A couple of thoughts

I posted these snippets in separate posts on ST.N earlier, and just thought, hey, that’d make a good blog entry. Plus, since I already wrote it all, I don’t even have to think! Score!

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Quote (Stargzrgrl @ July 04, 2004 – 10:58 pm)

So, how did your new jacket work out for you?

Really really really well.  Kept me warm in the hail, dry in the pouring rain, and more-or-less comfortable (read: not utterly miserable) at 100F in central CA on the return trip.

Unexpected bonsues:  after arriving home, I wanted to wash the bugs off.  The armor was really easy to remove from the jacket, the liner and shell were both machine-washable, both air-dried overnight, and the armor was even really easy to reinsert.  And all the bugs came off!

It’s a FirstGear Kilimanjaro, btw — I’d buy another again in a heartbeat. *thumbs up*

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I’m working on a “So You Want to Ride to Alaska” sort of thing for my site (things I didn’t need to pack but did, things I should have packed, things that surprised me about the trip, etc), because, seriously, it’s far more accessible than you’d think.

Out of the entire trip, there was only one small bit of construction (~1 mile long) where I wished for a dual-sport: the golfball-sized gravel was larger than my tire treads and made the SVS really squirrelly.  Other than that, any street bike could have made the trip, provided that you don’t mind short sections of pea gravel, hard/packed mud, and lots of dust.  

[EDIT: this is for the Alaska Highway; we didn’t take any of the non-paved highways, like the Dalton Highway to Prudhoe Bay or the Taylor Highway to Chicken and Eagle.  That said, our new friends Cindy and Nom rode the Dalton on their bikes: a KTM and a Triumph Bonneville.  Cindy put tires with larger treads on her Triumph and she said they didn’t have any problems at all.]

The turnouts and driveways (for restaurants, hotels, gas stations, you name it) were all in far worse shape than the roads: they were all gravel, albeit pea gravel and easy to ride on once you get used to it.

The longest stretch without gas was from Haines Junction to Haines: 150 miles.  Fuel up in HJ, because there ain’t nothin’ on the Haines Highway.  That was the only time on the trip that my fuel reserve light came on.  

Hotels and campsites are abundant.  We never had a problem finding a place to stay.  

The weather was utterly surprising: once we got past the rain/hail in southern British Columbia, it became the approximate temperature of the surface of the sun.  It was 90F in Fairbanks when we were there, and the Yukon had record-breaking heat during the week we went through.  Ha ha.

OK, that’s off the top of my head.