Neither my friend Mike nor I have actual tour­ing bikes. He’s got a 2007 Victory and I’ve got a 1994 Harley Sportster. Neither is ide­ally suited to long dis­tance trips. Not that that’s going to stop us! It does, how­ever, mean we’ve got to do even more plan­ning, start­ing with lug­gage, and a way to secure it.

In my last post, I said I’d talk about the motor­cy­cle I’ll be rid­ing for this 1,000+ week­long trip around Lake Michigan. Anyone who knows even a lit­tle about motor­cy­cles prob­a­bly imme­di­ately pic­tured one of two kinds of motor­cy­cles: a large tour­ing bike with a huge fair­ing, com­fort­able seat and lots of lug­gage; or, a nice rugged BMW or KTM style adven­ture bike, made to ride on and off road.

I wish!

I’m going on a week-long motor­cy­cle trip in June around Lake Michigan with friends and I’m going to doc­u­ment the prepa­ra­tions lead­ing up to the trip, as well as post daily entries from the road as the trip hap­pens! You can join me by fol­low­ing along.

On a nice day in May, we headed into Chicago to do some sight­see­ing. The idea was to spend lit­tle money and revisit old haunts and rekin­dle old mem­o­ries, not to visit the muse­ums. Instead, we would check out some of the places we used to go all the time or lived near and loved, and walk our old neighborhood.