5200 miles / 10 day early autumn novice tour

I just completed a 5200 mile (incl. detours) trip from Carmel Valley, CA to Iowa and back, to visit family in Iowa. 10 days of riding, with a break in the middle. I don't post here much, but feel a duty to report because of all the wonderful tips and advice I've found in this forum.

The bike is my first one: a 2013 NC700X manual, stock except for a Seat Concepts seat, outfitted with Givi top and 33L side cases. I started with about 5300 miles on it, and changed oil & filter just before starting.

The outbound route was from the Monterey Bay CA area, to Lake Tahoe, across the Loneliest Highway in NV, Salt Lake UT, Rocky Mountain National Park in CO, and across NE and IA. Concerned about potential for early snow in high elevations, I returned through KS, the OK and TX panhandles, NM, AZ (including a detour to the Grand Canyon), the Mojave Desert, and then back home along the Big Sur coastline. I avoided interstate highways except where there was no good alternative.

Timing was really fortunate: the weather was uniformly excellent, it was cold at high elevations but I only encountered rain in AZ, and the autumn color in the Colorado Rockies was spectacular. A wonderful experience. Only "trouble" I had was a rear tire (with 9500 miles on it) that wore down to cords in the Navajo Nation. No service I could find there, so I made a 160 mile round-trip detour to Flagstaff AZ for replacement. The bike made about 70 MPG; avoiding the high speeds of interstates helped the most I think.

Lessons for me, that most of you no doubt already know:

- The Verizon iPhone / Google Maps makes a lousy GPS. So many areas had no or inadequate data service. It was also my music, my camera, and my notebook and was really valuable to have, but crashes and data service problems made me often wish that I had a dedicated GPS. My paper AAA maps were comforting backups, but not of much practical use at critical intersections.

- The small windscreen doesn't cut it for touring, obviously. Main problem was BUGS in the Midwest which were smeared all over my visor within 10 minutes of cleaning. I need something short enough to see over but tall enough to deflect most bugs over the helmet.

- UV protection on the visor would be nice. Got my face sunburned too much.

- Prescription eyeglasses are a hassle. They have to come off with the helmet every time, I didn't have a good place to put them, and I ended up losing them on the last day. My focus was a little blurry, but the ride was actually better without them (they don't have a strong correction). Maybe Lasik surgery is in order...

- I have to do a better job of anticipating tire failure. I had 80 miles to go to find service when the cords appeared. A blowout would have been a hard lesson out there. Finding service might have been difficult if it had been a Sunday.

- 32 deg F is just too cold without better hand protection than my lightly insulated Alpine Stars gloves. I don't know if heated grips were really necessary, but I definitely needed something more.

Photos:


Bike ready for departure.

Near Lake Tahoe, CA.

NV side of Lake Tahoe.

Along Loneliest Highway (Route 50), NV.

Rocky Mountain National Park, CO, ~12,000 ft elevation.

Autumn color near Estes Park, CO.

Nebraska.

Kansas.

Navajo Nation, AZ.

Time to replace tire in Flagstaff, AZ.

Obligatory GC photo.

Highway 58 in CA west of Bakersfield; this is an awesome stretch of twisty highway with NOBODY around.

Big Sur on CA Route 1. This part of the ride is pretty hard to beat.

Wow !

Thanks for posting! Sounds awesome. Nice photos too.

How's your butt ?

/T

Wow! What a ride! Can't really call yourself a novice anymore... not after a ride like that!

the top box and saddle bags look really good on your bike. Nice choice.

GPS and cell phones.
Used TomTom devices come as cheap as $30 on Amazon. I carry two on that kind of trip in case one quits.
They are wired into the battery and never lose power. (you have to remember to disconnect them at night or they drain the battery).
In any case, they are self-contained and work as long as you can get a GPS signal.... anywhere... and they're cheap!

The pictures you posted are first class. Thanks for putting those up.

Thanks for taking us along via your post and pictures.

Awesome!!!

Nice,thanks for the pics, you should post more,don't be shy.

Very cool trip.
My husband had PRK (similar to Lasik) done at the beginning of the year, and he went from 20/400 to 20/15, and aside from being miserable the first few days, he loves it.

I, for one, think you should post more. Good post!
Did you camp any?
The cords on my rear tire surprised me in one day. I could imagine your surprise when you saw it out there in "nowhere"!

Beautiful set-up you have!

Nothing novice about this tour. Looks like a lot of fun to me!

Nice trip, lessons learned. Larger windshield , My Madstad does a good job keeping bugs off. I always have 3 different weights of gloves with me. A flip helmet solves the glasses problem. I try to anticipate tires but that stuff happens. Mine looked like that at 9000 miles I had 250 miles to home lucky for me first dealer I stopped at had a tire, 1/2 hour later I was back on road. Buy an electric jacket keep it packed all the time my Gerbings is over 13 years old and still going strong.

Feels pretty good to get off the bike for a bit, I can tell you. Every day in fact, after about 9 hours of riding. Earlier I had thought seriously about going for Iron Butt Saddlesore through Kansas / Oklahoma / Texas, but into the trip I decided it wasn't going to be fun enough. Too much nighttime riding too (days are getting short). 30 years ago, sure I would have done it!

Averaging over 500 miles a day for 10 days is an automatic skill level bump from "Novice"


Sidenote... We do the CVR-KC-25-Hollister loop frequently. If you're interested, I'll let you know next time we're headed that way. My wife is a fairly new rider as well.

Novice no more!