Motorcycle Trip Planning


This page is about the DECISIONS – where, when, how far, where you sleep. The physical stuff (what goes in the panniers, the tents, the straps) is over on the Equipment page. The two go together: the plan tells you what equipment you need, and the equipment limits what plans are realistic.

Planning is a prior, not a guarantee. You will still have an event you didn't think of – that is the story you get to tell later. What planning buys you is that when the surprise shows up, the OTHER twelve things are already handled and you have the slack to deal with it. The steps below are roughly in order, because the early decisions gate the later ones.

Step 1 – What kind of trip is this?

There are two basic shapes, and they get planned differently: Decide which one you are on, honestly. A "wander" that secretly needs to hit Glacier on the Fourth of July weekend is a destination trip that skipped its homework.

Step 2 – Maps and the route

Get some Butler Maps for the states you will travel in. These maps show you the BEST curvy rides, rated. I look at my draft route and compare it against Butler – many times there is a G1 or G2 road running parallel to the highway I was about to take, for maybe 30 extra minutes. Take the good road. That is the whole point.

If you see mountain roads or passes on the route (usually the MOST fun), go to the state DOT road condition site and confirm the pass is even open. The big ones open LATE: Going-to-the-Sun Road, Tioga Pass, Beartooth, Independence Pass, Washington State Passes can be closed into late June depending on snowpack, and they close early in fall. A route that depends on one closed pass is a route that just grew 150 miles.

For western Canada / Alaska, buy The MILEPOST. Literally a mile-by-mile description of the roads and what services exist. There is a page specifically for riding your bike in the north.

After the trip, my GPX-to-browser-map scripts are on my GitHub if you want to show the ride to others – instructions are in the script comments.

Step 3 – Weather

Look up the AVERAGE temperatures and rainfall for the area in your timeframe. Good sources: Five caveats that the average-temperature pages will NOT tell you:

Step 4 – Wildfire

Fire season is getting longer on BOTH ends – earlier in the north (Canada, Alaska, the boreal forest, because of earlier snowmelt) and later in California and the Southwest. The old calendar is a starting point, not a guarantee. Rough regional picture: Southwest May–June before the monsoon, California June into November (fall wind events are the destructive window – and SoCal has burned in JANUARY), Pacific Northwest and Northern Rockies July–September with August the worst, BC Interior mirrors the PNW, Ontario / Quebec peak in June, the Prairies in July.

The useful way to think about it is a series of gates. Each one exists so the later, time-pressured decisions are cheap: Two more things. Smoke travels; flame doesn't – for a rider the AQI radius matters more than the fire perimeter, and a full-face helmet does NOTHING against smoke particulates. Decide your personal AQI number BEFORE the trip (a 6–8 hour riding day at AQI 150–200 is a real exposure dose, not just haze) – most riders never pick a number in advance, which means they pick it standing in the smoke. And flag any single-road segment (Going-to-the-Sun, Beartooth, Tioga) back at the route stage – those have no short alternate, so a fire there is a hard gate, not a detour.

Step 5 – Reservations and permits

This gates the CALENDAR, which is why it is here and not at the end: For the day-to-day lodging on a long trip, my method is a ROLLING window: keep the next 4 or 5 nights reserved and book new ones as you go. That keeps flexibility for weather and whim without gambling on walk-in availability. OBVIOUSLY for National Parks you have to book months in advance – but you don't lose much money if you have to change plans, so book them anyway. Also SOME parks have walk-in backpacker areas and MIGHT let you camp there with the motorcycle – worth asking at the entrance if your plans went sideways. Two gotchas: some hotels in tourist areas require you to book Saturday AND Sunday together if you want the weekend – a Friday-night-only request gets refused, and you may need to shift where you stop to route around it. And a place can have Thursday wide open while Friday and Saturday are booked solid, so the DAY of the week you hit a town matters as much as the town. I bring the laptop with Garmin Basecamp loaded so I can adjust the route on the fly when the reservations force a change – which they will.

Step 6 – The riding math: miles per day, riding days vs. staying days

Miles per day depends on the ROAD, not the calendar. My rough numbers: 400+ miles of interstate slab is doable but joyless; 250 miles of Butler G1 twisties is a FULL day and your hands will know it; mix days land in between. Whatever number you pick, the first day and the last day should be shorter – the first because you always leave late, the last because you are tired and that is when mistakes happen.

Riding days vs. staying days: for anything over a week, plan a full day OFF the bike roughly weekly. That is the laundry day, and it is also the day your brain catches up. A laundromat load runs $3–$6 in quarters (bring the quarters and the HE sheets – see the Equipment page). Hotels with guest laundry solve this neatly – worth filtering for when you book.

Camping vs. motels: my personal guide is 1 to 2 nights camping, then 1 night in a motel – the motel is the good night's sleep, the shower, and the laundry. Hauling the tent off the bike EVERY night gets old; my Route 66 ride taught me THAT lesson. If you need to travel fast and light for a long distance then motels / hotels are the answer – but if you are doing THAT, why are you on a motorcycle? :-) Costs, roughly: BLM free to $5, state campgrounds $8–$30, KOA up to $40 (shower, water, electric, Wi-Fi), motels ~$100, hotels $140+.

Daylight is part of the math – and up north there is a LOT of it

In the northern states and Canada in summer, your riding day is MUCH longer than you may be used to. Around the summer solstice at the US / Canada border (about 49°N – think Glacier country, the Washington / BC crossings): sunrise around 5:10 AM, sunset around 9:20 PM – 16+ hours of daylight, and usable riding light (civil twilight) stretches that to roughly 4:30 AM to 10 PM. Keep going north and it keeps growing: Edmonton ~17 hours, Whitehorse ~19, Fairbanks ~22 – up there the sun barely bothers to set. The flip side flips HARD: those same border latitudes get about 8.5 hours of daylight in December, and in the fall shoulder season you are LOSING 3+ minutes a day, so a September trip planned off your July memories comes up an hour short by the end of it.

Three caveats before you spend all that daylight:

Step 7 – Fuel and range

In the west and in Canada / Alaska you MUST map your gas stops. I have seen multiple signs that say 'Next Service 110 Miles'. KNOW your range – your REAL range with the bike loaded and a headwind, not the brochure number. If it will be close, carry a fuel bladder.

What "real range" means in practice:
If you ride with others: the GROUP's range is the SMALLEST tank in the group, minus a reserve. Plan every fuel stop for that bike and nobody has a bad day. Same logic applies to pace – the group rides at the pace the least comfortable rider can hold, and you agree on that BEFORE the kickstands come up, not over the intercom at 60 MPH.

Step 8 – Bike service math

Nobody puts this on trip planning pages and everybody gets bitten by it eventually. Before you leave, do the arithmetic:

Step 9 – Navigation: building the route and getting it onto the GPS

The GPS hardware itself is on the Equipment page. This is the workflow. Mine is Garmin Basecamp on the PC, then the route goes to the Zumo XT2 on the bike. Basecamp is old and Garmin barely acknowledges it exists any more, but nothing else gives you the same control over a multi-day route.

The Basecamp to Zumo XT2 procedure

The XT2 lives in Garmin's newer Tread / Explore ecosystem and does NOT play nicely with Basecamp's device-transfer function the way the older Zumos did. The workaround is a file-level copy, and it works reliably: Multi-day trips: I keep the per-day GPX files on the laptop as the master copies. If a route gets mangled on the device, delete it on the XT2 and re-copy the file – 2 minutes, done. The files on the PC are the source of truth; the device is just a display.

Step 10 – Documents and insurance

Step 11 – The rules change at the state line

Traffic law is state law, and what is routine at home can be a ticket (or worse, a bad assumption at speed) two states over. Canada adds its own layer. The canonical lookup is the AMA state law database – check it for every state you will cross. The ones that actually bite:

Step 12 – Renting a bike in another country

A different animal from riding your own bike across a land border, and I am not giving the ENTIRE procedure here – just the gotchas so you know what you are getting into before you wire a deposit to a rental shop in another hemisphere:

A precautionary word about Asia

Full disclosure: I have not ridden in Asia, so this is the distilled report of riders who have, not my own miles – YMMV applies double. The counterintuitive part first: a motorcycle is arguably the RIGHT vehicle for much of Asia. Two wheels is the native traffic species there – on a bike you move WITH the swarm instead of fighting it from inside a car. But the traffic operates on completely different physics: it is a continuous NEGOTIATION, not a rulebook. The horn means "I am here," not "I am angry." Right of way follows MASS – trucks, then buses, then cars, then you – and the flow works because everyone is predictable, not because anyone stops. Riders who do well describe it as moving like water; riders who do badly are the ones who brought their right-of-way expectations from home and tried to enforce them. Go with the flow – do what the other riders do; they know the road and you don't. And recalibrate your speed expectations: you are probably not doing 70 MPH on a nice smooth interstate-grade highway, you are doing a MAXIMUM of 35 MPH on a somewhat-paved road between cities. Which means you plan Asian distances in HOURS, not miles – a 100 mile day there is a FULL day, and the Step 6 riding math does NOT transfer.

The precautionary story is depressingly standardized, and you have probably seen the GoFundMe version of it: tourist rents a scooter in Thailand or Bali, no motorcycle endorsement on their license, no IDP, crashes – and discovers their travel medical insurance is VOID because they were riding unlicensed. Now it is a six-figure medical evacuation on their own dime. Motorcycle crashes are THE leading serious injury for tourists in Southeast Asia, and "nobody checks licenses at the rental shop" is precisely the trap: the shop doesn't check, the INSURANCE COMPANY does, afterward, reading the exclusions with a magnifying glass. Everything in the rental list above applies in Asia with the volume turned up: proper endorsement, IDP, insurance that explicitly covers riding, your own helmet (rental helmets there can be decorative), and add three local rules – do NOT ride at night (unlit vehicles, livestock, dogs), assume the road surface will surprise you (sand, diesel, monsoon runoff), and remember much of the region rides on the LEFT. And India is the deep end of the deep end – riders comfortable everywhere else in Asia describe it as another level entirely. For a first India ride, a guided tour with a support vehicle is not cheating, it is engineering.

Step 13 – The check-in protocol

Someone at home knows the route and knows tonight's planned endpoint, every day. The rule is simple: a message when you stop for the night, and an agreed action if the message doesn't come (call, then call the last known lodging, THEN escalate – agree on the timing in advance so nobody panics at hour one or waits until hour twenty). If the route goes through no-signal country – and in the west it WILL – a satellite communicator closes the gap; that hardware is on the Equipment page. The protocol is the plan; the device is just the transport.

Step 14 – Commit

At some point you have to look at what you have planned, what your best guess is (with hopefully some room built into the schedule) and commit. You have done your best. You are as prepared as you will ever be. Gather your clothes, your maps, your route, and get on the road. If you forgot something, you can buy it on the road. Yesterday was the best day to leave – today is the next best day.

MOST IMPORTANTLY – Things will fail. Issues will come up. 'Man plans and God laughs' – old Rabbinic phrase. This is an adventure. Don't get bent out of shape. You can always buy something or get it fixed. If you believe there is something after this life, the only thing you will take with you are memories – and this trip is one of those.

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