December, 2021
Over the summer and into the fall, I’d written a very detailed description of the planning my wife and I did for our 2021 summer trip. After a couple more months of deep thought about what I had written, my editor (me) said ‘This is way too complex of a story to tell.’
So, here’s the simple version of the introduction for the ride.
NPT Table Of Contents
Introduction
Back in May, when my wife said she really wanted to visit her family in the east, after looking at those prices, I was really working out what a plan B and a plan C might look like.
Okay, let’s be real. Add it all up, and the cost of being on the road for a couple of weeks probably exceeds the cost of airfare and that rental car. Back to that reality - we have a couple of touring vehicles. One has two wheels, one has four. There’s only so many opportunities we’ll have to make these types of trips, especially on two wheels, right? That takes me back to one of the best movie lines ever - "Get busy living, or get busy dying." by Andy Dufresne in The Shawshank Redemption from 1994.
One afternoon, my wife and I were both evaluating routes on how we’d get to our eventual destination - Nassau County, New York.
That small motorcycling organization we are a part of (Iron Butt Association) literally has dozens of different rides to choose from - https://www.ironbutt.com/themerides/index.html
All are based on safe long distance endurance riding.
One of the more unique rides is a ride that can take up to a year to complete. Here’s what we’ll be attempting:
https://www.ironbutt.com/themerides/npt/index.html
Simple, right? I think it will be. The 50+ site limit is easy; it’s the 25 or more states that’ll be the challenge.
By my count, we could pass through at least 15 different states on the way there and back. Now, certain states will be reserved and are not part of that count. States such as Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, California, Utah...those can be collected later. This does NOT have to be a trip where you do it all at once - we have one year to get or exceed these totals.
Plan
Between mid-May and our departure in mid-June, a lot of time was spent in coming up with interesting places to go, things to see and learn about. Plotting them on a map looks like this:
We have a calendar with some penciled-in notes, and we have dates that we need to be in Nassau County, NY. We also have departure and arrival dates available.
Execute
It turned into more of a planning challenge than I had thought, trying to come up with some logic behind the plans. I’m not planning for one person’s enjoyment, I’m planning for two. Sometimes my peers don’t think about that person on the pillion seat and what they are experiencing while on the road.
Eventually a listing is distilled - latitude, longitude, state and the name of the park service location (called a ‘Unit’). All of the chosen locations have a visitor center (VC) where the stamp is located. Obviously, it's rather important to be there at the location while they're open. A few, rather remote locations, will keep the stamp in a known location, but you could access it at any time. I'm not sure if we will have those kinds of opportunities.
Then, figuring out just how long a visit to a location should last. That topic, along with the genesis of the ride we'll be doing, is documented at the following link:
https://www.ironbutt.org/higdon/thequest.htm
I readily admit, I don't write as well as Higdon does - on my best days. He's a trained professional, I am not.
The bike is ready and packed. Due to a last-minute change, we’ll depart earlier than expected.
It’s June. It’s hot. We want to get moving. Time to head out.
The story continues. Click the link: NPT West to East Pt.1
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