July 1 Day 1

After a ton of planning, and anticipation, day 1 is finally here! The plan for today was to get on the road by 2:30 and head to Elkhart Indiana. A short trip, but this will get us far enough west, that we can get up early on Saturday and get through Chicago with little traffic. Sounds like a good plan, let's hope it works out that way.

A quick weather check before leaving home showed some pretty bad storms in the Elkhart/Chicago area. The radar image had those nasty red and yellow colors. However, it appeared to be heading in a southerly direction, and finally moved out of the area about 20 minutes prior to our arrival. How's that for some day 1 luck!

Since our route was a simple sprint across the Ohio and Indiana turnpikes, there are no interesting pictures to post for today. So, you'll just have to put up with a few glamour shots of our bike and trailer. Note: clicking on any of the photos will give you a larger version of the photo.

Here's a shot of what my view will be like for the next 23 days. We have a Garmin Zumo 665 GPS on the left handlebar. There is also a GPS built into the Goldwing, but the zumo is nice, because it also serves as an MP3 player, has XM radio, and can even display live Nexrad radar images to help us dodge those nasty storms. You can see our SPOT tracker on the right handlebar.

Here's a picture of our trailer, all loaded and ready to hitch up to the bike. The trailer is nice to have, otherwise we would end up having to do laundry during the trip, and who wants to spend vacation time on the road doing laundry!

Another shot of the loaded trailer. As you can see, the trailer allows us to bring along normal luggage. There is also a spare trailer tire stowed away in a floor cavity beneath the suitcases. We also carry a small assortment of tools, just in case we run into problems on the road.

Not much else to say about today... The next couple days will be pretty boring, as we slog across the highways toward Glacier National Park. Once we hit Glacier, the days will get much more interesting, and the photos will be less boring as well.

Well, it's getting late, and I need to get some sleep as we have a long day ahead of us tomorrow. So, I will leave you with some stats from today's ride...

We covered 272 miles from home to Elkhart, which took about 4:45 minutes, including a quick fuel stop on the turnpike. Below is a map of the route from today.