US-50 Coast-to-Coast: Day 1

Somewhere over Colorado in a Jet: I am not sure where it really began. My obsession with traveling somewhere, anywhere started at an early age by riding my bike through the forest and cornfields of Northern Illinois. I would remember a location that I had seen from driving around the area in the back seat of our family’s green rambler, and then I would later on ride my bike to it, always by myself.   Sometimes the trip would take hours, but I was always felt a great sense of accomplishment for achieving something new. 

Come this Friday (July 10^th, 2015), I will ride my motorcycle from Ocean City, Maryland to Sacramento via US-50.  Yet just another extension of my desire to travel somewhere, anywhere and see something new.  I first got the idea to travel across the US when I was on a group motorcycle trip to several National parks in Utah. I was staying at a hotel in St. George Utah when I went out to pack my motorcycle bags in the morning and saw an old but nice BMW touring bike. The bike’s owner came out of the hotel and was also packing his bags. I asked the BMW rider where he was off to. He told me that he was from the East coast and had flown his bike into Los Angeles, and was now crossing the country back to his home. I had never heard of anyone flying their motorcycle across the US. This idea really intrigued me, because I could ride greater distances and not loop back the same way. 

I started exploring different routes across the US and quickly came upon Wulf Berg's web site (http://www.route50.com/) devoted to US-50.  US-50 is not one of the interstate highways, but one of the older highways that have replaced or made less important by the interstates over the years.  US-50 is largely intact and was named the “loneliest highway in America” by Life Magazine in 1986 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._Route_50_in_Nevada).  I had some knowledge of US-50 since I rode across Nevada on US-50 last year on a solo motorcycle trip to Great Basin National Park. Therefore, around January 1^st, 2015 I set my mind on, and started planning for my coast to coast ride on US-50. 

I decided I liked the idea of riding East to West, and after researching many different options to transport my motorcycle to the East coast I found a national motorcycle trucking company (http://motorcycleshippers.com/) that was located locally in Irvine. I selected this company because the prices were good and I could go down and actually talk to the people that would be organizing the transport of my bike. After discussing with them some options, I decided to select a hub-to-hub strategy where I would drop my bike off in Santa Fe Spring, CA and pick up the bike in Jessup, Maryland. Jessup is between Baltimore and Washington, which is not that far from Ocean City, Maryland. By selecting the hub-to-hub strategy, the warehouse facility in Jessup would be my storage location until I arrived by air. I needed to drop the bike off 3 weeks in advance of when I wanted to pick it up. 

Meanwhile at home, I spent 6 months working on my Suzuki VStrom DL650 motorcycle making improvements and maintaining older components, since the bike already had 118k miles on it I wanted to have better odds of getting home back in one piece. 

Interesting conversations before I left with people on the us-50 ride. Discussing the ride with my motorcycle group really shows the variation in the way people think.  At a recent four day ride I heard some of the people tell me that they were really excited about the ride, saying “why would you not want to do the ride?”.  Others in my riding group could not understand why anyone would want to ride across the United States.