The trip is over and these are my memories.
On the road to Seward.
"Transportation is only a secondary function. A motorcycle is a joy machine. It's a machine of wonders, a metal bird, a motorized prosthetic. It's light and dark and shiny and dirty and warm and cold lapping over each other; it's a conduit of grace, it's a catalyst for bonding the gritty and the holy." - From "Season of the bike" by Dave Karlotski
This site holds the story of my trip to Alaska and back to Virginia. If you just read the title I suppose it's only natural that you expect to read about a 9 day ride from Anchorage to Virginia. That isn't the case. I guess that is my fault for calling the site what I did.
I was actually in Alaska for about a month before I started coming back. I arrived July 20th and started back on August 24th. The time I spent exploring Alaska during the month I was there make up a huge part of this site but the idea for the site was the 9 day trip back home.
There are two main ways to read it. You can click on 'The Story' and start from Day 1, that is, the day I arrived in Anchorage via Airplane on a cloudy day in July. Then you can read a day by day account of my time there. Generally it focuses on the weekend trips I took and the weekday preparations I was making for those trips and the trip back.
Or. .
You can click on 'The Story' and click on '9 days' and just read about the trip back from to Virginia. This is the section that focuses on the high mileage days it took to get from one side of the continent to the other in a little over a week. I think it has a little of everything. Good decisions, bad decisions, mechanical problems, unexpected expenses, odd experiences, and of course pictures that I took along the way.
Whichever route you take please understand I am no writer and I did not pretend to be. This is very much in the form of a personal journal so don't expect any pros or flowery descriptions. I just wrote about the things that happened to me that day in the order than I thought of them.