Monday, October 12th, 2026

Yesterday the rains came in again, luckily I already have most of the outdoor tasks done before our Fall trip. I was able to work in the garage for a bit getting the new handrail up to the office area. This is something that I wanted to get done since I know it needs to be done before we can close out the building permit on the garage. Not too many tasks left on the garage. I moved our F-500 based travel truck and our little expedition trailer into the garage before the weather hit the other day. It was good to see everything fits no problem, and that it looks like it belongs in there. The garage was designed around fitting this big truck, so I knew it would fit, but seeing the truck in the space always makes it real. Unfortunately, that truck will be sitting for awhile while we travel by motorcycle. It is what it is, we will eventually get back to using this truck, it is a fun way to travel.

Somehow we have created more ways to travel, then we could possible use at any one time. It would be nice to figure out how to mount both motorcycles on the big truck and have them when we go some places. Maybe that is the next iteration of that truck when we get home from our Pan American trip. Who knows, I am sure that after a couple years on the road we will have a completely different, or at least a way more informed perspective of how we want to travel going forward.

It seems like preparing for our travels takes up a good chunk of time and mental energy while we are home. I think this upcoming trip is a bit more since there was so much work over the last few months to get the motorcycles ready. Really getting them ready for Pan America, but since this is our long shake out ride, I wanted the bikes set up like they would be for the long ride. So we could see if anything isn’t working as expected. Then there is the route planning. The Florida trip required a more detailed full plan given we have dates we need to be places. So working out which towns we are going to stop in, and what to see and experience along the way took some work. But, that research also got us excited about the trip. I am sure there will be days of just boring long stretches of road, I’m looking at you Texas. But, these are the types of experiences that we will need to get comfortable with.

We will also get to test out our travel planning system. It currently is a combination of Obsidian as a note repository, AI to help fill in details, and DMD’s GPS app to route the days. Who knows if this will all work for the longer trips, but it is nice to have some details in an offline note about town you are rolling into. Normally we would not do this much planning. Having the full route mapped out isn’t generally our style. But, we can’t use normal Google maps to estimate our travel time, since we will be staying off of highways and sticking to the back roads.