After forty years of riding motorcycles, it's only in the last few years that my bike has become a method of touring rather than a get-to-work vehicle. With the children off our hands and a more time and a little disposable income, I started touring about six or seven years ago, first with a 1979 BMW R100/7, but then in 2001 I bought possibly the World's best touring bike, the Honda ST1100 Pan European. I also acquired another cracker of a machine, a BMW R100GS Paris-Dakar, a dual purpose bike with a massive plastic petrol tank and therefore a long, long range, and supple long travel suspension do deal with uneven road surfaces. The Pan is the 'Gentleman's Express' which excells on motorways and dual-carriageways (freeways and divided highways) whilst the GS is yesterday's technology but favoured by Round-the-World riders for their simplicity and ruggedness. And it's the GS I plan to ride to Alaska.
2001 Amsterdam
2002 USA - West Coast to East Coast
2003 -
2004 Austria
2005 France/Spain/Pyrenees
2006 USA - From Sea to Shining Sea and Back
2007 Isle of Man
With 2007 being a quiet year, I'm planning on two destinations this year - Austria (again) and Morocco. But the next really big ride, and the biggest since the USA in 2006, will be during the summer of 2008 to Alaska and back across Canada. I got to think where I should travel next and whilst I'm clearly in love with the States, I also needed to try somewhere different....but not too different.
So the plans so far, and they are very sketchy, is to ship the bike from Southampton to Vancouver through the Panama Canal, then fly to Vancouver to collect it. Ride NW up Vancouver Island and catch the ferry at Port Hardy to Juneau or Haynes. Off load the bike then ride to Anchorage, the Denali National Park, Fairbanks and Prudoe Bay, the most northly town in Alaska and well inside the Arctic Circle. After an about turn, it'll be back to Fairbanks, Beaver Creek crossing back into Canada and the Yukon, Whitehorse, following the northern end of the Rockie Mountains to Edmonton, Banff and Calgary. Then head east to Toronto, Montreal and Quebec.
