It's 10pm and everyone in my group has called it quits for the night. I'm willing to bet they are all asleep by now. I'm not quite ready yet, so I thought I'd blog a little.
First, I have to say one more time how happy I am to be using overpass-turbo.eu and BaseCamp. I plotted a route from Spring Hill, Florida over to Ormond Beach Florida (west coast to east coast), using secondary, secondary link and tertiary roads - no interstate or toll roads, no dirt roads. The route took me down 41 a little to Avery road and across I-75, and then up 301. The route was excellent. There was beautiful country side and many twisties along the way; definitely enough to keep me interested. Even though I never hit a high speed highway, I still made the trip in 4 hours and stopped for lunch along the way. I planned a really nice ride for Sunday; but, it looks like it's going to thunderstorm and I may need to re-route to the south. We shall see. If that's the case, I'll be disappointed because the route takes me on the ferry to cross the St. John's river.
Before this trip started, I picked out the camping gear I wanted to use.
I've clearly accumulated a pile of camping gear. I have 3 air mattresses, 3 sleeping bags, 2 tents and a bunch of other stuff. When on a motorcycle, one must choose wisely as each item takes up precious space and contributes to the overall weight of the bike. I have yet to worry about the weight recommendations of the bike. My bike has more than enough power to take two riders and full bags and then have stuff strapped on top. I've also seen pictures of guys in Asia that do ridiculous things like transport a 600 pound pig on the back of a moped. Space, however is a serious concern. So, on this trip, I went with my bivouac and my large air mattress. I wasn't sure the large air mattress would fit inside the bivvy; but, if it didn't, I simply would have put it on top of my ground cover and pitched my bivvy on top of it. No problem.
For my sleeping bag, I selected my REI light weight bag. I think it's a 3 season bag. I had this bag and tent combination in Death Valley and it got down to a bit below 40 degrees if I remember correctly. I was toasty warm. The bivvy adds about 15 degrees of warmth all by itself and the sleeping bag many more, particularly if you know who to use it correctly.
I also brought my MSR Whisperlite camping stove. This little stove is truly awesome. This trip, I left the spot tracker behind as nobody was following my travels and I'd post the GPS track anyway. I brought an extension cord, mess kit and hand axe. I thought that should definitely cover it.
I arrived to see Fred coming out of the camp site. He said the others were out and were going to stop at the store. He also said I could set up anywhere I like, folks were starting to pull up stakes already. I remembered they were by a porta-john; and pulled in close by; but, couldn't see Cliff's car and trailer. Almost on queue, Cliff called to see if I was there. He said his car and trailer were there, nothing moved and maybe I wasn't far enough down the path. He was right. I found the camp site right away. The campsite looked something like a modern day western. There's big cover on 4 telescoping legs and under it is all the cooking stuff. There were no sides, so it's not really a tent. The tents were pitched around it. Cliff was gong to be back and start cooking soon, so I wanted to get my bivvy staked out and get some shorts on. It was pretty hot and I was sweating being still in the heat. Fortunately, I packed well and didn't have to search for anything. I pulled open one hard case on the motorcycle and there was my bivvy, ground cover, etc. I got that pitched and dove inside for a quick change. It must have been 130 in there already. WOW. About then, Cliff, his brother Brian and Fred came back to the campground. They were going to start cooking soon.
Cliff had dinner going and I asked if he needed some help. Cliff always says no. I was telling him about my MSR stove and how I wanted to burn off some of my fuel. He said to set it up because he could use another burner.
This stove has a small pump that screws directly into an MSR can and feeds the stove with fuel. Every so often, you need to give it another pump. The manual recommends 10 strokes every 10 minutes. I don't think it needs quite that much. Perhaps it will need that much when the fuel is mostly drained out. From a heating point of view, this little stove is awesome. It puts out a lot of heat. We heated up a kettle of water faster than my stove at home. It's HOT. The thing is, you really can't turn the burner down to a lower temperature. Once the valve is cracked, it's pretty much full on, so cook fast or find some way to elevate your pan, pot, or whatever a little higher off the flame. This stove packs down amazingly small. I think I bought this stove about 5 years ago for about $25-$30 and it was worth every penny. I understand they now go for $40 and they are still worth every penny. I highly recommend it.
Dinner was steak with peppers and onions. Fantastic. Cliff seems to be the campsite chef; but, I wish he'd share some of the responsibility. I almost didn't mention Steve. He wandered over and ate with us at some point. Steve is camping on another site adjacent to ours. He's got a Ford Explorer and trailer. He's got 2 BMW's with him. He also has a big tent set up (no sides) as well as an awning off his trailer. He sleeps on a cot under the tent with no sides. This is pretty smart for Florida. There's plenty of air circulation and you're protected from the dew. If it rains hard, he can go in the trailer if he needed to. We went over to Steve's camp for a fire. We all gabbed about motorcycles and the event and who knows what else. It was a lot of talking for guys. I think all that talking wears guys out because by 9pm, everyone was wanting to go to bed.
Right now, it's twenty to eleven and this campground is still very busy. Motorcycles are still coming into the campground and someone is revving their car engine. There's a group across the way still sitting around the fire talking. My group, I think is fast asleep. I'm about ready to turn off the computer and rest myself. Tomorrow, we're supposed to go to the Daytona 200, a motorcycle race. I'm looking forward to that. Sunday may get cut a little short because of rain.
I wanted to mention my GoPro Hero 3. I thought that for this trip, I would try time lapse photography and sort of stitch together a vine of the trip. Just as I got to my lunch place, I heard the camera shut off. I could not turn it back on - the battery was dead. I don't know why it ran out so fast. I was not continually recording, just one snapshot every minute for 90 minutes. I need to check the battery to see what's what. I think it should have lasted longer.
Another thing I wanted to mention was the BMW Nav IV GPS I have. I bought a micro SD for it because I was running out of space on it (94% full) and it wouldn't accept any more custom routes from me. Initially, I put in a 16GB card and it wouldn't recognize it. I read online that it can't read bigger cards and 4GB was recommended. Where does anyone find a 4GB micro SD card in 2016? I bought the smallest one I could find, 8GB and fortunately it worked. I put the new route on there and when I started the Nav IV, it recognized it and asked me if I wanted to import the new route. Once imported, it began calculating the route. My guess is that BaseCamp saves the way points only and the GPS calculates the route. No worries, I had enough way points to force the route where I wanted it to go. Particularly annoying though was that it would lose the route periodically and indicate that it can't route from where I am to the next point... which may only be a mile or so up the road. It happened 8 times with 24 way points. I think this is horrible. Fortunately, as soon as I told it to follow the route again, it did. I'm so happy that this GPS will let me program it while I'm moving. I'd be livid if I had to pull over every time it happened.
---- Saturday March 12th ---
I woke up to Cliff at my tent telling me breakfast was ready. I thought I had another couple hours of sleep to go. Cliff is an early riser. I was happy to see it was light out and that it was just my lazy ass wanting to stay asleep for a while longer.
At this point, Cliff's brother Brian is going to start his trip back to Texas and Fred is going home to North Carolina via his mother, whose 93rd birthday is today. I think his wife was picking him up and they were going to visit mom. So, the morning would be filled with activities to get those two guys on the road. There were bikes to be loaded on trailers, camping items to pack, etc.
In the midst of all this, we got to talking about my rear tier, which, before I started this trip, was having trouble with holding air. The issue was that after I filled, air would come out the valve stem. As seems to be quite normal on these sorts of trips, Fred has everything, including a valve stem and a valve stem change tool. Steve had a tank of compressed air. So, we changed the valve stem. The tire still hold air, although, at one point while we were filling it, the same problem occurred. We'll have to see the next time I go to top it off if the problem is solved or not. Either way, I have a new valve stem and a tire full of air, so the day will go on without a service call taking priority over everything else. I brought the right sized torx socket, just in case I had to pull the wheel and have someone ride it into town.
Now that Brian is on his way and Fred is in a holding pattern, it was time to go use the wireless and then head into Daytona for a Ducatti demo ride. It seems that Ducatti came out with a new bike, only 2 days before Daytona - the Ducatti Xdiavlo. It is competing with the Harley V-Rod. I will write an blog about just this bike and the demo ride. It definitely deserves it's own blog post.
After the demo ride, we headed over to the HIlton for lunch. Cliff had a free lunch coming to him for some reason. While I was there, I somehow got into a conversation with a motorcycle gang member. Without mentioning names, this gang was recently involved in a terrible shooting. He was from LA and I was shocked to hear that they trailered their motorcycles to Florida from Los Angeles. I totally didn't expect that one. Big tough biker gang members trailering their motorcycles and staying at the Hilton.
After lunch, we decided to go the speedway for more demo rides. Unfortunately, the only one we were able to get was a Suzuki VStrom 1000. I'll write a separate blog about this bike as well. By the time we were finished, everyone was packing up at Daytona.
I should have gotten a picture at Daytona. Outside the track, there is a concrete walkway. It's wide, maybe 35 or 40 yards in width and on the other side of that are the vendors. The walkway is PACKED with people and moving motorcycles. The motorcycles are slowly working their way around walking people. I was glad to not see anyone get knocked over. Sometimes, you had to ride really slow and wait for pedestrians to move out of the way. If you don't know how to slow ride, you weren't going to have a good time getting around this. Also of note were a particular type of motorcycle. These are Harley's with very big, thin front tires, almost like a big wheel. They seem to be all show - bright colors, chrome, immaculately kept and annoyingly loud pipes and stereos.
Traffic was a nightmare; but, we took the interstate back to the campground, so it wasn't an issue.
Cliff wanted to break down most of his stuff, so we did that. We loaded his bike on the trailer and packed his big tent and many of the things we would not need in the morning. I also packed most of my stuff and left the hard cases open for the sleeping bag, bivvy, etc. We had a camp fire going also; but, around 9pm, I was ready to turn in. I slept really light last night. Now, I can't get to sleep! So, I blog, again.
About bivouac tents:
One problem that has to be addressed with the bivvy and tents in general is condensation. In most cases, the temperature and dew point seem to collide somewhere around early morning; but, tonight, I noted dew starting to form on things by about 9pm. I was fortunate enough to get the rain fly on my bivvy in place before the contents inside got wet. That said, by the time I crawled inside, the temperature was still in the low 70's. Remember that 15 degrees of heat 'savings' I mentioned earlier? Well, inside the bivvy it was probably 85 degrees and that's not good for sleeping. Now, if I open the rain fly, I get wet and there's simply not enough ventilation in this bivvy to decrease the temperature. The other problem is that by morning, if I do nothing, my breath will have condensate on the rain fly and I could be wet anyway. My two man tent deals with this problem by having an air gap between the top of the tent and the rain fly. I have woken up to condensate on the rain fly, so this isn't exactly optimal either; but, it's never been so much that things in the tent got wet. As I write, I have the rain fly partially open by my head so my breath can escape. There isn't very much place for dew to collect where it could drip in, so I plan to leave it that way for awhile. If it gets cold, or I feel something starting to get wet inside, I'll close it.
So, over night daylight savings happened. At 5 am (on my Iphone) 4am (on my biological clock), I heard Cliff stirring about. I had to pee anyway, so I got up. He was already in the process of packing up. I peed and told him I was going back to bed. I couldn't get to sleep, so I got up and made coffee and tea while he packed. There was no point in my rushing through packing the motorcycle. I didn't want to leave until it was light out anyway. Go MSR Whisperlite. I had boiled water ready in a heartbeat. We went through 1 tank of gas, and I was very happy about that. I want to re-purpose it for unleaded gas to have as a reserve for my motorcycle. I have one now, I want two to carry.
After Cliff packed, he was gone. The sun wasn't up yet. The sun wasn't even thinking about coming up yet. The sun was still tucked under the covers and not coming out. The sun apparently did not get the memo about the daylight savings time change. So, I started packing. Packing up with a hand light is just as much fun as setting up camp with a flashlight, the only difference is that you don't have to be concerned about how things are packed when you're unpacking. When I packed the motorcycle, there wasn't any space left. I had to pack it just as tightly to get home. No, I do not regret bringing my full size pillow. I was more comfortable on this trip than on many others, simply because I had a full size pillow. I'm going to be hard pressed to pack an air pillow next time. I need to write about improvements I can do to my camping gear to be more comfortable next time.
So, now, I'm packed, Cliff is gone, Steve has pulled out and it's still dark. It's not even that kind of dark where you'd be wondering if it's light enough to hunt yet. It's pitch black. Off to the bathhouse. Fortunately, when I got out, it was starting to lighten up and that was good enough for me. I rode out.
My GPS would not reverse the route that I had gotten there on because it "couldn't find the destination." Whatever. I had a breadcrumb trail. At some point, I noticed a button on my GPS that said something about reverse track, so I pushed that. Well, that wasn't what was intended. It wiped out my breadcrumb trail. Fortunately, I was already on my way to Rt 1, and I could figure something out from there. I knew that I generally needed to ride south and west. I also knew I wanted to go back to through Ocala National Forest and that was the big green blob on my GPS, so I pointed to that. It wasn't long after I got off Rt. 1 that the sun came up behind me. It was big and beautiful. I turned north as it was about 7/8ths of the way up and was able to watch it come all the way up. Not soon after, I was back going west again. I took only county and state roads as I have been doing lately. I'm really liking this, I find an occasional twisty road, see a lot of farmers fields, animals, horse farms, trees, and other wonderful things. I generally know I'm in the right spot when I see homes that were abandoned so long ago that the roof caved in and they are falling apart. I managed to come across a Denny's, so I stopped for breakfast. I was curious how close the rain was also.
I decided that I would take 35 south to 301 south. I hadn't been on 35 south or, that far up on 301, so that worked out. At some point, I started seeing my breadcrumb trail again and I was about to get on a section of 301 that I'd already been on, so I turned off on another county road and started working south and west on other county roads. Sumter county is very nice. I also found that county roads with a letter designation generally aren't the same quality as maintained paved roads. I went down one that was better described as 'hard pack' than pavement. It was rough. I had to adjust my suspension because I bottomed out twice. That road took me through someone's orange orchard. I don't think it was a private road and it intersected a more well maintained road about 2 miles up, or so. After that, I wasn't far from home and came out right on a segment of road that I started this trip on. I had no idea I was that far south. It was another awesome trip.
More maps and pictures:
(I made the right decision. This was right after I got home. I would have been in rain all day long.)
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