After 18 days on the road, including 3,836 motorcycle miles in the past seven days (6,079 for the entire trip), it feels kinda strange to be home.
It felt really weird to drive my car Monday. I found myself looking for the neutral light (motorcycle joke) before putting it into gear.
I just finished crunching the numbers and entering all of my receipts into my Quicken software and determined the trip wasn't as financially paralyzing as I had feared it would be.
At an average daily cost of $67.36, it cost me about 20¢ per mile. I spent about $400 on lodging, but that was considerably less than it might have been had I not had the generous hospitality of my friends in Alma. The cost of food and fuel was about even at around $350 each. The bike delivered an average of 38 miles/gallon with a high of 50.3 mpg on the downhill ride from Hartsel, Colo. to Colorado Springs and a low of 35.9 mpg on I-70 from Wakeeney, Kans. to Salina, Kans.
All things considered and not counting getting assaulted in California last Wednesday with a SUV, this was the easiest and most comfortable long haul ride I've done in the history of my 19 annual Mid-Life Crisis Tours. Most of the credit goes to the new BMW K1200GT. With its heated comfort seat, heated grips, electronic cruise control and electrically operated windscreen, it's a terrific bike for gobbling up huge chunks of highway, yet it's supremely nimble in mountain twisties. I've already jabbered on at length about the XM satellite radio, so suffice it to say it does a wonderful job of alleviating boredom, not to mention giving me useful realtime traffic/weather reports for St. Louis and San Francisco.
Even though I've been at this for more than 20 years, I learn new ways to improve my touring technique and kit every time I go out.
This time, the most prominent lessons are:
1. Never again take my monstrous 5-pound (well, 4 pounds 11.5 ounces with lens) Nikon F5 film camera on the bike. It's big and unwieldy and the film takes up way too much space, not to mention the fact that I'm deep enough into digital now that I hate paying for film, then having to pay again for processing. When it comes to motorcycle touring, I hope to have a large-megapixel digital point-and-shoot - like the Nikon CoolPix 5700 or somesuch - and an image tank for nearly limitless photo possibilities.
2. I finally see a point to a Palm Pilot. Before this trip, I thought they were just expensive overblown pocket notebooks. After examining, and almost buying, a Palm Pilot Zire 71 that the Dillon, Colo. OfficeMax was blowing out in favor of a newer model, I began to see how it could fit into my way of doing things. Unfortunately, the model I really need has WiFi capability and costs about $400. But give me one of those, a fold-out keyboard and a truck stop or Starbuck's or McDonald's with WiFi service and I can blog and journal and e-mail my brains out. As it turned out, I did practically no journaling on this trip because (a) it's a hassle to write longhand in my travel log and (b) I was with friends almost constantly and found it very inconvenient to block out time for writing.
Both of these technology upgrades would weigh less, take up less space and do much much more.
That's important, considering the reduced luggage capacity of the K1200GT, compared with my old '91 K100RS. BMW makes larger capacity lids for their saddlebags. That might be a good solution, but I'm worried about how goofy they would look on the bike, making for a considerably wider profile.