Sunday, September 27th, 2026

We are a few weeks from heading out on our ten-week motorcycle tour of the American South. Not a small trip by any measure. The current mapped out route is over four thousand miles. The whole idea of this trip started with the feeling that we needed a shakedown ride. Something to work out most of the kinks on the bikes, and our setup before we leave for our much longer route in Mexico to the Pan American. This wouldn’t be our first longer ride. We also did a shorter ten day trip back in August through Colorado. This Colorado trip was good on several levels, but from a shakedown perspective, we learned a few things. First, that camping off the motorcycles isn’t really a thing that Valarie loves doing. Which was really good to find out before we left for our long trip. There is no point packing a ton of camping gear if you know you just won’t be camping.

The trip we are leaving on in a few weeks wasn’t our initial plan for a longer shakedown run. Initially we planned on doing a route into Baja Mexico for a couple of months. We have been to Baja a few times now, but never on motorcycles. Then a large group of Valarie’s cousins worked out a trip to St. Augustine Florida for Thanksgiving. It is a location that they all spent time since their grandparents lived there, and it has a special emotional place in their hearts. The idea of trying to get from Baja to Florida and back just seemed a bit too much. I did map it out, and it would have been a fun route, taking the ferry from La Paz to Mazatlán, then crossing central Mexico into Texas. It was just too much riding for the time we had. So the plan changed. The American South it was.

After getting over the fact that we were not going to spend a couple months eating fish tacos in Baja, I started to get excited about exploring the South. I haven’t ever spent much time through that part of the country. And as we looked at the map we realized that one of the benefits of riding small motorcycles, the silver lining if you will, of staying off highways is you get to explore smaller towns, that often have been forgotten since the interstate highway system allowed people to travel much faster but see much less. The way we plan to travel has little resemblance to how most people travel now with the goal to get to your destination as fast as possible. We are taking five weeks on the way to Florida and four on the way back. Stopping every few days, and not riding long days. The point is the adventure not the destination.

I am not sure what we will see, or who we will meet. But, taking the time to explore and let the plan play out as we are doing it seems like a much better way to travel.