Seems people are interested in a few more details. We are in our mid-50's. We were lucky enough to be on 2014 Rushmore Harley's. Hubby on a Road King CVO, myself on SGS. We were both delighted with our choices. We are both "short", about 5' 7". He lowered the rear shocks on the RK, I had the supernarrow mod. on my seat by Mean City Cycles and it was perfect for me.

We had done a couple of longer road trips before - 4 weeks each, so we knew we would love an even longer trip. Hubby is retired. I still work full-time but do have a generous vacation allowance which allowed us to do what we did. I was a little apprehensive about going for that long and wondered if I/we would get bored - I need not have worried. Every morning we could not wait to get back in the saddle and see what was around the next bend in the road.

This is only my third year riding! And I am proud of that! Hubby rode when he was younger but only got back into it 4 years ago. We are diehard Harley fans. Our philosophy is that "Life is short - so do it while you can!"

 

Great trip and thanks for the report.

 

Im in the same situation....retired...wife works and great vacation (2 months a year) and cant wait to do that kind of trip. (Al Can highway if possible)


Bonus for you is you get to return to Maine!


I love that place...never had a bad time whenever I went up to Maine!


cant wait to read the blog....good job guys!

 

I smiled the whole time I read this... awesome! When you ride South, let some of us know where and when and maybe we'll all get to see the smiles on your faces too.
Thanks for sharing

 

Awesome. Really enjoyed the read about your ride and the pics.

 

Very impressive, shows what can be achieved with the right preparation. Going to the planning table soon myself.

 

Had a great time reading this it made me feel like I was along for the ride. My question is that you showed a moving average between 55 and 60 mph. Does that mean that's basically how fast you guy's were going the whole time? Way too many people want to speed on bikes these days.

 

me again... scrolled thru the blog this rainy morning... now I REALLY wanna hit the road. Thanks a lot...

jus' kidding. Curious that you have some exact pics we shot in the SD and Yellowstone areas. Pretty good with that camera. You do a lot of cropping?

Looks like you guys did around 300 miles on an average day?

 

Awesome trip!!!!!!

 

Thanks for all the comments and glad you have enjoyed the tale! Sorry to make people envious - that is not the intent.

I was interested to follow our average moving mph each day. Up here in the Northeast it seems that no matter where we go, or what time of day, our average mph over the course of a day's ride would be about 45mph. So that is what we used in our planning. We were surprised, but it makes sense, that our average speed was much higher than this once we got out West where the posted speed limits are much higher. We do tend to stick, more or less, within 10 mph of max posted limits. It's just too much of a pain to get stopped for speeding. So we were happy to achieve moving averages of 55 or 60. (Remember that this is including slowing for traffic, intersections etc.). We did end up averaging about 300 miles a day - I believe we could have done more!

Thanks for the compliments on the photos. Road King Q - I really did no cropping just an occasional edit to straighten a tilted image. I think we are all drawn to take the same iconic images when we go to these places. I bought a Canon T3i specifically for the trip. It was a bit bulky and took up a lot of precious saddlebag space - but so worth it for the lasting memories. We had a small Canon Powershot as well which is great for taking shots on the fly but sadly it bit the dust, literally, in Monument Valley and is probably beyond repair (although we will try). We bought a GoPro en-route and loved it mainly for the videos we got. We wished we would have done more - but have a mammoth enough job as it is to get them all edited into a movie.