![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.vicsocotra.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/01\/011723-LIT1-e1674067320921.jpg\")
<\/p>\nMay 2001
\nDetour Version 1.0
\nPart 1<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Why a Motorsickle Roadtrip & Preparations<\/p>\n
I had been feeling out of sorts for some time — long before the Y2K hair-on-fire nightly broadcast and cable news stories started in earnest.\u00a0\u00a0It was an itchy-scratchy uncomfortable feeling about being in my own skin.\u00a0\u00a0I was tired of waiting for something to happen, to take me away from this Beltway rat-race, and its crazies running around in clown shoes.<\/p>\n
I was so desperate that I settled on a two wheeled escape plan — city to city, town to town, rock-n-roll runnin’ around and away from these no count, desperado thieves of the truth, beauty, and love in my life.\u00a0\u00a0No more of their funny business shakin’ me down.\u00a0\u00a0Needed the oh-so-sweetness that far western myths offered.<\/p>\n
Yeah, I knew that the old world back home would keep on turnin’, but so what, I didn’t doubt it, I just needed to keep myself on the move and live a dream, and that’s all that I would ask for — my mind at rest.<\/p>\n
First of all, let me answer the trip\u2019s WHY question of motorsickling it.<\/p>\n
\u00b7\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Recent sudden deaths of young shipmates, surprising divorces of friends\u2019 long-lived marriages
\n\u00b7\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0The road travel works of Jack Kerouac and CBS Sunday Morning host Charles Kuralt
\n\u00b7\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Long kept and curated list of must-visit places and to-do things
\n\u00b7\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Windshieldless skylarking at 80+ MPH
\n\u00b7\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Never dissipated wanderlust from my formative 1960s days
\n\u00b7\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Movie road trips like\u00a0Animal House, Grapes of Wrath, Easy Rider
\n\u00b7\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0And being creatively played out after three plus years as a consultant to the point of\u00a0postal worker syndrome\u00a0for a $1.5 Billion Marine Corps program to automate and digitize their WW II era ground warfare fighting command and control systems spanning breadth from the Commandant inside the Pentagon all the way to the buck private in some distant foreign foxhole.<\/p>\n
Thus, it was no surprise that my earlier shared idiot gauges read like this:
\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.vicsocotra.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/01\/011723-LIT3-e1674067371694.jpg\")
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![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.vicsocotra.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/01\/011723-LIT2-e1674067356241.jpg\")
<\/p>\n
Select Marlow\u2019s pre-Detour gauge readings<\/p>\n
From hereon in, to my maximum personal physical extent possible, I promise that these musings will be as all good road trip motels promise in their throne-wrapper writings.\u00a0\u00a0To assure you, my readers, that they are as advertised, please note my headers and footers.<\/p>\n
Preparations<\/p>\n
After some informal landline, voicejail, and email discussions, my Detour 1.0 mate Steve and I met for an hour seven nights before our departure to map out a route.\u00a0\u00a0Using my old road atlas from the previous century, we laid out roughly where we had relatives, friends, college roommates, on top of the scenic places I had from my \u201cmust tour\u201d list.<\/p>\n
I\u2019d been compiling this list for many years with the care of a small boy in New York City during the 1950s collecting his must-have\u2019s — the Mantle, Mays and Hodges rookie baseball cards.\u00a0\u00a0As time and travels came and went, I\u2019d take out my list and begin deliberations whenever I read about a new place in the newspaper travel section, see something on the tube, or listen to a fellow voyager wistfully recount the memorable beauties of a place long ago visited but ever present in a special place in his heart.<\/p>\n
Trading one destination for another was tough, so I instituted a baseball farm team system for those places which were not major league in quality for this opening day trip but with time (and additional trips) could move up to the \u201cshow.\u201d<\/p>\n
Temporal structure for this odyssey was imposed by both of our general managers instructions: celebrate Steve\u2019s fiftieth birthday on May 10th\u00a0in Monterey California and return to Northern Virginia no later than May 20th.\u00a0\u00a0The internet was only consulted to calculate the rough daily distance between way points to see if what we were considering was sane from a\u00a0numb butt syndrome\u00a0standpoint.<\/p>\n
Our exchanges to date had been on the necessities, such as packing lists, extra keys, etc.\u00a0\u00a0Lessons learned from my prior long-haul trips, deferred maintenance, must-have equipment for such a journey like\u00a0throttle-locks,\u00a0quality (i.e. thick) leathers, boots, tire patch kits and so forth.<\/p>\n
Key trip planning rules included mandatory side routes, interstate road system avoidance whenever possible, cheap hotels, no chain\/fast food eateries, no shopping, no museums, no gift shops, no tourist traps, no TV other than the Weather Channel for daily route tweaks and occasional SportsCenter reports on the Orioles, no newspapers, no whining, maximum daily schedule\/destination flexibility, Harley and Honda dealership oil changes at three thousand mile intervals, one weather\/maintenance day each on the out to the West coast and back to Virginia trip segments.\u00a0\u00a0Our initial rough outline was a 6500 miles, three-week skeletal route non-inclusive of side trips:<\/p>\n
Northern Virginia\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0611 miles to
\nLouisville KY\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0547 miles to
\nJoplin MO\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0475 miles to
\nAmarillo TX\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0281 miles to
\nSanta Fe NM\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0152 miles to
\nPagosa Springs CO 494 miles to
\nTempe AZ\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0398 miles to
\nSanta Monica CA\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0342 miles to
\nMonterey CA\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0459 miles to
\nReno NV\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0319 miles to
\nEly NV\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0431miles to
\nGrand Junction CO\u00a0\u00a0449 miles to
\nLamar CO\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0490 miles to
\nLouisville KY\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0611 miles to
\nNorthern Virginia<\/p>\n
With side trips it looked to be ~ 8000 miles, give or take.<\/p>\n
Easy peasy. Wink<\/p>\n
Copyright \u00a9 2001 and 2023 From My Aisle Seat
\nwww.vicsocotra.com<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
May 2001 Detour Version 1.0 Part 1 Why a Motorsickle Roadtrip & Preparations I had been feeling out of sorts for some time — long before the Y2K hair-on-fire nightly broadcast and cable news stories started in earnest.\u00a0\u00a0It was an itchy-scratchy uncomfortable feeling about being in my own skin.\u00a0\u00a0I was tired of waiting for something […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-25268","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-island-times"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vicsocotra.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25268","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vicsocotra.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vicsocotra.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vicsocotra.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vicsocotra.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=25268"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.vicsocotra.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25268\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":25269,"href":"https:\/\/www.vicsocotra.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25268\/revisions\/25269"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vicsocotra.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25268"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vicsocotra.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=25268"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vicsocotra.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=25268"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}