Passes & Canyons Blog

This was a good trip a few years ago. I shot photos of where I was every 100 miles and this was the last 100-mile stop on the trip. Burned a lot of dinosaurs.

“My goal is to see how many gallons of dead dinosaurs I can send through my bike.”

I used that for a “Biker Quote for Today” several years ago and you know, it really rings true. I pride myself on putting as few miles as possible on my car each year, but then I turn around and pride myself equally on how many miles I can put on my bikes.

Let’s keep this in perspective, of course. For my friend Dan, who is an Iron Butt guy, hitting only 30,000 miles in a year is an off year. For me, a really, really good year is in excess of 10,000. I’m probably looking at something between 6,000 and 7,000 this year. And when you consider that I’ll probably only put about 6,000 miles on my car this year, that’s not bad. As far as I’m concerned, any year where I put more miles on my bikes than on my car is a good year.

So the end of the year is not far off now and as always I’m identifying some goals that I may not achieve but that I want to at least shoot for. Some are fairly arbitrary: get each bike up to the next 1,000 on the odometer by year’s end. This year, however, that’s going to take some doing. The Honda right now is in the 100s, while both the Kawi and Suzuki are in the 200s. That’s a good bit of riding when you’re not going on any trips soon.

Now, I am going to be taking the Honda up to Boulder on Saturday, and that will be about 100 miles altogether. But most of the simple riding around that I do is a lot shorter: go to the dentist–18 miles; go to the bank–3 miles; go to the wine story–19 miles; run to the grocery store–4 miles. Those kinds of trips don’t add up very quickly. When I just go out for a cruise on a nice day those rides generally run between 25 and 75 miles. It will take a lot of those to get to the next thousand on any of the bikes.

And then there’s riding to work. Yeah, I know I said I had ridden to work for the last time but maybe that’s not the case. The National Park Service has asked me to come back on an emergency, 60-day basis. The emergency is that they have a little more than 400 of these foundation documents to get completed and the deadline is past the 75 percent point but the work is only around the 65 percent point. “Can you help us catch up?”

So I said yes, and I’ll try to get in as many days riding to work as I can. It’s a 35-mile round trip. But this also means these are days when I can’t just go out for a cruise.

Whatever. It’s no big deal if I don’t turn over the next thousand on any of the bikes. The point is to ride as much as possible. I just want to maximize dinosaurs.

Biker Quote for Today

Reason takes a holiday as Dr. Horrible spends money he doesn’t have, on a motorcycle he doesn’t need, in a misguided attempt to recapture his youth which, upon reflection, wasn’t all that great in the first place.

Tags: motorcycle mileage

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 15th, 2015 at 4:15 pm and is filed under motorcycle touring. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.