Tuesday, June 15, 2010 — Today we woke up around 6 am and real­ized we were still in Muskegon. Argh! We show­ered and I repacked my gear so it fit bet­ter, but for­got one essen­tial thing that came back to bite me later in the day. I’d brought a garbage bag to pro­tect my cloth­ing, since the pack I bought was listed as “rain resis­tant” and not “rain proof.” There’s a big dif­fer­ence between the two, as I found out later.

Monday, June 14, 2010 — Mike, Tim and Dean arrived at my house around 10:30. We gassed up the bikes, handed out the radios for bike to bike com­mu­ni­ca­tions and got the show in the road. We decided on rid­ing as much of the old Lincoln Highway as pos­si­ble to avoid the Interstates and toll­ways. So we headed out on Route 31 and skipped over to Route 30 after Aurora, stay­ing on 30 into Indiana.

My trip around Lake Michigan by motor­cy­cle starts tomor­row! I’ve spent the week­end pack­ing and re-packing, try­ing to get every­thing down to just the essen­tials. It’s a lot harder than one would think.

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!