I am planning a trip through Europe I will begin in May of this year. Since I have used this forum for preperation (I am also on advrider) and it has helped me immensely, I thought I would contribute with some photos and wisdom from my first adventure. Hopefully it will help others and perhaps even inspire someone else to do the same.

If someone wants detailed route information, please ask. My route was simple - Austin to Fairbanks only riding the Rocky Mountains, then to Achorage, back down the Yukon and on to San Francisco. Lastly, we headed across through the deserts to New Mexico before reaching home.

We left on August 1st and gave ourselves 1 month. We arrived at 8am in Austin exactly 1 month later.

2 riders, a friend on a 05 Ninja 500r, and me on a 07 zx14, both stock with no touring modifications. My priority is enjoying the roads as much as possible first, reliability second, several other things after that, and comfort ranks somewhere near the bottom.

August 1st proved to be a worthy start to our trip. My tent fell off about 2 miles from my home and dragged on the pavement for a good minute before I noticed. I was able to salvage it and ended up having it replaced, for free, at the REI in anchorage. We made it from Austin to a lake in New Mexico to camp the first night, about 600 miles. We unexpectedly had to ride about a mile on a terrible gravel road to reach the campsite and got lost several times in the process. Gravel on a zx14 is not easy, but it proved good training for what lay ahead.




We camped most nights and only stayed in a couple hotels. That particular night some kids were driving their truck around (probably drunk) up and down the shore of the lake all night. I figured there was a decent chance they would either run our bikes or tents over but went to sleep anyways.

We continued through New Mexico towards Colorado. No GPS, just a few maps and my internal ability to know which was North was.