The Motorcycling Blog

A little more than five years ago, I penned a stream-of-conscious piece about what I thought I needed to change about how I went about touring. While my plans for the 2020 riding season obviously got upended by the pandemic, I’ve spent the last five years trying – with mixed results – to implement the concepts I put forward in that article. 

I’ve followed my own advice to a degree by better accounting for stopping time in trip planning. But issues I have encountered on several tours in 2023 and 2024 have shown me I need to slow my pace even more if I want to truly enjoy touring the way I used to.

Perhaps the haphazard way I ended up having to plan my 2020 touring season with all the COVID-related travel restrictions diminished my impetus to implement my ideas on slowing down. But starting with the 2021 touring season – when some semblance of the old normal was returning – I was still using my old tour planning habits. My longest tour that year was to see my Marino Communications clients race at Barber Motorsports Park in Birmingham, Ala. Though I was used to having a 2.5-hour shorter ride from home to Barber after moving from Columbus, Ohio, to Cleveland, Ohio, earlier in the year, I still decided to plan one day of riding each way. I didn’t plan any stops along the way, but still forced myself to race the sun both riding days of 11-plus hours in the saddle. 

I did a little better in 2022, as my only real tour was to visit the now-closed National Motorcycle Museum in Anamosa, Iowa. I planned plenty of time for my visit and didn’t feel rushed while I was there. I squeezed in a Johnny Cash stop in Baraboo, Wis., on that tour, but made it to my hotel with time to spare before sunset.

I was back to my old ways in 2023 though, particularly with my long-overdue Out West Adventure. Some issues with touring pace were beyond my control, as the unexpectedly cold temperatures delayed my departure for almost every day of the second half of the trip. But not accounting for the reduced sunlight hours in early October and still not planning enough time to see what I’d planned to stop at made the nine-day trip feel more like a marathon than an adventure. Though I’d started planning to be on the road no more than 10 hours each day – and subtract stopping time from that time block – I found I still wasn’t planning enough time to really enjoy the things I was stopping to see.

After the Out West Adventure debacle, I made a more concerted effort to ease my touring pace more in 2024 – with so-so results. One of the better choices I made was splitting up the first leg of my annual ride to Allentown, Pa. Instead of leaving work early and having to push like hell to get to my hotel in Allentown, I left work not as early and just rode to Somerset, Pa. that day. I finished up the ride to Allentown the next morning and got to take my time and enjoy riding the Pennsylvania Turnpike sweepers. 

Another success with slowing my pace was another trip back to Barber Motorsports Park. Due to the museum’s hours of operation and the short days at the beginning of October, I did have one day where I was racing the sun. But, I did cut one stop from the trip down and picked a destination for the first night that allowed me to get to get close to the destination a little after dusk. 

However, I did try to pack a little too much into my Denver Run, as I mis-planned my museum stops (I flip-flopped a couple museum’s hours and days of operation) and had to squeeze one in on the ride back to Cleveland. I also made an unplanned extended stop during my New England Johnny Cash Run that caused me to cut my time at the summit of Mount Washington short and get to my hotel after dusk.

The Denver Run was my last big tour of the year, and it was the last straw for me. I realized that I was doing better, but was still putting too much emphasis on quantity over quality. When I was planning the Denver Run, I had already cut out several stops I wanted to make to ensure I wasn’t overdoing it. Yet, I kept on returning to the, “see as much as you can while you’re out there” logic, and it yet again didn’t serve me very well.

Some of the Denver Run planning had an even more fundamental flaw – that someone who is museum-trained can ever have enough time to fully enjoy a museum that makes its own mistake in emphasizing quantity over quality in its exhibit design. But even if I’d used a different mental approach to each of those museum visits, I still don’t think I planned enough time to fully enjoy them.

So, for 2025, I’m going to focus on dialing it back even more. I have just one big trip planned for this year – a Johnny Cash Run to North Dakota and back – as well as a weekend tour to The Back of the Dragon and several small sport touring rallies. But I’ve already removed one museum stop from the North Dakota tour and reworked its schedule to make sure I have plenty of time to visit the Mall of America for my Minnesota stop.