Working on collating my you-know-what, so the trip report will be kinda disjointed at the beginning. I’ll start with a little background...
First off, a lot of reading,a LOT of encouragement, and a lot of lessons learned from my last trip to this one. Now, it's not in the book, but I need a few minutes away from messing with that to do some data crunching, and writing here - and runninga few errands before the storm hit. Now that it has, some time to put in the effort.
The intent was to ride a SS at a BBG rate. As I had mentioned a while back in this thread, I'd only done a single SS before, andI really wanted to know what it would take to make a BBG happen. That, and with another 30,000 miles of riding on this bike since the last SS, it's as ready as it will every be.
I knew a few weeks ago that my wife wouldbe working a good part of the day yesterday, so what better way to spend the day. After careful review of the weather for the last three or four days, I knew the ride would be on.
The ride itself was quite uneventful.Temps for the first leg (Tucson -> Yuma) were in the 30's the entire way, as I knew, so the gear I had worked as expected. It warmed to a high of 70 as I made it back into Tucson. Shed the Gerbings for a few hours, andas I mentioned before, the temps dropped the further east I rode.
What a WeIrD feeling blowing by your home exits, knowing your goal is to ride
another 500 miles. The secondary thought in my route planning wasin the event the weather turned sour, a ride abort would be easy to do.
I spent a few hours researching the stop locations, even though several of them I was acquainted with from past experience.
So...in no particular order, the stuff I found that really helped in one form
- Route familiarity. Other than the stretch between Deming and Las Cruces, I’ve been on all of these roads (some of the stretches multiple times...) and am familiar withwhere the law likes to hide...
- gramps’ comment about recording the GPS mileage - boy, was THAT a time saver!
On a tangent - I knew that my bike - and every bike - has an error. The ‘Wing has an estimated 4% error with stock shoes. Being one of these that uses [redacted] shoes,I really didn’t know what the error was, so the first 100 miles I paid attention to the GPS reading...at the 100 mile mark on the GPS, the tripmeter showed 102.5 miles - easy math is the best math for me - 2.5% high. Atthat point, I knew to document the odometer from the bike and the GPS reading.
- I read this not long ago; boy did I like this tip - make sure the bike is on the left side of the pump. Makes it easy to access the pump, as well as the trunk. I had to fuel the bike one time on the right side; I know that took an extra couple of minutes; easy!
- The keyless entry to the fuel door is a given, but also not turning the bike OFF; use kill switch instead, so the clock/odometer is still active. As fuel is pumping, gettingthe trunk open to access the clipoard & bag with the receipts, pencil, etc. If your notes are good on your receipts, you should be able to complete your log after the ride is done (thanks Flyguy405 for that tip...). I used only my receipts to fill out the log, making sure times were what the stops were (that I recorded with Spotwalla...) accurate; they were also in agreement with the time that the bike clock had at the time I checkedthe receipt, and wrote the odometer/GPS readings on it, using the fuel pump as my clipboard.
- Don’t dawdle with squeezing every last drop of gas into the tank, unless you know you have a long ~200 mile gap to the next station (another Flyguy405 revelation...). Trustme, you really don’t give a whit about that extra tenth or tenth-and-a-half of gas in most cases. This *will* toss some post-ride MPG calculations for a loop - mine range from a low of 31.4 to a high of 38.2. I think Idid an overall average of 34 in my fuel estimates; 34.4 was what it was for the entire ride.
- End the ride? Don’t fill the tank. I put in $2(1 gallon) to get that last receipt to end the ride...filling would have taken another minute.
- The whole ‘pit stop’ sequence is one to work outin your head - and verify what it was you did good. The first two were without the benefit of a bio-break. First one 5 minutes; second one 6 minutes of stop time, which includes any dead-stop time. Three total bio-breaks for the entire ride.
- Most guys use a dedicated GPS for all of this; great idea, but I’ve already got a really expensive bit of technology, so I’m usingmy Android phone - it only did two things the entire trip - Spotwalla tracking and monitoring the time, using an app called SpeedViewer Pro. It doesn’t matter what tool you’re using but you need to be able to monitoryour progress. early on in my ride when my overall average was as fast as 71MPH, I knew that the pace that set that would be a pace that would be BBG-achievable - recall that 67.5MPH is the minimum mark, so ending the ridewith a 69MPH overall average - even with a 30 minute stop would be a BBG with a bit of time to spare. Toward the last two legs, I could begin to feel the pace catching up with me...but plotting it, I was just as fast as Iwas earlier in the day.
I’ve put a few images of the data, etc. here:
https://picasaweb.google.com/115618...authkey=Gv1sRgCL-p4LK7_oeRsgE&feat=directlink
No photos during the ride...left the camera at home.