May 2001
Detour Version 1.0
Part 1

Why a Motorsickle Roadtrip & Preparations

I had been feeling out of sorts for some time — long before the Y2K hair-on-fire nightly broadcast and cable news stories started in earnest.  It was an itchy-scratchy uncomfortable feeling about being in my own skin.  I was tired of waiting for something to happen, to take me away from this Beltway rat-race, and its crazies running around in clown shoes.

I was so desperate that I settled on a two wheeled escape plan — city to city, town to town, rock-n-roll runnin’ around and away from these no count, desperado thieves of the truth, beauty, and love in my life.  No more of their funny business shakin’ me down.  Needed the oh-so-sweetness that far western myths offered.

Yeah, I knew that the old world back home would keep on turnin’, but so what, I didn’t doubt it, I just needed to keep myself on the move and live a dream, and that’s all that I would ask for — my mind at rest.

First of all, let me answer the trip’s WHY question of motorsickling it.

·      Recent sudden deaths of young shipmates, surprising divorces of friends’ long-lived marriages
·      The road travel works of Jack Kerouac and CBS Sunday Morning host Charles Kuralt
·      Long kept and curated list of must-visit places and to-do things
·      Windshieldless skylarking at 80+ MPH
·      Never dissipated wanderlust from my formative 1960s days
·      Movie road trips like Animal House, Grapes of Wrath, Easy Rider
·      And being creatively played out after three plus years as a consultant to the point of postal worker syndrome for a $1.5 Billion Marine Corps program to automate and digitize their WW II era ground warfare fighting command and control systems spanning breadth from the Commandant inside the Pentagon all the way to the buck private in some distant foreign foxhole.

Thus, it was no surprise that my earlier shared idiot gauges read like this:

Select Marlow’s pre-Detour gauge readings

From hereon in, to my maximum personal physical extent possible, I promise that these musings will be as all good road trip motels promise in their throne-wrapper writings.  To assure you, my readers, that they are as advertised, please note my headers and footers.

Preparations

After some informal landline, voicejail, and email discussions, my Detour 1.0 mate Steve and I met for an hour seven nights before our departure to map out a route.  Using my old road atlas from the previous century, we laid out roughly where we had relatives, friends, college roommates, on top of the scenic places I had from my “must tour” list.

I’d been compiling this list for many years with the care of a small boy in New York City during the 1950s collecting his must-have’s — the Mantle, Mays and Hodges rookie baseball cards.  As time and travels came and went, I’d take out my list and begin deliberations whenever I read about a new place in the newspaper travel section, see something on the tube, or listen to a fellow voyager wistfully recount the memorable beauties of a place long ago visited but ever present in a special place in his heart.

Trading one destination for another was tough, so I instituted a baseball farm team system for those places which were not major league in quality for this opening day trip but with time (and additional trips) could move up to the “show.”

Temporal structure for this odyssey was imposed by both of our general managers instructions: celebrate Steve’s fiftieth birthday on May 10th in Monterey California and return to Northern Virginia no later than May 20th.  The internet was only consulted to calculate the rough daily distance between way points to see if what we were considering was sane from a numb butt syndrome standpoint.

Our exchanges to date had been on the necessities, such as packing lists, extra keys, etc.  Lessons learned from my prior long-haul trips, deferred maintenance, must-have equipment for such a journey like throttle-locks, quality (i.e. thick) leathers, boots, tire patch kits and so forth.

Key trip planning rules included mandatory side routes, interstate road system avoidance whenever possible, cheap hotels, no chain/fast food eateries, no shopping, no museums, no gift shops, no tourist traps, no TV other than the Weather Channel for daily route tweaks and occasional SportsCenter reports on the Orioles, no newspapers, no whining, maximum daily schedule/destination flexibility, Harley and Honda dealership oil changes at three thousand mile intervals, one weather/maintenance day each on the out to the West coast and back to Virginia trip segments.  Our initial rough outline was a 6500 miles, three-week skeletal route non-inclusive of side trips:

Northern Virginia    611 miles to
Louisville KY         547 miles to
Joplin MO               475 miles to
Amarillo TX            281 miles to
Santa Fe NM           152 miles to
Pagosa Springs CO 494 miles to
Tempe AZ                398 miles to
Santa Monica CA    342 miles to
Monterey CA           459 miles to
Reno NV                  319 miles to
Ely NV                     431miles to
Grand Junction CO  449 miles to
Lamar CO                490 miles to
Louisville KY           611 miles to
Northern Virginia

With side trips it looked to be ~ 8000 miles, give or take.

Easy peasy. Wink

Copyright © 2001 and 2023 From My Aisle Seat
www.vicsocotra.com