Blue's Big Trip

Welcome to Blue’s Big Trip: it’s a blog set up for my trip across the USA in the summer of 2012.

I was intending to take my 2002 Kawasaki ZRX1200R from the UK by airfreight to Anchorage, Alaska and then from there ride down via Seattle – where I have family – to Los Angeles and then via Las Vegas and New Orleans over to New York, from where I’d airfreight the bike back to my home in London.

Along the way, I hoped to take in a bit of sightseeing like the Grand Canyon and some bike-specific ones like Deal’s Gap in South Carolina.

Well that’s the original plan anyway!

By the summer of 2012, I had reached the grand old age of 50 and London was likely to be a hellish place to be with the London 2012 Olympics taking place. I’ve always wanted to do a big trip and so then will be as good a time as ever, I reckon.

I took 2 weeks to do this trip having done 900 miles in a day in 1981 on a Triumph T140V Bonneville, a few more trips every year like that to the Bol d’Or at the Circuit Paul Ricard in the late 80s and early 90s on a Yamaha FZR1000, and more recently 1,000 in less than 24 hours on the ZRX1200R and my Honda Fireblade.

The costs and administration hassles of taking the ZRX have kiboshed that idea, so after planning to fly to Chicago and go to Sturgis via Milwaukee, that plan also died a horrible death, so I booked a trip by Harley from Chicago to LA along Route 66 instead…