Background about our ride

Welcome to my Alaska motorcycle ride blog. This is my first blog so try not to laugh to hard.

First a little background on how I became part of this ride. About 2 years ago at one of our weekly meetings of the New London Motorcycle Club (NLMC) http://www.newlondonmotorcycleclub.com/home.html our road captain, Tom Lloret, announced that there was going to be a club ride to Alaska in the summer of 2008. The commited riders were Pete Lodi and Tom. When I first heard him say it I laughed to myself and said how great it would be to go but probably not realistic that I'd ever be part of it. Periodically Tom would mention that the trip was still being planned and I kept telling myself that I should "Just Do It"! I had been considering buying a new bike and knew that if I was going to go on this ride that my Road King wasn't the best suited bike for a long range multi week trip and I should go with an Ultra Classic if I was going to be part of this ride. After about 6 months of waffling about going or not around January 2007 I started letting folks know that I was considering selling my bike and it was gone by February. I ordered my 07 Ultra and picked it up at the end of April. My thought process was that if I do go on the trip I wanted to have a year's time on a new bike to make sure that there weren't any problems with it that sometimes come up and be at some point in a 14-15,000 mile trip. So at this point I've now got the right bike for the trip. The more I rode the new bike, the more I realized that I wanted to go on the trip. So by the middle of last summer I decided that I'm going! At that point the ride still seemed far off and my enthusiam level was not very high. As of last fall our commited group had grown to 5 as Tom and Pete's brothers (Mark and Joe) also commited to make the trip. We are now 20 days away from leaving and it's the same 5 still on track. I can tell you my current enthusiam level is almost off the chart as I'm psyched to embark on a "ride that will be full of memories"!


We are giving ourselves approx. 6 weeks for our journey. Our summary plan is to leave at 8 am on 6/28/08 after having breakfast at the Shack restaurant in E. Lyme. In broad strokes our route will be to head northwest to Niagra Falls and cross into Canada go up around the Great Lakes and take the Trans Canadian Highway west to Calgary/Edmonton area in Alberta provice. At that point we go Northwest up through British Columbia then the Yukon and on into Fairbanks, Alaska. We expect this to take about 14 days with a few sightseing stops such as the Calgary Stampede http://calgarystampede.com/ We're planning about 12 -14 days touring in Alaska. At this point Pete & Joe will be splitting off as they are planning a different route home and both being retired have more time to spend on the trip. Tom, Mark and I will go from Anchorage, Alaska down toward Vancouver and cross back into the US near Seattle, Washington and take a route home across Idaho, Montana, Wyoming for a possible stop at the Sturgis rally in SD http://www.sturgis.com/ then heading east back to CT around the 2nd week of August. I'm planning on trying to post daily if we have access to the web. Stay tuned for details!