, packed and mounted onto the bike. Wow, did my inexperience with motorcycle touring really show through today. I have a lot of stuff strapped to the back of my bike. You can see the final packing list, here.

We both ended up packing about a weeks worth of clothes which may have been too much given that we could just wash stuff more often and bring less stuff. Since my bags and bike were a bit bigger, I’m the one carrying the tent, stove, gas, cooking stuff, etc. It’s like I’ve got a whole passenger behind me now.

Having a dad who also owns a Nighthawk was pretty helpful as I was able to score a free corbin seat and was allowed to borrow his engine cards should the weight of the bike be too much for me to keep off the ground (I really don’t want these guards to ever come in handy).

I think that we are both going to get pretty good at packing things up pretty quick with the amount of practice that we will have.

Tomorrow morning we are going to meet up at 7:00am and take some photos of the bikes all loaded up then head out to our first stop: Wallowa Lake State Park. Check out the route page for a sort of up-to-date map of where we’ve been.

Let the adventure begin!

-Alex