How did we choose the Trans-America Trail?

With tons of great riding opportunities in the world, we had to make a decision based on time, money, riding requirements, and overall objective(s). Do we ride domestic? Do we ride abroad? Do we ride street? Or do we ride dualsport?

Over the years, we’ve had the privilege of hosting riders from all over the world. In doing so, we’ve received open invitations to come visit and ride with people in virtually every continent. Actually, we have acquaintances that spend a good portion of the year in Antarctica too, although riding motorcycles there is non-existent as you can well imagine.

While riding abroad with our global friends sits proudly on our bucket lists, it will have to wait a couple of more years before we can start marking each location off. So, this helps us narrow our geographic location to North America, but more specifically, where? Individually, we have ridden in many areas of the US, but this trip is all three of us together, so it has to be both unique and special.

We’ve spent the last several years on smaller dualsport rides relatively close to home, particularly because Kendrick didn’t become street legal until last month. This experience has us quite comfortable with dualsport riding. Dualsport riding certainly isn’t for everyone, as it’s dustier, more demanding physically (not including Ironbutt riding), trickier, and tends to include riding in relatively remote places. It’s these very reasons that make dualsport riding more attractive to us.

At this point, we’ve defined both the general location of the ride, the style of ride, plus criteria that the ride is to be unique and special. Then, you take Sam Correro’s efforts over a twenty year period to chart the East to West journey and create a somewhat predictable recipe for how to approach the ride and the Trans-America Trail (TAT) fits the bill perfectly. Based on reports from riders that end up at our shop after finishing in Port Orford, we don’t anticipate the TAT to be anything less that physically challenging, but also tremendously rewarding at the very same time.

For this very reason, planning for the trip started well over a year in advance. Since it’s already mid-November, the clock is ticking and as you’ll read in future posts, our planning and preparation are pretty much on schedule. Although there is still a lot to get done, I’m enjoying every minute of it!