2025: A Girl, a Motorcycle, and a Gypsy Soul

Part One: How to pack a lot of gear on a motorcycle... and keep it there for the duration of the trip!! How the heck do I get ALL the gear I need on the bike to ride long distance and/or camp?? Where there is a will, there is a way! I started riding and camping with my Suzuki Boulevard M50 - Love that bike, still own it. I had two gallon size saddlebags on her and the rest was pure strategy. I bought a Saddleman luggage pack and a bunch of bungees - which quickly got traded in for LOTS of straps and then a net on top. I first went long distance riding and motorcycle camping with a good friend, nickname HD, years ago. Let me tell you, she was a GREAT teacher in the art of packing a motorcycle. I would make the effort, get to the meeting point, have to retighten every since strap, ride, and repeat. She probably felt both sorry for me and annoyed by me for the extra time I took at stops to make sure my gear wasn't going to wind up on someone's windshield. So between he...

A flat tire on a motorcycle. One of those things I have always dreaded. And of course we had left Niagara Falls, NY, around dusk and were making great time, on track to make it to MN by the start of the Vikings football game... until we weren't.  Knock on wood, it didn’t happen to me, but it did happen to Stiffy on our way back to MN from Niagara Falls, at 2:30am in the middle of no-where at the Ohio Indiana border. A flat (rear) motorcycle tire. I was in the lead and Stiffy would fall back a ways. Thinking she was messing with her music or needing a stretch break, I would slow down, then she would catch back up for a bit. But then, just as three semis were cruising up in our rearview, she disappeared to the side of the freeway. I pulled over a little ways up and waited. She texted that she had a flat tire. DANG IT! For once, I was HOPING she was going to text the usual (“My phone flew out of my holder” and she would be running down the side of the highway to find said phone). S...