Dream rides

Still chugging my way through Red’s questions. 🙂

Your dream rides

There are two possible ways to answer this: a real ride that I do want to do someday, or a list of ideal qualities of a ride that all together would make my dream ride.  For the “dream motorcycles” post I did the latter, so I’ll do the former here.

I have  three “real” rides that I would really like to do someday.

1) Trans-Canada.  I’ve been planning this one for years as it was supposed to be my next big ride after the 2008 cross-country trip.  Unfortunately, I decided to rupture my disc in 2009 instead, so it’s still in the “to do” pile.

In my fantasy world where I have unlimited time, I would ride both ways; however, when I was planning this one, I only had a couple of weeks, so I assumed I would ship a bike to the east coast and ride home.  I would start at Dan and Colleen’s in New Jersey, of course, and putter around the northern eastern seaboard a little bit (I’ve never really been there).      I’d ride up to Niagara Falls, over to the Hockey Hall of Fame museum in Toronto, and then head vaguely westward.

This would likely be a solo trip as, for some reason, no one else seemed to get excited about riding through the Great Plains of Canada.  I bought a book on Manitoba and Saskatchewan and things to see/do there, but for some reason even things like the World’s Largest Curling Rock or the Combine in the Sky were not enough to convince Peter that this would be a fun trip.

Of course, once you hit the Canadian Rockies, things start to get awesome, and then there are things like Glacier National Park and the Sawtooth Mountains and the Oregon Outback to see you home to California.

Glacier National Park:

2) Four Corners. This is one of those “do it so I can say that I did it” rides that Type A personalities like me just adore.  I wouldn’t do the SCMA competitive versionwhere you have to do the ride within 21 days, but I’d still use their checklist of cites:  San Ysidro, California; Key West, Florida; Madawaska, Maine; Blaine, Washington.

I’ve already done portions of the ride (SoCal to Key West; the Plains across to Washington; Washington back to California) but it’s been a dream of mine for years to tie it all together into one ride.  This is probably the ride that would make me absolutely happiest to do someday.  I have no idea when on earth I’m going to have the month or so necessary to do it the way I want to (boarding school for you, Blueberry!!) but, hey, dreams are good.

3) Australia. I don’t have any particular destinations in mind, really, but after our Cape York trip, I really wanted to see more of Australia.

I would love to do a circumnavigation of the continent, checking out the Gold Coast and Sydney and down to Camberra and over to Melbourne and eventually Perth and up up up all the way to Darwin.   Yes, I know, the Aussies are laughing at me now because that’s like a bazillion miles and there’s nothing along any of that route but poisonous spiders.  But I think it would be awesome.

Peter says I’m nuts and that if we’re going to ride anywhere down in the Antipodes, it should be the south island of New Zealand.

Why Peter hates riding with me, a photo illustration:

Great Central Road, Western Australia:

Milford Sound, south island of New Zealand:

Hrm, maybe I will begrudgingly admit that he has a point.  OK, we’ll add the south island onto the dream list, too.  😉

There are a bunch of other places I’d like to ride someday:  Iceland, Norway, France…but these are the top three and the ones most likely to get ridden.  Even if I have to go solo to the World’s Largest Curling Rock.