If you’re thinking about planning a cross country motorcycle trip or really any sort of trip, you might not even know where to start. There a few obvious components to travel:

• Where to go
• How to get there
• What to bring
• Where to stay

With each of these components, I tend to jot down notes on something to start. I carry around a steno pad and pencil and go to town as things come to mind. I also jot things down in google keep, which is probably a better idea since those notes cant get lost and you’ll likely always have your phone with you.

I also like to write stuff down on a whiteboard. I have a few of them in the house and make myself To Do or To Get lists. Again, keep is probably a better idea.

Once these methods became unsustainable, I created myself a spreadsheet that works as an itinerary as well. It tracks where I’ll be, how I’ll get there and where I’m staying. I’ve yet to formalize a packing list, though I think I have everything I need at this point.

Here’s a little bit on some of the tools and methods I’ve been using in order to stay organized with regard to these 4 components.

Where to Go

You probably already know all of the places you want to travel, and if you don’t figuring that out isn’t the hardest thing in the world. Keeping track of all of your ideas, must see places and stops along the way is another story.

There are a few cool resources I came across over the last few weeks in planning this adventure that have been helping quite a bit.

Google Route Planner

This might seem like more of a “how do I get there” tool but really it helped me a lot more in learning where to go. Traveling on the motorcycle limits the distance that can be covered in a single day by quite a bit in comparison to a car. In addition, I’m planning on avoiding interstate highways at all cost and taking the most scenic routes possible. This, with the fact that my ass needs stretching about every 60 miles or so, my range is limited. I tried to stay around ~200 miles per day, give or take. Some of my stops are a lot shorter in between and some quite a bit longer. Those longer stops will probably require traveling all day.

Using google route planner made it a bit easier to judge where I needed or should stop based on my 200 mile guideline. Especially neat is the “measure distance” feature (which you can also do on regular google maps too) to get a feel on how far one place is from another. Click the ruler button to start. On google maps, right click anywhere to select “measure distance.”

Why not just use google maps? There’s a limitation on gmaps that allows a maximum of 10 stops. In route planner, a similar limitation exists for a single stretch of directions, but you can layer multiple sets of directions. If you notice on my map in the post below, the sequence of A-J appears more than once, each representing a new directions layer in the route planner.

Here’s a good tutorial that I used to get the hang of route planner.

Once you have your destinations and driving directions set up, you can drag the route to the roads you actually want to use instead of the default fastest route that includes boring highway. Unfortunately there’s no way to “Avoid Highways” and “Avoid Tolls” like you can in regular google maps, and dragging everything around is kind of a pain, but once you get it down its nice to see an overall map of your entire route and especially fun to show friends and family.

Road Trippers

I came across this site after googling who knows what, but was delightfully surprised at all it had to offer. The idea is, you plug in your route and it shows you all sorts of cool things to stop and see/do/eat/whatever along the way. I plan on using it to scope out cool things along my route.

https://roadtrippers.com

How to Get There

I was invited along to a camping trip this last weekend to Newaygo state park in Michigan. Aside from being a great time in general, it was really nice to have a decently long overnight test in preparation for the big trip. Some things I learned:

1. Turn by turn directions on the phone with a handle bar holster is really nice but not sustainable
2. It’s bad to rely solely on digital forms of maps
3. Plan on the trip taking a lot longer than expected

I bought this handle bar mounted phone holster on Amazon thinking I would use it to get to where I needed to go. It was awesome at first, especially navigating through Indiana right next to the lake. Then I had 5% battery left even before I hit St. Joseph. Luckily I packed a solar panel charger too, this one to be exact, but it wasn’t sunny enough (or maybe the charger just sucks, not sure yet) to charge my phone very quickly or hold a charge very long. So every 30-40 miles or so I would have to stop, power the phone on, check the map, try and memorize the next few pieces of instructions and be on my way. The phone would soon die out and there would be just enough juice for me to power it after the next 40 miles.

The new plan is to print instructions based on my proposed route and have a physical copy of them as well. I’ve yet to do so, but I’m thinking of getting a little tank mounted plastic pouch so directions are readily in sight. I’ll also try and grab a map when I can for each state, just to have it tucked away in my backpack.

When I planned my route to Newaygo the night before, google maps suggested about 5.5 hours. Perfect, I thought, should get there around 3-4pm, have tons of time to wind down and relax before it gets dark. It was actually more like 7-8pm when I showed up. With stopping so much to gas up, stretch, figure out my next few turns and along with the time zone change (which I totally forgot about, don’t forget about that…) it wound up taking closer to 7 hours, plus the hour I lost crossing into Eastern time.

 

What to Bring

I’ve mentioned a few things here and there so far, but this category warrants an entirely separate post, maybe two. Stay tuned…

Where to Stay

This entirely depends on your budget, what you’re looking to get out of a trip, how much you like the outdoors and people, etc… I mentioned in my first post that Green Bay will include the first time I’ve used couch surfing. I’m quite excited to try it out but I’m sure its not for everyone. I’ll plan on a detailed couch surfing post and some notes on my other accommodations soon as well.