July 12, 2025

After months of planning, the moment of departure has finally arrived. I’m standing in the safe cocoon of my garage—having pulled on full protective gear (boots, pants, jacket, gloves, ear plugs, helmet).

All travel gear is securely stowed in closed panniers: tent, 2 sleeping pads and bags, my MSR Whisperlite stove and cookpots, a french press for coffee, 4 changes of underwear, pair of pants, shorts, 4 shirts, and countless other little bits required to live on the road for 3 weeks.

It’s been months in the planning stage and now there’s nothing to do but open the garage door and ride.

You imagine this moment many times leading up to the day, and in your optimism you think of it being peaceful, joyful, your spirits soaring. But this morning the main sensation is being strung-out, wondering what critical thing I’ve forgotten and wishing I’d had 3 more hours of sleep.

Never before in my life has a trip been so anticipated. Never before has there been such a frenzy of last-minute activity. Let me explain:

• In the past year, we’ve moved houses and have yet to sell our original home. After living in the same location for 18 years, the relocation and downsizing itself was brutal. But the improvements and yard maintenance in two places has made things worse.

• The weekend before departure I was scrambling to do extended service on the bike (more details are available here). The first time I’ve ever really torn into all the “Tupperware” body work of my Yamaha FJR. This kind of service work is normally relaxing and enjoyable for me, and the second time through it will be just that. But I’m under time pressure and not sure how all that body work comes off to get access to things.

• A goal I have for this trip is to start blogging about the journey. A key part of this involves a “bread-crumb” feature where my location can be tracked and displayed on the site. This means setting up two open-source environments on my Ubuntu virtual server: OwnTracks and Hugo web authoring. It also involves testing the Android GPSLogger interface that drops those breadcrumbs as I’m traveling.

I’m writing this up after the trip and am pleased to say that:

1. I didn’t forget something critical that morning.
2. My service work on the bike allowed me to travel without injury or other breakdown. The bike performed flawlessly.
3. The tracking tools worked just like I hoped.

But many things were improvised because of this frenzy. There was virtually no route planning completed before the journey. There was no real thinking about sights or destinations beforehand. The first day of travel in particular was pretty brutal.

Well—that’s probably enough of a lead-in to this whole story. But perhaps it’ll give you context. If you make your way through this wordy journal, I hope you’ll see the tone of things evolve from frenzy to that joy we all hope for in such trips. Truly this was a wonderful experience for me.

So—let’s get this thing started!

This is Highway 53 headed north, pretty sky beckons and nice to know at least for the first half of the day the sun will be at my back.

The rest area near Nickajack lake means you’ve navigated through one of the more dangerous stretches—Chattanooga, TN. Not sure why but truckers and others speed up around the turns, block in traffic and raise blood pressure for everyone. A few hours later, the whole northbound I-24 would be shut down due to a shooting on the freeway. All traffic routed between two exits on an interstate. Probably an hour lost here.

That baseball park bench was site of a much needed 20-minute nap.

It is brutally hot, temperatures in mid 90s for much of the day and humid. When you are at speed, it helps. But with full riding gear on—you inevitably get soaked in sweat. There was no way I was going to make Topeka, KS as originally hoped. I ended up finding a neat spot in Daniel Boone WMA. First time putting together a new tent.

Maybe you can see them in the photo below. It took me more than a day to realize how many ticks there are in this part of US.

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Sorry for the brief writing this day—truthfully it was just a long slog of roads I’ve traveled before. The necessary evil to get to better things.

Map