Episode 009 – Planning your 2024 motorcycle riding season – Best Motorcycle Roads Podcast – YouTube

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=veakeYJ7UC0

Transcript:

(00:00) in episode 9 we’ll let you know what kind of underwear do you wear during an eclipse hello and welcome to best motorcycle roads I’m Tom and I’m Todd and together we have over 65 years of combined motorcycling experience and 30 years of planning and riding motorcycle trips we’re here 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

(00:42) and other tips and everything in between from 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’s toolkit is kind of for that long

(01:14) road Comfort um when you’re putting some miles in the one thing that you and I both agreed you need is some sort of Highway Peg yeah um it it’s very different every bike to bike so like you definitely want to check into your specific bike do some Googling get on some research because it’s it’s the essential endgame is to have different leg positions usually two to three um from wherever your stock feet end up to where you can kind of relax a little bit M yeah um C icon is a f is probably one

(01:50) of the biggest ones I think of it um you know and there’s so many different variations and it depends on the type of bike and how you like to have your legs um out there there I mean I know there’s some for the gold wings that have you know when you push them then they fold down and then you can kind of have your feet they go kind of close to Road and then they’re sprung spring activated and so yeah I mean you have some out on your I yeah I have a Gold Wing and I I have Koken um and mine just fold down yep or

(02:20) you can fold them up uh I pretty much leave them down all the time but um I can either put my feet on them like you know hook my heels to them or I can just kind of lay my my legs over so my Cales yeah so my calves are almost like sitting on top of them and it certainly does make it nice to be able to stretch your knees out you know um yeah to get your just yeah get the knees stretched out for a while and that feels good I think the two things to be cautious or thinking about is the ability to like open them up and shut them like from the

(02:52) bike yeah because like mine have like what I would call like a switchblade style and they’ve got a little nub on them and I can hook them with my feet and then they open out but they’re also really narrow and thin and like I don’t think I could do I don’t think I could put my calf on them if I did I feel like I’d be like cut my leg kind of flat yeah and I think a lot of them have rubber which is nice grip um and then you know based on the type of bike we’re talking about Gold Wing right here but other bikes very

(03:20) different times I mean sometimes they’re just six inches in front of your other pegs which look ridiculous but they actually do the job like you said of getting those legs stretched out so and then I think you you’ve talked about it sometimes it happens in the early days of the rides usually you get those hip cramps oh my gosh almost every trip we go on like day one or two I get a hip cramp and it’s always like just after we get started and I just move wrong and all of a sudden I can just feel it

(03:50) cramping up and yeah I’ve got to get my leg stretched out it’s horrible I know we’ve talked about pre pre-trip like getting you know the the checklist for people to use we probably should add in there like stretching the week before do a little stretching yeah exactly um and then one thing that I always fail to do is really give your your Highway pigs a good good test beforehand oh yeah it just seems like you put more pressure on them um when you’re out there like I know that when I borrowed Brad’s Gold

(04:20) Wing when we got halfway back I think I had pushed one of his like had come loose a little bit and uh you don’t want that like yeah a lot of them connect to like the the engine protector the motor guard um and it’s just a clamp yeah so if you don’t get it real tight yeah you can kind of push them and I think they have crunch washers and different like yeah to make sure that everything’s kind of and they’re really hard to adjust like when you’re on the road it just doesn’t seem like you have the right

(04:49) tools always so just be something to think about there well and that’s a good point maybe before you leave look to see what types of tools are needed to adjust your yeah your foot pegs because you might have to you know along the way yeah and then it was I know I rotated his and it was kind of slipping away but um yeah so yeah so that’s the the tool tip for today is highway pegs just or or at least like sometimes on some of the different bikes I’ve had I’ve actually been able to put my feet on the

(05:14) passenger pegs yeah something different to just boy after a while you need it so yeah it takes the pressure off your tailbone sometimes it just shifts the pressure absolutely ridewise is the section we focus on planning and safety tips what I’d like to talk about really is is uh since we have a trip we’re going to start planning for um it’s kind of like that yearly uh planning how do we do it well we have a you know a pretty good group of friends that that rides together and we we always want to

(05:43) make sure that we pick some dates that everyone can do um and it it takes a while for people to look at their calendars and all that kind of stuff so I’ve what I’ve gotten in the habit of um I’ll I’ll go into a a program U it’s an online program called Survey Monkey and and I’ll just load up Survey Monkey with a whole list of dates you know starting from maybe June 1st and then running it all the way through the end of September and I’ll send that out and you just put your name each person puts

(06:14) their name on it this all done online yep and then you just go through and click all the dates and we like you to pick consecutive dates like right I was going to pick every other date yeah yeah if you pick every other date that means you have to you can’t go on a trip because every other day you’re busy um and with Survey Monkey at least once everybody has you know clicked all their dates it basically shows you which dates line up with everyone and that’s usually when we choose to go on our trip and

(06:41) then we design the trip and the stops all you know around because it’s hard to you know know every you can’t know everybody’s schedule um so like this we’re doing the eclipse ride that we’re planning now and then um yeah it just works out great cuz then we have a nice anytime during the season then people can get blocked their time blocked ahead of time which is good yeah that’s great the next segment is what we call the mile marker it’s our story segment it’s kind of the Open chat I think is what

(07:12) we’ve planned for the year kind of walking through you know we’ve gotten questions about well how do you plan trips or how do you this we want to go into that at some time in the future but this is really about like you know we kind of blocking out a year the 2024 season if you want to call it and so we know we want to do the eclipse ride which is coming up is early probably the earliest ride we’ve ever taken yeah we know we’ve talked about doing a partial well we talked about doing a full loop

(07:39) of the Great Lakes but when I re researched that I don’t know if I told you but it’s 2400 miles from like point a to come back to point a we average on the a about 400 miles is what we’ve kind of talked about yeah so that puts you at six days and that’s if you don’t do anything at all and it’s just I think we’ve done this before where we’ve we’ve tried to put a high num a high mile um number out there and just it it doesn’t it’s not as fun right like to not see some stuff so so I think what we’ll end

(08:13) up doing is doing like a partial like Lake ride I hadn’t quite figured that all out um and then some day rides I think uh this year too uh one of the goals you know tapping into the podcast is to just document more roads that are in the area so that we can kind of help other people from other areas when they want to come to this area to to do that so um yeah so maybe we could dig into at least a couple things like maybe the eclipse ride a little bit more about where we want to go but you know I wanted to answer the question you know

(08:46) yeah for sure what kind of underwear do you wear during the eclipse yeah what is it to it’s clearly fruit of the Moon that’s a bad dad joke so I mean I think our biggest thing is you guys were in carbon Dale last year it was good not last year I’m sorry 2017 the last Eclipse trip yeah solar eclipse we’re talking about complete solar eclipse right which now is happening in 2024 April 8th and you know we’re trying to figure out you know a little bit more about you guys enjoyed it so much and I know that

(09:23) Brad has like a video but it was in his like on his phone like he’s just holding it up and we want to try to do a little bit better job maybe um you know videoing it finding a place where maybe other people could meet and so that’s what we’ve been talking about a little bit I so we’ve got the Carbondale area you guys um went to that Bald Knob uh Cross of Peace last year now I know they’re having an event this year 2017 not last year oh you guys yeah sorry last trip last yeah yeah no but they’re

(09:53) also sounds like they’re having a big event that’s quite a place I mean that’s like the highest point I think yeah like a F feet above sea level yeah when you’re talking about southern Illinois Missouri Kentucky that’s that’s High I mean yeah um so and it’s it’s cleared off so there’s you know no trees in your so you can really and youy how long what was the story did you remember the story on them it’s been around a while well the they started having like um Easter Sunrise Services they like in the 30s

(10:24) 1936 and then in the 50s they maybe talked about um building this giant cross and then they started doing fundraisers and I I think they broke ground in the late 50s and completed it in the early 60s like 63 or something and yeah it’s like a 115 111 ft it’s it’s huge yeah yeah um so there’s I know there’s an event there yeah they’re doing a you know an event for the eclipse I mean just watching a viewing party and um you know people have telescopes and you all that kind of Stu stuff there and then I was looking

(11:01) at some there’s a bunch of small towns a little bit more south and west of there the one I was looking at was that Wolf Lake it looked like there’s a cool motorcycl is bar um called the duck in oh yeah the duck in that’s kind of that’s a good name but one of my goals for this trip and and we always have some goals is I’d like to just get like a video of motorcycles preferably ours and the eclips you know in the background um so that’s like one of the things I’m trying to figure out I guess

(11:32) a little bit but yeah we get one shot at it so we got to get it right get those cameras I don’t think I’m riding a motorcycle the next one yeah the well the I got it I got it um I know when we were there in 2017 and we you know just pulled out our phone cameras which you know the phone cameras are good but what a phone camera will do unless you set it right it’ll keep adjusting for light okay and even though it was like complete darkness for you 4 minutes or whatever uh the phones make it look like

(12:03) it’s still light never Chang yeah it didn’t really change so so we got to do a little research you could hear the Crickets and all the you know the the night creatures that come out you could hear them in the video but because the cameras keep adjusting to the light it made it look light you know and it just didn’t it didn’t capture it the way I wanted it to capture it so I’m hoping maybe we work on some manual mode maybe huh so it doesn’t do I I’m sure that there’s a way so so that’s one thing we

(12:30) talked about so lesson learned yeah so hopefully if anyone knows of anything in those areas that’ be good kind of open a suggestion we’ll be looking to the West right because the sun will be over the over the center because it’s it’s but by not much pretty pretty close to straight up one because it’s daylight savings time still and right so we’re in Central Time so yeah so it sounds like four minutes of eclipse and that’s a little bit longer than I think the last last time for I think so yeah another the

(13:02) trip that we just mentioned too is the you know the Great Lakes we’ve went around Lake Michigan independently we went around Lake Superior independently M but we kind of were talking about going around all all the Lakes but that was where we’re saying there a little little too many miles so yeah I think we need to cut it down so I think we’ll cut it down a little bit um I think I did a just a brief line where if we went I think up the Upper Peninsula and then around not the far to but then like um

(13:36) can’t remember which one that was but uh that was like 1,700 miles so I thought that was a little more um doable um yeah I haven’t looked at your Maps yet I yeah well what was cool cuz there’s some spots up in um Canada that uh that you could kind of dig down into the northern side of some of like like Eerie MH I think um and I think you’d be seeing hon but not going around it maybe okay and you rode in in Canada before right when we went around Superior yeah I didn’t I you didn’t on

(14:09) that yeah no it was you know I don’t want to do what we did with that trip was we grabbed the first Highway round and that’s what we did um we want to find some roads because we just rode down a two-lane Highway with really tall pine trees and looked looked out for moose oh cuz they said don’t hit a moose so I mean it was cool to be up up there Thunder Bay Area like that but we definitely I think want to do a little more digging you know like uh finding a little more roads so when I looked at it like I said P when you kind

(14:47) of get up there then you know there’s some peninsulas type things that you can come in and and drive around and find some Talent so that’s just early so that’s one and then we have some day rides planned we live near the Great River Road and there’s some some cool places up and around there that we want to kind of maybe document with some the videos the Great River Roads Mississippi River yep yep yeah I mean the it starts in B miji I think does is that where is that where the beginning of it is of the

(15:13) road or the river of the river sorry uh no I think it’s Redwing Minnesota somewhere around there I don’t know yeah it’s up there that’d be fun to see that um but in Iowa there’s I think it’s the official start of the Great River Road in Iowa is in that El Dorado Iowa that I was telling you about so so it would be good to um to dig around in there a little bit um both on the you know the Great River Road is kind of cool because it it runs Minnesota it also runs Iowa Wisconsin Illinois and then all the way down to

(15:45) Louisiana which would be we’ve talked about that road but I don’t think for this year but I don’t know how many do you know how many how many roads do you think we’re going to ride or how many trips we going to get to this year we might be able to sneak three in maybe three if we cuz we’re leaving so early yeah right we can head south uh you know in October yeah my July is really full ju I probably can’t off the hook maybe the very end of July but well you know we’ll have August September October maybe even

(16:15) a little June May May or June May or June that’s early well it’s early we go down and see the trees turn colors yeah South cool well hopefully by getting those block of times we’ll be able to figure out some good times that everyone can go the podcast can be found on best motorcycl roads.com 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

(16:49) questions and suggestions for roads topics and anything else you have on your mind so today’s roadside Q&A comes from Ronda and ronda’s as asking about uh motorcycle mapping route mapping software and you know Tom really you have more experience at it than I do I don’t know because you’ve mapped most of our our trip so um if you want to take that on WE we’ve talked about that a little bit before and this is one of the things I think we want to try to tackle at some point in the next in the future

(17:20) because you know you see this question come up a lot on the like Facebook forums and Reddit and things and so what we use just to be super clear is we pretty much just use Google Maps and it’s gotten easier over time it’s not really too hard to take a Google map convert it to a GPX which then goes into a Garmin which we did for a number of years and now you know we’re all kind of using devices that are Apple uh Apple carplay or Android auto so they either play on a screen or our phone and that’s

(17:51) what we’ve had great success using I mean we really like it you can kind of save and share the link to everyone it’s not perfect um you know and I think our big super tip was your first location you should always literally call it your location because Google Maps that’s their little trigger to say start where you are right now cuz I don’t know how many times we sat parking lot so many and be like I can’t get it to start we can’t get the map to start it it it shows me the the list of directions and usually what we

(18:20) had to do is we deleted the very first yeah we kind of like stumbled into it right yeah we would delete the very first Waypoint or stop and then it would say want to start where you’re at y there it works so I would say that’s our tip for today I know you and I’ve talked about I think it would be fun because man there’s a bunch of new ones just continue to come out and you don’t get time to use them so I think what you and I talked about doing is maybe even with this trip or at least repeat planning

(18:48) this trip with all the different apps maybe side by side so so look for that in the future because I’d really like to I I think there’s some with all the AI and all the like new things that are coming out all the time it seems like there’s a lot of good ones I know a lot of people use a base camp which is the Garmin one um and then there’s some other ones that are out there they’re really good Reaver is um that one’s more like yeah or is that just track you there’s relive and Reaver both of them

(19:13) track um and then there’s also um the Harley-Davidson one has a lot of cool um roads kind of identified and so does um not as many roads but destinational spots is motorcycle map that’s another good one but it’s a lot of like places to stop you know like like like single destinations than specific roads to take it’s here’s things to see on the way so that’ll be something fun to go through but for now Google Maps is really a friend I mean it’s pretty Universal and and what’s the trick to because I

(19:47) remember a few times you you would create a map and it would send to me and then my phone would take pick it up or however I looked at it and my phone would just make the new determination on how to get cor where it wasn’t really what you had mapped out correct so what do you do to fix that so what you do to fix that is you add those way points so like you can have like 10 or 12 I can’t remember the exact number of of like waypoints and so if you want to take a certain Road you know in Google Maps it

(20:14) allows you to drag it over and it looks like you have it but when you save it and then it recalculates it based on that moment in time because it’s checking traffic is checking um you know different things so you have to add you have to right click on the spot you want to set you add destination and then the super trick is it always adds it as the last one so then you got to drag it up above the because what I’ll generally do when I start it up I’ll put the start point and the end point and then I’ll

(20:41) start to try to figure out like how can we make this go on bit roads so then when you drag it over then right click say add this as a destination so then you’re adding that that way point over here and over here so then it’s much harder for your phone to then like redo the map yeah cuz you know does that make sense so if you can only save 10 Way points and you have a a day of you know yep you know making loops and things how how do you do that that’s not enough you have no so what you do is you have day

(21:11) one a day one b day 2 a b sometimes C gotta yeah so you have multiple links like so you could have 40 and what I generally do groups of 10 I see okay so generally you’re looking at that from that device then I’ll I’ll save it as a draft in my email and I’ll just have every day laid out each link for every day laid out in the email um and then then it’s easy to get to too that makes sense and then the one other trick while we’re talking about we’ve talked about this before but when you’re in Google

(21:41) maps you can actually if you’re looking at that page on your device there’s a way to download the background data for that because if you don’t have sales service you you won’t have Maps so you can download the files or the map files for the areas for the area that’s right you definitely want to do do that so now we’ve come to the last mile it’s kind of our way to close out each episode with our reflection so Todd go ahead well looking ahead to uh you know this trip you know later this summer uh around the

(22:12) Lakes um I I just know that whatever it is that’s going to be great we have a a great group of friends we’ve been riding together for years we always have a fabulous time um you know we kind of look out for each other we make each other laugh we enjoy each other’s company and along the way we’re always seeking adventures and experiences and you know talking with people and you know I’m just really looking forward to it you know it’s always so much fun and um you know a big part of it is just the

(22:40) people we have going along yeah you know I me too I’m looking we’ve talked so much about the eclipse ride like kind of more so than a lot of things so I’m looking forward to that looking forward to uh Canada or the Lakes ride too it’s fun because um for I I’ve always felt bad because one of our friends Chris is he’s by Chicago seems like we always have him he has to come and find us so I’m a little excited to go find him like go start with him at home because we’ve never done that so that’s fun I got some

(23:11) Canadian quarters out of the vending machine the other day so I figure if we do we I could spend them you know like in the native land um no that and then also we’ve kind of we’re going to talk about this in our next episode tips and tricks for documenting your trips but like I think we’re being a little more um you know with the podcast we’re trying a little harder to document video audio I’m really excited to try out the the video with the with our headset Communications some of the stuff is

(23:42) probably not safe for the podcast but it’ll be fun for us to have too yeah and then some of it is just cool I mean like we’ve got some pretty good ideas I’m looking forward to talking about stuff that only feels comfortable talking about on the trip you know so I don’t know we’ve talked about this before I know it’s one of our favorite Parts is just getting out there riding and chitty chatting so yeah so that for me I don’t know that was a lot that wasn’t one thing but uh yeah it was if this episode

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