Welcome!
On June 21st I embarked on my ambitious summer tour on my 2010 Kawasaki Concours 14 motorcycle around the United States, with visits along the way to several friends and family located in different states. In initial planning I expected it take about 70 days.
At an overlook along the Blue Ridge Parkway (6/30/2011)
Shortly after embarking on this journey, a friend suggested that I write about my travels and share my experiences. I began to document my journey in nearly daily travelogue updates that I sent to nearly 40 e-mail addresses. Within those 60+ messages I shared many of the numerous photos taken during my 100-day odyssey.
After returning home from my motorcycle journey around the country that I call my Summer Tour 2011, I decided in early October 2011 to start this blog in order to share my travelogue writings and photos more easily than by e-mail. After a few days I now have all of my travelogue e-mails transferred to this blog, along with an index. I intend to add detailed maps and additional photos. On future trips I intend to post directly to this blog.
Here is the map captured by the SPOT tracking device. The green and yellow flags are numbered indicators of my progress and stops along the journey.
Summer Tour 2011 Map
Click on the map for a larger version, or click on the following link to display the tracking map on Spotwalla.com:
https://new.spotwalla.com/trip/5467-78de8-60ab/view
The postings are dated according to when I sent the original e-mail out. Although they are generally organized chronologically to correspond to a location or activity that took place during my journey, some postings were written and sent a few days later and are thus out of chronological order. Although I sent out several e-mails prior to the first entry in the index below, they were unfortunately lost due to the failure of my notebook computer’s disk drive. As I recover them from the recipients, I will include them.
The photos in each posting are at reduced size and resolution to display quickly within a posting. Please click on the image with the mouse to view the higher resolution photo in a new window in your web browser. Some panoramic photos will be wider than the browser window and you may need to scroll the view horizontally to see the entire image. Recent versions of Internet Explorer will automatically resize a large photo to fit within its window. When that happens, the mouse pointer turns into a magnifying glass with a small “+”. Click on the photo again to see the full size photo.
All postings have been reviewed and released to public view, mostly unchanged except for minor corrections. Since I took many more photos than were included with the travelogue reports, nearly all of them are available under the “Additional Photos” menu, grouped by state and titled by the area, topic or destination. On each photo page, I have also included a map showing the area where I took the photos. The maps from each day’s travel will also be collected under the “Maps” menu.
Click on the specific travelogue entry in this list to begin reading with that posting: