If you've been riding long enough, you may have hit a lull in your riding where it feels like you just do the same ride over and over and over again. In this episode, we'll discuss ways you can shake up your ride and keep it interesting. Welcome to the Throttle and Roast Podcast. I'm your host, Niels Meersschaert. If you listened to our episode on Leisure versus Transportation riding know that, many riders in the U.S. only ride for leisure. And if those leisure rides start to always feel like the same ride, what can you do to shake it up? Well, we're going to cover a few of those in this episode. let me start off with maybe some of the aspects of day rides that one could do. one of the things to kind of tie directly into that leisure versus transportation is maybe try to shake up your ride by add riding during the workweek. Many of us only ride on weekends or holidays. So a weekday ride can feel very different than those other times. Now you may be used to starting your ride a little bit later in the day. So this gives you a chance to try and see what an earlier ride by using your bike to get to your 9 to 5 feels like. Plus, you're going to get so many more days on your bike and maybe even more miles each This is actually how I started my riding career many years ago, commuting into New York City every day on my motorcycle and the beauty of it is that I had just as much freedom as anyone who was in a car. But also many of that sort of traffic situation I was able to get by because motorcycles can kind of get through most anything. So it was a little bit easier for that. Not to mention some of the advantages in terms of gas. I was a big fan of it. Do you have an adventure bike? And maybe it's the cliche you only ride it to a Starbucks or it's only been seen on pavement. Maybe find some dirt roads in your area, get the tires a little dirty, and see what that's like. You know, you might be pleasantly surprised. And even just a dirt road doesn't have to be some, you know, heavy duty trail or anything that's really too complicated or too technical. But just a well graded dirt road can start to feel a little different and might make you feel that you've had a different experience than your day to day. Now, of course, not everyone's on an adventure bike, but what you could also start to think of is what if you're only riding on highways all the time? And we see this sometimes with some cruiser riders as they love to get out on the open road, they're on the highway and just straight line. And that's fine. That's a great way to get from point A to point B as quickly as possible. But sometimes getting on to the backroads can actually be a really wonderful thing. You're going to see very scenic scenes. It's going to be a nice twisty road that you have to actually control the bike through. That might be a nice change of pace for you if you've only been doing highways and you know, if we're sort of honest about it, a bike leaned over can be a lot of fun. Now, another day ride that I found is really, really good to do is have a meal as your goal. So maybe you're trying to ride to a particular restaurant that you'd like to try out. Oftentimes for a lot of people, we tend to do very short rides and it might be just maybe even a place that we eat at that's very close to where we live or where we're starting from and maybe go for something that's a little further away, look for something that's an hour or two, 3 hours away. So maybe you leave at 9 a.m. and you get to your lunch spot around noon and now you've been able to experience a different area. You're still going to have a meal into there, and this can be a lot of fun. I like to do the stuff where I look for an area that I'm not typically ridden to before and look for one that maybe has some fun roads.This is where I actually really like to use something like Rever. Rever has this wonderful capability called the Incredible Roads, and you can actually see them visually on the map as you're as you're figuring out where you're going to go. So I just look for where there's a cluster of some of those incredible roads. And then I look for a cool restaurant that's in that area, and that's where I'm going to point to head into and look for a fun road. this is going to be a great ride. I like doing these lunch rides because you leave earlier in the morning, you get there for lunch and then after lunch, now you can start to come back and maybe do a different route. coming back. It can just make for a much more of an interesting experience that you can do. because I'm not in a hurry, I'm just getting to a lunch spot and hey, if I get there at noon and I get there at one, like it's not a I have to be there at a specific minute. It gives a lot of flexibility. And so I don't mind if I pull over to the side of the road, take a few pictures, enjoy the scenery. It's not the rushed feeling that might get from when you're you're on the highway and just going. So it can be a really fun thing. Now, another kind of a ride that can be interesting is one of you have a site that you want to go visit and maybe it's a particular area that you found interesting. I actually did this recently with one of my club rides. We went up to northern Connecticut to a it was an old prison it was originally a mine for copper. this is actually the oldest copper mine in the United States. And it's called the new gate or the old new gate prison and copper mine. what was cool is we just picked that is where we were going to go. And then we we got there, we did a little bit of a tour. We went into the mines and got to see it, and then we got back on the road and head back home. But it was something where you got to see something a little different and, you know, we just figured, okay, well, we'll just grab lunch somewhere nearby. So we just randomly picked a restaurant that was close to it just before we had lunch, and then we went to the tour. Now, another way that you can do this, which probably doesn't work as well with the digital maps, but if you have an old school paper map, I've actually done this in the past where I just, you know, lay out sort of a circle and I start spinning my finger and then just wherever it lands, that's where I'm going to go. So it's a little bit of a random factor to it, but you'd be surprised of how you say, Oh, that's a new place that I'm going to go and try out another way, and this is there are some tools, certain GPS this will really help with this is maybe you have no destination, maybe you're just going for a ride. And this is actually one of my favorite types of rides. You know, maybe I just have a couple hours that I have available to ride. And so I'm just going to say, you know what? Let me find a good route on this. So, you know, I have a couple of GPSs that I use and both of them support this capability. So one is the Garmin Zumo XT and you can actually set up to do a round trip. So you can start from where you are at home and say, okay, I want to go 2 hours round trip and maybe it's going to head mostly in a northerly direction and it will plot a route for you and you can set it up on the fun twisty roads and it will give you 2 hours to or thereabouts to get back and it'll do something that's different than what you normally have done. Now, the Beeline Moto, if you have the Beeline Plus subscription also has a similar capability. It's not quite exactly the same in terms of time, but you can set it in terms of a distance and then it'll give you the estimate of time. if you have restrictions on time. Like I'll I've got a couple hours before I've got to get back for a family event and now I can go for that ride and it can be something different than what I normally have done. So another great, great way to kind of change up your ride for a day ride. Another one that you could change. And these tend toward being day rides as well, But things like poker runs or photo scavenger hunts, fall foliage rides, or charity events like the Distinguished Gentleman's Ride. These are a couple of different options that you can do. Have an organized ride where you can go and find them, So some of them will be you have to get to certain spots, but it's up to you to lead your way there. Others will be more of a guided ride like the distinguished gentleman ride where you're kind of following behind all the other bikes. But each of them can give something that's a little bit of a different experience than your normal day to day and keep it a bit more interesting. So that's day rides and a few varieties of what you can do there. I think another one that we could look at is what if you just start thinking about a weekend ride? what? If you have this touring bike with the panniers, but you've never taken it on an overnight trip. Well, fill them up with a change of clothes and give it a chance. See what it's like to take your motorcycle and actually go travel with it. I think we talked about in an earlier episode where almost half of all riders in the United States ride less than a thousand miles a year. Well, if you're not doing a lot of overnight trips, that's probably why. So weekend trips are a great way to do it. Maybe it's a place that you've always wanted to visit, but it was maybe too far for a day ride. Or we just feel like, you know, you're just basically slabbing to get there and then slabbing to get back home. So make it an overnight. You can get there. You can spend a little bit more time, relax, see about the area and then come back. if you're new to this, I might encourage you to sort of start maybe with a hotel. And this is probably the easiest way for people who are new overnight motorcyclists to get started. So just look for a hotel or a motel that's near your destination, book a room. And then you just need to throw a change of clothes, some toiletries, maybe a few chargers for your phone, GPS, whatever Throw those into your panniers and then you're good to go. Now, while hotels are, pretty much everyone has done them on some trip or whatnot, so people are familiar with the concept of them. The costs are going to not be insignificant. You know, you might find a really, really cheap motel for $60 $70, but they're not all that common. You're usually spending between with taxes and everything well over $100 a night. But you do have some of the creature comforts. You're getting, a comfy bed. You've got a full bathroom, maybe even air conditioning, maybe even an option for room service. So even the smallest bike can do something like a weekend hotel trip. I've gone on trips with my sport bike and fit everything I needed just in a Kriega, R25 backpack for a hotel trip for a weekend. So it's easily doable by anybody on any bike with minimal, minimal pannier or bags needed. But there's another that actually I think is is more in the spirit of riding a motorcycle. And this is Moto Camping. camping and motorcycles have had a long history together. You know, if you if you look at some pictures from from way back when, you'll see that iconic bedroll strapped to the back of a bike. Some bikes have these luxury tents that can hold a queen size bed and even put your motorcycle into there like a garage, like the Redverz Atacama The reason why I like camping with them is in a motorcycle. You're out on the road and you're exposed to everything that nature has to throw at you. So camping to me feels the most in sync with this. It's actually my preferred way to travel on a motorcycle. there is some expense to getting camping gear if you don't already have it. And you might have some choices in terms of thinking about, well, what camping gear is good for a motorcycle trip versus a hiking trip or a car camping trip, and there's going to be some variation into there. So when I'm hiking and I'm going camping, I want to keep my pack size fairly small and lightweight so that it's not going to wear me down. Now, the motorcycle, yeah, if it's a 10 pound tent or a 30 pound tent, motorcycle is not necessarily going to care that dramatically. But pack size still can be quite important. So you might want to look at some options there in terms of of what sort of gear you would do. I actually really like Moto Camp Nerd there there a fellow motorcyclist there actually have a whole website that's geared around this premise of saying, Hey, how do we find the best camping gear for motorcyclists? Given the smaller space Now when you think of as compared to hotels, the cost to actually camp is dramatically cheaper than that of a hotel, as I mentioned earlier. Most hotels, you're usually with taxes and everything. You're over $100 per night, but most campsites are usually less than $20 a night. And if you go into ones, you know, most of those will often have like showers or even a store where you can pick up some some supplies. Now, simpler campsites that you might find at a state park will lose some of those amenities, but they're oftentimes even cheaper, maybe ten, $15 a night. wild camping is even cheaper at free. So your cost per night in terms of the actual camping is dramatically, dramatically cheaper. Now, before my kids were born, I was leading multiple overnight trips for my local riding club each year, and I averaged 20 to 30 nights camping per year on the motorcycle. I wouldn't have been able to do that if I was in hotels because the cost would have just been too difficult to sort of manage at 20, 20, 30 nights a year at over $100 per thing, plus gas, all that stuff. It would be very, very expensive. But camping, if I'm spending ten bucks a night, if I do a weekend trip, it's my entire cost of the weekend is minimal. Now, I actually just participated in the Ramapo 500 a few weeks ago, and this is a wonderful event put on by the Ramapo Motorcycle Club based in Rockland County, New York. They've been around since 1938 and seem to know every single wonderful motorcycle rode around and they stitch many of them together for a 500 mile weekend of riding with camping in the middle. And if you'd like to know the details, way in advance. This might not work for you because the route and even the destination for where they're going to have camping aren't shared with you until you check in on Saturday morning. But the roads they choose are outstanding. And this year, the first day was about 300 miles and our destination ended up being in the Finger Lakes region. So our route on day one was from our start in Congers, New York, into New Jersey, then into Pennsylvania, and then back into New York. So really, really great way to kind of have a fun road and a fun ride that gave me that camping opportunity. And I think the fee for the whole event was like $65. And that included the camping and included dinner that night and included, breakfast the next morning. So and of course, then putting together this amazing route As I said, I really like motor camp gear and what they're doing. I think they're a great resource, so I would look at them. So that's weekend rides. the more days that you add on to your trip, the more relaxed you can be in terms of exploration. You're not having to feel that. You're just always just running on the road and just hour after hour after hour on the bike. So sometimes a long weekend is a great way to do this. So you can figure out what's a destination that you like to visit and you can have a travel day there, a travel day back, and then a day or two in the middle for riding around in that area. And this is a much more relaxed way to do it. So I used to run these these trips that I mentioned before with the camping trips, and we had one that I called the Pining for Pennsylvania trip. And what we would do is we'd ride out to roughly central Pennsylvania and Camp in the middle there, and that became our home base. And then we'd have, you know, we could do a bunch of rides from there, and I'd set up all these cool day rides that we could do. And it just became a fun, fun experience. Now, another ride that I used to do, which I did a little tongue in cheek with some of the the acronyms on it. So I had originally started as the going scenic route as in GS. BMW. GS. And this was a effectively an adventure ride. And we followed along the Trans Mass Trail. We followed along the puppy dog route up into Vermont. And of course, I had a bunch of dirt roads that were in Connecticut that led us up. So the idea was leaving from New York City, going all the way up to the Canadian border. We stay the final night at Jay Peak, and over four days we basically traveled all the way up there and then came all the way back. And I added in a second one, which was called a scenic route, and this was for road based bikes. And I did one year I took my S1000R thus SR and brought that lead along while we were also running the going scenic trip contemporaneously. And I made it such that I lt I laid out the courses so that we would actually meet for lunch in the middle and then we would meet for camping each night. And I did the timing such that the street route was a little bit longer, so we would actually come together. So again, just a fun way to add in long weekend trip that you can actually then get some some of your friends together and shake up your ride, do something a little differently. The next sort of group is a little bit harder for most people, which is if you're going to do a weeklong trip or even more, and probably the one that most people will sort of think about when they see this is to look at the the 2004 motorcycle documentary TV series called Long Way Round. And this featured Charley Boorman, Ewan McGregor, and they circumnavigated the globe aboard their R11500GS adventure motorcycles. Now, I had the previous generation, the R1100GS, I had a 1998 model and then the R1150 that was featured in the film came out the year later. And then the adventure model with a larger tank was used in the Long Way Round. And they did 19,000 miles covered between London and New York City, many of them not on paved roads. And as with true adventure and in many ways helped to popularize the adventure motorcycling segment. Now, they took three and a half months to travel around the world, and they also had a full support crew. So many of us are probably not going to do that. But it does give maybe some ideas that you could think of as are there sections of that that might be of interest that you might be able to pull together? And the duo returned three years later for the 2007 series Long Way Down and they traveled from northern Scotland to South Africa over three months. It took them a little while to come out with the third film that they did, which was Long Way Up and this was in 2020. And here they took the Harley-Davidson Livewire, the electric motorcycle, and they traveled from Ushuaia at the southern tip of Argentina all the way up to Los Angeles. And what was challenging for that trip was finding where they could charge the motorcycle. So, again, they had a full support crew. So not the same thing as us doing it as an individual, One that's a little bit more recent that I could really recommend for people to look at for inspiration and more in the vein of how each of us probably are going to travel is actually this wonderful woman from the Netherlands and her YouTube channel is called Itchy Boots, and she's been sharing her adventures of exploring the world on a solo trip and her channel on YouTube. Definitely worth checking out. These are probably a more realistic aspiration for many motorcyclists because she did them completely solo without any support crew. Now she found a bike that was, you know, fairly small size. I think she used a CRF, a Honda, CRF300L, very lightweight bike, not a lot of power to it, but she didn't necessarily need all that power. It was about just trying to get to where she needed to go. But a fascinating, fascinating video series that she has on there. So I'd really encourage you to do it Now for one that you could do that's maybe a little closer to home. Again, if you're an adventure rider, would be some of the backcountry discovery routes, those adventure rides that we just talked about or, you know, many months on to the extremes. But the backcountry discovery routes are something where it's a little bit of a smaller scope. You know, you could do them in, you know, 5 to 7 days typically for most of them. And they do have some ones that are even smaller. Last year with the BMW MOA, Rally down in Virginia. And since I'm on the East Coast, I took, you know, my GSA all the way down to the Rally anyway. And since I was already halfway down, I was like, okay, I'll just pop all the way down to camped in northern Tennessee, and then cross back over the border into Virginia to begin the return trip on the backcountry discovery route. And this was the mid-Atlantic backcountry discovery route that I did. So I did this whole solo, all camping every single night. I did did stay in a couple of hotels just for fun, one of which was where they they filmed Dirty Dancing at that resort. But my whole trip from going down to the MOA Rally, staying there for a couple of nights and then going down was about ten days and about 2500 miles.And so completely something that is reasonable for people to be actually able to do. But if you're on a cruiser, there's a lot of other options there as well. So you owe it to yourself. I think if you're on a cruiser to at least try one of these three events. So the first one I'll mention is probably the most well known is Sturgis. And this is in South Dakota. And this attracts nearly half a million motorcyclists each year and runs for ten days. Now, the Black Hills surrounding the venue have some amazing, amazing riding. So if you actually like to ride, it could be a great option. And this rally was started by an Indian motorcycle club in 1938. But of course, it's very popular amongst Harley Davidson riders today. But other brands are represented as well. Now, not everyone rides to Sturgis. Many people will trailer their bikes or have them shipped to fit the event into a typical two week vacation. But it is definitely an option that you could consider now being South Dakota that's closer towards the West Coast, so maybe not as accessible for everybody who's maybe in the East Coast or the Southeast. So another one you could think about would be Daytona Beach. Daytona Beach in Florida also has similar numbers of attendees as Sturgis and a ten day duration. And it's a good fit for the riders that I mentioned are on this side of the country as opposed to the Western side. So if you don't want to spend a whole lot of time shipping a bike or riding all the way across country, this might be a better fit for you. Now, Daytona originally started as a race in 1937, but the event has continued to grow over the years. It usually runs in March, but they now it's gotten so popular that they actually run a second event in October called Biketoberfest. The last one I'll mention is Americade now. This one's actually in the Northeast. And every June, roughly 50,000 motorcyclists head to Lake George, New York, for the rally. Now, unlike Sturgis and Daytona, the focus of Americade is more on touring riders. So the vast majority of the people going to Americade ride there and then do a bunch of rides in the area. So it's it's a little bit of a different feeling. It's not quite as big an event as Sturgis or Daytona is. So I think it's it's definitely one that you could do and think about. So we've covered a lot of different things in this episode. We've talked about, you know, some of the day rides that you might be able to do that would be a little different than what your your typical riding is. Even a weekend ride, some of the longer trips that you might do, maybe some inspiration, look at some of the films from long way round, etc.. Itchy Boots, BDR, some of the events that are there, I think these are just some great, great options But I'd love to hear from you. So is there something you've found that you really like to do that's a little bit of a different type of ride? Do you prefer riding on just as a day ride? I Do you prefer weekend rides? Do you prefer longer rides? What? What is your favorite? especially when it comes to sort of an overnight stay, do you prefer hotel or do you prefer camping and why? I'd love to hear back from you, so please send a text to the show through the link in the show notes and we'll share some of your feedback in a future episode. So thank you so much for listening to this episode of Throttle and Roast. And if you love listening to this podcast, please leave a review in Apple Podcasts, Podchaser or your favorite podcast listening app. Thanks so much.