2012 California Trip

Where are Tom and Lennie Now? - Click here for our current location !

Lennie and I have finalized our plans for a trip out west. Our goal is to visit Nevada and California. We will be spending 24 days on the road, and will travel through 13 different states. We plan to leave home on Friday, August 17th, and return on Sunday, September 9th. Our current route plan covers roughly 6500 miles.

Here are the states we plan to visit during this trip (13 states):

Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, Illinois, Iowa, Nebraska, Colorado, Utah, Arizona, Nevada, California, Kansas, and Missouri.

As I have mentioned in previous posts, one of our biking goals is to visit all of the lower 48 states. This is our fourth summer of riding toward accomplishing that goal. Upon completion of this trip, we will have succeeded at traveling in all 48 of the lower 48 states on our Goldwing! Our map will finally be complete !!!!!

As with previous trips, we plan to use our personal satellite rescue and tracking beacon. It is called a Spot Tracker. The Spot unit contains a GPS receiver, and a built in transmitter, which sends location signals to low earth orbit satellites. This means it can be used anywhere in the world, and does not depend on cell phone coverage! It also has an SOS feature, which when activated, will cause the monitoring company to send out a full blown search and rescue effort. If they see that you are on the water (like in a sinking boat), they will send out the Coast Guard, if you are in mountainous terrain (perhaps climbing or hiking), they will send out rescue helicopters, or if you simply drive your Goldwing over the side of a cliff/mountain, they will send out ground rescue teams. Hopefully, we will never have to use that feature! We will always have an active page that shows our current tracking data from the Spot unit. You can find it by looking at the "Current Location" page in the sidebar at the left.

In addition to the Spot tracker, I have added the ability to leave comments. Please feel free to add comments/questions as we make our way through the trip. You can get to the comments page by using the links at the top of our daily pages, or by choosing the "Trip Comments" page from the sidebar on the left.