Documenting Your Motorcycle Trips Best Bets | Best Motorcycle Roads Podcast Episode 010 – YouTube

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Qb7H8ipzqg

Transcript:

(00:00) Sometimes the best bet is just put the mattress on the [Music] floor hello and welcome to best motorcycle roads I’m Tom and I’m Todd we have over 65 years of combined motorcycling experience and 30 years of planning and riding motorcycle trips we’re here to share with you everything we’ve learned over those years our goal at best motorcycle roads is simple make your next motorcycle trip the best it can be we’ll dive into technology planning packing the roots and other tips and everything in between from

(00:41) essential prep to Unforgettable Roots we’ve got you covered before we Kickstart today’s Journey we ask you to sign up for our BMR Rider alerts it’s our way of keeping you in the loop with the latest rides tips and stories we promise no spam only the essentials to enhance your motorcycle Adventures join the BMR crew today we’ll put a link in the show notes this segment about motorcycle gear reviews and tips we call the toolkit today we’ll talk about the GoPro 12 and the Senna mesh Port red this combo pack

(01:13) is new for us so what we’re trying to do is document more of our trips and uh honestly this will help us get um our helmet communicators tied into the video that we’re going to shoot on this next one so that’ll be great we picked up a GoPro 12 which is pretty amazing in itself and then I was telling Todd that we uh we picked up a terabyte memory card the ones that are the size of your Thum your little fingernail um and what’s really great about that is from what we can tell shooting in 4k we’re

(01:47) going to be able to shoot about 40 hours on the one chip um so hopefully that works out pretty well and I’m kind of excited to record the audio too yeah that that’ll be fun we have a lot of good conversations when we ride and not so good some not so good but it’ll be nice some really bad actually it’ll be nice to have some of those you know recorded So then the Senna mesh Port red is a is a is an add-on device that basically um Taps into the senna’s mesh port and then that’s all the all the

(02:18) communicators are also running on on the mesh cam mesh so then all of those things will be comboed up and then you connect the cin mesh with Bluetooth to the camera and then hopefully it’ll be quite quite a quite a cool thing I’ve seen some examples and it sounds really fun and I know for me Todd and as we’re talking about documenting trips this is the part we’re missing right now like documenting some of these discussions talks and not to say that you guys want to hear about everything we talk about

(02:45) but um I know that you and I have some aspirations of just just stories that we can capture that they’re hard to put into words afterwards so I’m I’m pretty excited about it yeah they’re hard and sometimes you just forget about them until you know a conversation comes up later so it would be nice to have those yeah I agree ridewise is the section we focus on planning and safety tips so Travis asked us about different motorcycles I think that was maybe in the last episode episode 9 and so let’s

(03:13) let’s chat a little bit about standard bikes yeah um like technically speaking you know like a what what we call a standard is like a motorcycle that’s um maybe like 300 to 600 lb kind of in that range and um really most important it’s it’s the ones that have that kind of upright writing position yep um your foot controls are underneath rather than out front and you know that really actually comes in handy when you see like a a big bump in the road or a pothole you can just like almost like stand up on those foot pegs are right

(03:46) under you and get your butt off the seat to you know uh absorb that bump yeah whereas on a cruiser your feet out front you’re getting tailbone you sometimes just take it right on your tailbone and I think honestly why they call them standard bikes is because they used to be called motorcycles right you know it was all motorcycles that happened probably until the 70s when people started making Choppers and Harley honestly I mean I think they’re just the bike they’re they were the motorcycle you know um so

(04:16) that’s why I think you’ll see or reflect when people are talking about them sometimes they also do talk about like a 60s and 7s style M um but yeah totally just a round to town motorcycle um you know still used in many countries but yeah I mean it’s it’s a it’s a great bike um yeah and you can I mean you can take them on Long rides you can you can outfit them with uh wind screens you could put bags on them you could strap a bunch of luggage to them uh they’re usually made for two passengers yep and

(04:47) well they have two seats I I don’t know they’re actually made for two no I’m kidding good point a joke but no I mean and in some countries I’ve seen up to three or four I’ve seen those I’ve seen those videos as well it’s the family motorcycle right but yeah like you said I think most standard bikes have places to attach things bags luggage different sorts of things and honestly that’s are you know that’s how the the Honda Goldman got started it was not a Touring bike it was just a motorcycle with a Big

(05:16) Mo bigger motor on it you know when the Honda Golding came out in 75 it’s a 1000cc Mo motor and in fact um a lot of the luggage was just uh aftermarket you know it wasn’t until later on that that it became something that was more um like you know veter was one of the ones that came out with the first first luggage and fairings to kind of turn them into a turning bike so yeah um standard bikes are great I mean they’re great to ride easy to ride yeah um simple yeah probably uh easy to work on too because

(05:47) there not a lot of plastic or covering the engine is exposed uh you can really kind of see and get at everything and it’s it’s one of those bikes that if uh you know people are just getting started standard motorcycle is great you know the cheap they’re cheap not a lot of plastic they’re a little bit lighter um you know than than some of the big Cruisers and touring bikes sport touring bikes um but they’re comfortable to ride comfortable to ride they’re easy to park easy to get into your garage you know

(06:13) you know it’s like a motorized bicycle really I mean the same feet position and all that so yeah yeah you you had found a few um bikes out there that were standards yeah like uh like a Honda CB 500 kawazaki the Z 650 Suzuki has the SV which is basically the old Bandits like there’s a lot of people know what the Bandit looks like yep yep uh BMW has kind of a standard bike uh like the 900 f900r yeah um and even the old BMW GS horizontally opposed those are all standards even their Adventure bikes are really a standard bike they call them

(06:49) Adventures but they really are standards um and and I’ve seen the ones we call Standard now like um I think like the Ducati uh monster I I think they just have one seat on them I I don’t think they’re generally those aren’t made for uh two up sure those are one the next segment is what we call the mile marker it’s our story segment so the theme of today is really documenting the trip you know I think this is something that we’ve done okay at at times and just horrible at other times um you know and

(07:21) it kind of comes down to planning again and we that seems to be a common theme whenever we whenever we talk but I mean even with beginning of the trip starting with a plan um I think just sharing the plan um just helps people connect it helps people get an idea of what what what’s all going to be going down or you know going on yeah um and you know something that I think is just brilliant that we’ve used now is just using your Google calendar right um how easy is that so I know you did it recently when

(07:54) we’ve been planning our trip next trip and you had just went ahead booked the rooms and then you put the reservation and the confirmation number boom right in the an event for that day and it’s like that’s awesome right and so then doing the same thing because one of the struggles that we used to kind of have is how we going to get the maps how we going to share the maps who’s going to know what the up is this the updated map you know or is this the old map you know like I don’t know so I think using the

(08:20) uh calendar events for each day for that works fantastically as well so and it just gives people um a heads up of what to come where we’re going they can look at it and then if you update it boom it’s done so I love that idea so that kind of starts with the plan so it gets an idea of where we’re going you know and then but what’s really the best part is the pictures maybe the stories but um so you know I think and we haven’t done this yet so this is going to be new for us for this year’s kind of number one

(08:52) encouraging everyone to try to document more um just just being verbal about it um but second I what I wrote down was you know it’s a lot of pressure to make one person that person so if we can say um hey you know everyone participate take pictures that would be good so but one thing I know we’re terrible have done is get the picture of like before you leave like the before picture yeah you know yeah and that can just it doesn’t have to be anything special a selfie you know right before you pull

(09:21) out boom take a picture and then if you flip that over and you get the wherever you guys are all going to be at everyone is going to be last because we have people like on one of our next trips you’re going to go a different direction at the end as others so that we should just get that picture then too so at least we kind of have the the book ends right yeah agreed and um along the way I mean you can go into your phone and take some notes but you could just have a little notebook too you know and just to

(09:48) write down a couple of things that happened throughout the day or something you saw or the weather or the road you were on um it’s just nice to have that written down and then maybe later when you’re done with the trip you can transfer into uh electronic storage you know one idea I had here too is maybe we should try to do that since we haven’t again done a great job of this but trying to think about how we can I think just having the podcast has helped us kind of re-envision how we take motorcycle trips and I was thinking like

(10:16) okay every day at dinner we’re generally done before we eat our evening meal and I’m thinking okay well that’s one thing we could talk about we could just take notes for the day at dinner time and say okay what did you remember about today you know what do you you know yeah and I think the only you miss then is the Antics that happen after dinner which you know you could always come back come back for um but yeah and those are easier to remember and then just to pick every day at the start of the day end of the day

(10:43) you know even if it’s just people getting junk off their bike or putting stuff on their bike in the morning I think those are good and then what I try to do too is every time we stop for gas or food at least take one picture and it does a couple things right so we’ll talk about in a minute the Google timeline but when you take those pi pictures you know the modern phones unless you’ve turned it off it saves GPS location where you took the picture and the time of day you took the picture and I cannot

(11:07) tell you how many times I’ve went back to those and looked and said oh well shoot it was March 12th of 2013 I would not have known that you know yeah and I think that is the other piece that’s helpful yeah to have that Tim stamp on the photos and I’ve done the same thing where I start looking through photos and luckily you can line them up by time and exactly yeah then you go oh that’s what we did that’s right and well it’s kind of cool too now the AI in some of these photos saving places Google photos

(11:33) Amazon photos they’re starting to get better about visualizing what’s in the picture too so you can say motorcycle and then it narrows it down gets me to the right time then I go back and hit just you know dial into that so tons and tons of people of course um are using a lot of action cams you know you see it all over YouTube they’re beautiful it’s great right and so two one so we talked about the GoPro 12 with the ca mesh Port red the insta 360 is a very popular camera now if if you’ve seen this one it

(12:00) almost looks like there’s a camera floating in front of or behind of the bike that’s the insta 360 and they have a little um so you usually Mount them on you mount them on a selfie stick and then the software will eliminate that selfie stick so that’s that’s how you get that cool picture so if you ever think how in the world are they doing this it’s a selfie stick but then they use the they kind of overlap the picture and get rid of it and which is pretty cool so that’s cool um and that’s video

(12:28) and like we talked about with these mega cards now and on the GoPro 12 that we’re going to be leveraging I bought a weatherproof battery door cover and then you can you can slip um a um power cord right through weatherproof and the GoPro 12 is already weatherproof so it’s the insta 360 so now you can record and not worry about the battery dying because that is a sin and the GoPro they’re just trying I mean they only have so much space you know and it takes so long so so one trick that I’ve used previously

(12:57) though to that is I’d mount a camera and then I just put it every 60 seconds take a picture or every 2 minutes take a picture and uh you know it’s not video but man if I go back through those there’s always great pictures in fact the current picture that we have on best motorcycle road.

(13:16) com was one that I took as a as a 60-second interval picture when you say you took it did you physically push the button or it just set on a it’s like time lapse but you can go into a photo mode and then you can say take a picture every and usually it’ll be like 1 second 5 5 Seconds 10 seconds 30 60 you know and I’ll set on 60 or 200 you know as much as I can not 15 minutes you know but you know somewhere in the one to 5 minute range and then you just end up with a lot of great pictures and usually what I would do is i’ change the battery at the next

(13:47) stop put a new a new card in if I thought it needed it you can usually get many thousand pictures you’ll run out of battery before you run out of card so and so now you don’t have to worry about um putting new battery in because you’re going to have it plugged in right the new one with the video I would highly recommend looking at these waterproof doors yeah um because oh my gosh what a difference I mean you’re talking you could be 90 minutes a video and that’s it on a on a GoPro like which is a lot

(14:15) when you think about it but then not a lot when you’re thinking about an 8 hour day right so yeah so the new one will be always running so I’ll have to stop it and then hopefully we’ll figure out the coms and it’ll be pretty good so so uh yeah just permanent Mount we have many pictures that don’t want to totally admit on but like many years I bought a Sony camera because it had a a door when you flip the door open it was a digital camera it would turn the camera on oh yeah and then the one I had was perfect

(14:43) cuz I could take a picture with my finger yeah and I knew it was just worked MH um so you know 2015 and earlier that’s what we used to document while we were riding pics and it just you know it was okay and I tried mounting a digital SLR on there and it was okay it was just always having problems with the zoom like it was autofocus it was not loving that way you’re driving down the road at all um and then one other just quick tip before I get go because this will happen every time clean your lens off at every stop

(15:16) because I have a thousand pictures that would have been amazing if it hadn’t had a bug in it so maybe I have to run those 3 AI so then this is something we’ve struggled with and I don’t know that we’ve completely found a solution if anybody says what they do that’d be great it’s just the long-term storage because what you and I have been trying to do now as we start this podcast is kind of put these stories back together you know and archive them in the trip mode instead of my Google photos your

(15:43) Amazon photos like it just is then they’re everywhere right so um so yeah looking for something if anyone has good tips for that um long-term photo storage and then when you add video just gets gargantuan right you know I mean we’re going to be talking about having we’ll have you know 3/4 of a 3004 megabytes or gigabytes of of video storage we come back so yeah and and you talked about the Google timeline it it’s been really nice to go back yeah I missed talking about that I’m glad you to go back and

(16:12) look at uh my Google timelines from you know eight years ago uh because it it’ll show you where you stopped for meals it’ll show you where you stayed at the hotels um and then you can of course see the route and all the roads and it’s the secret hack for me when you’re like I can’t believe you remember this I didn’t I just went back and looked at Google timeline yeah and it’s funny because um you know over the years you can tell when I switched phones and because it’ll tell you on there too so yeah the Google

(16:40) timeline is cool as long as you’re not paranoid about everybody tracking you if you you get over that part it’s great yeah it’s cool to see all the places you’ve been to so yeah so I guess I thought I’d talk a little bit about a couple things we talked about the standard bikes so I’ve taken two trips on standard bikes and both were fun Lake Michigan loop loop of Lake Michigan 2007 um 2001 Yamaha FZ1 most people look at that bike and they’ll say it’s a sport bike it’s definitely not sport bike is when your

(17:10) feet are behind you MH and this is not that it’s a standard but it was not a comfortable bike nor was I in the shape that I needed to be in to make that a comfortable trip um I went back and was and actually used the Google timeline to look at some pictures and full-faced helmet no modular cuz you know we weren’t into that then um and then the windshield it was about that big it was about 10 in wide 14 in tall um yeah so it was uh interesting and then that second day and and this is where we were documenting with our handheld cameras

(17:42) because I’ve got some cool pictures of this fog but we headed up in the up north on Highway 41 we probably got up at 7 or 8:00 in the morning and it was I was getting water no rain but it was fog you it was just you’re right next to that and it was just brutal which is also why I was just going to mention why I like gloves that have a little plastic um my friend used to call the wiper blade but it’s like a plastic rubber thing that you can kind of just scrape across works wonders um when you don’t

(18:13) have a full Goldwing windshield and you’re actually eating bugs and dirt and stuff but um but yeah so that was a great trip on a standard motorcycle um I just one of my most memorable parts of that is laying on a concrete sidewalk on the third day thinking we’re never going to make it back you know like saw oh God it was terrible but that’s also where the uh you know sometimes you got to move the mattress on the floor we went to Trevor City and there was four of us and we had the last I swear we had the

(18:46) last room in in chur City so there was one bedroom which the couple went in and then Brad and I um pulled that awful pull out couch mattress just on the floor and and we figured it out so yeah my second one though is one of my was still the longest trip I think I’ve ever take 78 Gold Wing that’s a standard bike um but my favorite part of that was the luggage because um as we talked about earlier there was no official luggage from Honda yet really soon after they did yeah but veter had it but that one had the

(19:22) Samsonite luggage on it so that’s the best man um yep I love that luggage did the luggage come off like could you carry it yeah yep yep you had they had like the barrel lock on the back and you could un it was just like a barrel lock it was a screw and you just unscrewed it and it popped off beautiful you could carry it right on in yeah beautiful don’t tell Colleen my wife this but I have a brand new set upstairs here that someday we’ll find another Gold Wing to to restore and put it on but but honestly like in all practical terms the

(19:55) standard bike is probably just the most adaptive you know reliable bikes there are and they’re they’re they’re usually the cheapest yeah um they’re just kind of No Nonsense and now with technology they’re they’re pretty decent bikes I mean they’re there’s good bikes a lot of people ride them um for long distances so yeah I’m I’m a I’m a big fan the podcast can be found on best motorcycleroads.

(20:21) com slmp podcast all the information you need will be there uh but you can subscribe on Spotify Amazon music apple pocketcast and YouTube this is the interactive segment we will be looking for input from you uh we want you to send us your questions and suggestions for roads topics and anything else you have on your mind before I talk about today’s uh roadside Q&A I need to give a shout out to Interceptor Moto um he he’s been enjoying the podcast and sent us a note on YouTube and uh he is looking forward to taking a right on tale of the dragon

(20:55) at some but uh hey thanks thanks Interceptor modo for uh for your comment and then uh we actually have a question from Phil and he’s asking how do you maintain comfort uh during the extended hours of riding on the road and boy there’s all kinds of tricks to that but um really getting your feet into different positions I I find that you know I’ll stretch my legs out sometimes and lay my legs over the top of my highway pegs other times I’ll move my feet behind me and hook them onto the passengers like floorboard W um just for

(21:31) me it’s moving my legs around a little bit or you know straightening up and and I do have a back rest on my bike so sometimes I’ll just kind of lean back but uh how about you I mean what what are you doing to maintain your comfort when I think legs I think my knees you know my knees are what get you know we’re older the knees are not as good as they used to be so for me it’s that um a lot of times too you know a lot of bikes you can buy the risers like bar risers for so I know for like the newer Gold

(21:58) Wing it’s 9 16 of an inch taller which seems like nothing nothing right and then 2 and 1 12 Ines back which doesn’t seem like much either but what I’ve always been told is to get those elbows below your or you know elbow is kind of in that same neighborhood as your handle uh your hand grips and that way you don’t get too you know you’re not get because you don’t want your shoulders up too high you know you want to get the elbows like below below your kind of grips and then your shoulders are more

(22:26) in a relaxed position Mak sense and that way you don’t get kind of cuz I’ve had my shoulders get bus like on the fc1 right I remember many times I’m laying up on the front bars with both hands like that you know windshields we’ve talked about that a little bit you know like breaking the wind you know if you if you don’t want to go riding if you haven’t been out riding for long and you don’t have much of a windshield your neck’s going to be in trouble because you’re fighting the wind with the helmet

(22:51) the whole time you know and if you’re used to it it’s fine you just get more strong neck muscles but yeah those are the two big things there and you said back rest to and you’re going to get that more in these two rine motorcycles but you know sometimes you can just put like many years we put one of the bags behind you yeah and use that for the back rest it’s just nice to get positions I think you mentioned it and then one more thing I’ll talk about and maybe we can highlight it in another

(23:16) podcast in future but staying hydrated does help too and I’m working on a rig to kind of get me some water I’m not sure I want the coffee cup the size of uh you know the small nation state on my handlebars like you guys do but but no I mean just keeping keeping that going I think is good stay hydrated now it’s time for The Last Mile it’s our way to close up the episode with our reflection so Todd what’ you think of this one what what what stuck out well uh just documentation why it’s good to

(23:47) document because I can’t remember crap anymore well that’s that’s just it I mean for some reason my memory just isn’t that good you know and uh there’s so many times you guys will say remember when we were on this road or that road remember when we did this remember and I’m always like you know we’re just making it up was I there you’re like timeline does not say that so it’s great to have these timelines it’s great to write it down as soon as you’re done and have the

(24:15) pictures uh that go along with the timeline and time stamps yeah um because there’s been so many great things we’ve done and and now that I go back through my Google timeline and really start to line everything up why wow I mean we’ve seen some some stuff you know it’s it’s been great so yeah I just highly recommend document document I couldn’t agree more and one of my favorite things you know and you see these coming up on your little the screen devices Here There and Everywhere but you’ll just see

(24:44) a picture come up and you’re like oh yeah like I totally forgot about that you know like oh my goodness there’s you know yeah the kids last night we were talking about tenderloins you know and so I brought up the picture of the megal loin you know like and it was just those are the things like you said I think when you start to forget about those things then going on the next trip doesn’t always maybe seem as fun until you start to realize like you just said like oh yeah we did that we did that we

(25:09) did that you know I know that one of my favorite burger places moonshine you know and when we were on a trip driving the I’m like we’re going to be close with my kids and they’re like can we go to Moonshine and like you know like so it’s just funny how it just kind of carries on so yeah I I couldn’t agree with the documentary and then the next next episode we’re going to talk about navigating as you’re riding at night not something you necessarily want to do but you know it happens sometimes so if this

(25:37) episode revved up your day don’t keep it to yourself like subscribe and share it with your crew we’re all about the thrill of the ride and the bond it creates keep the spirit of Adventure alive and remember bikes friends and endless roads the stories ride forever take care [Music]