Rides in North America

Iron Butt Rally 2019

Preparation (or lack thereof)

They say the third time’s ‘a charm’ and that was what we’d hoped for this time. Before both our previous IBRs (2013 and 2017) Kevin had been in and out of hospital which meant we were totally unprepared. This one was supposed to be different. Unfortunately he’d been ill again – …

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Iron Butt Rally 2017

T-1

It’s early Sunday afternoon and we’re waiting for the Riders’ Meeting at 14.30. This year we don’t have to attend the Rookies’ meeting as we are already Iron Butt Rally finishers. 

The last couple of days have been rather relaxed. Friday was spent mostly catching up with old friends and sleeping. We  had to …

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It’s been a while…

Just over two and a half years in fact, and some of you may have wondered where we went.
It’s been an, er, ‘interesting’ couple of years.

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And Finally…

On Saturday we all went out for breakfast then relaxed while waiting for some of Paul and Mary’s friends to arrive for a barbecue. At 17:00 we said our goodbyes, headed for the airport and arrived home late on Sunday afternoon. We’ve been back a fortnight and I’ve been reflecting on our amazing adventure. 10 …

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Last Leg

We breakfasted at the wonderfully-named Bogies cafĂ© where the owner was delightful, he was quite a character. Apparently one of the guys from Santana used to be a regular, so much so that people forgot he was a celebrity and he became ‘just another customer’.

Don and Kim then took us on a tour of …

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New Bezels Please!

Our first stop of the day was Rancho Cordova near Sacramento to visit Clearwater Lights. We have two sets of their brilliant lights (pun intended) on the bike – one set each of Glenda and Krista. There was a cosmetic issue with the Glenda bezels which had faded in the sunlight (apparently a few had …

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The Lost Coast

Rick Mayer lives in a delightfully-named place called Happy Valley. Unfortunately there had been a bit of a wild-fire in Happy Valley the night before so it probably wasn’t so happy this morning. Luckily though it wasn’t anywhere near Rick’s place which was well off the beaten track. When we arrived we could hear a …

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Oregon to Northern California

After an early’ish breakfast with Tom and Emily we said our goodbyes and headed in opposite directions. Today we were planning to visit Crater Lake and the Oregon National Cave Monument. The omnipresent mist accompanied us until we headed inland.

I have always associated lumberjacks with Canada but Oregon also has a huge …

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Mount St Helens to Coos Bay

Our first visit today was to the infamous Mount St Helens, another volcano in the Pacific Ring of Fire, which erupted in 1980 making catastrophic changes to the environment around the area.

Our original plan was to take a slow wander via the interesting National Forest roads but someone from a BMW forum said he’d …

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Back to the US

We discussed heading into Alaska to turn our potential Silver National Parks Tour into a Gold which would have added about 3500 miles to our journey. Eventually we decided against it as it would have meant long days every day for the rest of our trip and we were quite enjoying our relaxed pace.

Vancouver …

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