Coming Up Soon: New Zealand Rides The Rockies
All right, this is going to be great. A couple times now I’ve mentioned Steve from New Zealand who is coming here in 2009 with a few friends to do some motorcycle riding. Steve found www.motorcyclecolorado.com and found it helpful in his planning and sent me a few questions. At my urging he has sent me his rough first draft of an itinerary and what I’m going to do over the next few weeks is show their proposed route, any alternatives I might suggest, and discuss the places they will be going. I’ll also give daily mileage and estimated time. It is my hope that this will be helpful to other bikers planning their Colorado trips.
I’ve been trying to write this blog on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, and I figure to devote one post to each day of their trip. Steve and crew are planning 10 days of riding, with 2 of those days in Utah. I probably won’t have as much to contribute on the Utah days so I may combine those two into one post.
The first thing that struck us when my wife and I pulled out the map and started looking at their proposed routes was how a couple of those days seemed a bit overly ambitious. Not so much in terms of miles but in terms of the time they would take. Covering 300 miles in one day is easy on the flatlands but when you’re negotiating switchbacks and getting stuck behind campers and semis you can find 300 to be almost impossible. I mentioned this to Steve and he made some changes to their plans, but I’ll discuss this along the way, whenever appropriate.
By the way, one other thing that is somewhat off-topic: I have had an ongoing battle on this blog with spammers and had to turn comments off for awhile. I would really be pleased if any of you out there reading this has any input into these day routes. All of us know more than any one of us. But if the spam gets too bad again — and it has already started — I may have no choice but to turn comments off again. If that happens, please email me your comments at ken at motorcyclecolorado.com and I’ll post them myself. In the meantime, I’m working with my web host to set up a javascript that requires you to prove you’re a human before posting. I tried doing that before, but the script would not work with the way the host had their server set up. They tell me it should work now. Keep your fingers crossed.
Tags: Colorado roads, motorcycle
