Look out Great White North

[TCMike]

Took that boat on 8-19 on my trip.
Great report. I was planning on doing one myself, but haven't gotten around to it yet.

Took that boat on 8-19 on my trip.
Great report. I was planning on doing one myself, but haven't gotten around to it yet.

We were on the 9 am crossing on the 19th with a few other bikes, one guy on a BMW coming back from Winnipeg, a few hogs, a couple of sport bikes and our FJR's. Would have been nice to run into you.

Thanks for the comments on the report. Looking forward to reading yours as well.

I was on the 3 o'clock headed the other direction.

 

[Old Michael]

Excellent! Excellent! Excellent!

I can't even reference my favorite photo, there are so many. This is the kind of ride report

that has a fellow getting out maps and considering possibilities.

Great stuff Bandit! Thank you.

 

[canyonman]

Now you guys had a time, wow what a ride and it looked from the pictures that the weather was mostly good, mostly.

Thanks for the report and pics looking forward to the rest and the video don't forget the video.

 

[Bungie]

Great report & pics. Glad to see you enjoyed and got treated well in my neck of the woods!

My pics of Old Woman Bay:

 

[FJRBandit]

OM - thanks for the kind words. that means a lot coming from you! always love reading your ride reports!

canyon - boy do we have videos, i just have to figure out how to post them. if you couldn't tell from the bug splatters in some of the photos, we had a camera mounted on a ram mount centered above the instrument panel behind the windscreen. we've got video of us burning up some corn in Iowa and smoking up the twisties in West VA. i'll do my best to figure out how to post vids this week.

Bungie - thanks for the compliments! we really did have a blast in Canada. Old Woman Bay was one of those majestic places, as soon as we left we started planning the trip to bring the wives back there someday. We even brought a few of the granite rocks home with us. Also, thanks to you for keeping up with the assistance list. we had our copy with us on the trip, thank goodness we didn't have any reason to pull it out.

I'll finish up the report tomorrow (minus the videos) ~~~ thanks again for all the kind words guys!

 

[FJRBandit]

Thurs 20th - woke up to this - i know the last pic was essentially the same, but wow!

we toured around the falls then on to the border, for another shakedown, no pics available as the Border Patrol caught Mike capturing the moment and made him delete his pics in front of them. This is the only one we came away with, not even sure it's legal...

We headed to see Justin and Terry at Voz Cycles in Niagara Falls, NY where we had staged rear tires. If you are in the Niagara Falls area, stop in and say hello to these guys. They took care of our needs, had us slotted for an appointment and even called that morning to make sure we were on schedule. It ended up, I had enough tread to make it home so I decided against installing a new rear tire but Mike had his swaped out.

then down through Upstate NY

into Central PA

and then into Gettysburg for the evening

 

[user 6393]

Great report & pics. Glad to see you enjoyed and got treated well in my neck of the woods!
My pics of Old Woman Bay:

GREAT shot, you even managed to get the Old Woman in the shot too! Howdyadothat? :blink:

 

[Bungie]

Great report & pics. Glad to see you enjoyed and got treated well in my neck of the woods!
My pics of Old Woman Bay:

GREAT shot, you even managed to get the Old Woman in the shot too! Howdyadothat? :blink:

I had a really hot young woman take the pic of course!

Now the question is, how did THIS picture get taken?! (taken a couple miles down the road at Sand River Falls)

 

[user 6393]

Great report & pics. Glad to see you enjoyed and got treated well in my neck of the woods!
My pics of Old Woman Bay:

GREAT shot, you even managed to get the Old Woman in the shot too! Howdyadothat? :blink:

I had a really hot young woman take the pic of course!

Now the question is, how did THIS picture get taken?! (taken a couple miles down the road at Sand River Falls)

You had 2 women??? OMG!...........oink!

 

[FJRBandit]

Fri 21st - Headed out of the hotel to tour the Gettysburg battlefield

our hotel was on the same roundabout as the house where Lincoln stayed the night before he gave the Gettysburg Address

drove through town in our official squid gear

i would be remiss if i didn't throw in a couple of pictures of the Cyclorama at the visitor's center --- In 1883, French artist Paul Philippoteaux was paid $50,000 to create the circular portrayal of Pickett's Charge at the end of the three-day Battle of Gettysburg. It has now been fully restored and is absolutely incredible!

toured the battlefield

from the Southern perspective,

Little Round Top in the background

General Lee

and from the Northern perspective at the famed Little Round Top,

stopped by the National Cemetery to pay our respects

then off to Harper's Ferry

from there we headed to Skyline Drive, VA - where the deer along the trail, not the smokies, caused us to keep our speed down to the posted 30 mph

where we found my mountain ---

and saw a great sunset from Skyline on our way to Slaugton, VA for the evening

 

[FJRBandit]

Sat 22nd - We started our last day of touring, 500+ miles, with 250 mountain twisties then 250 slab to Knoxville, with some beautiful sights crossing the mountains of Virgina heading into West Virgina

we were heading toward the Green Bank Radiotelescope (GBT) in Green Bank, WV and found some great riding along the way with some scenic sites

then the GBT itself

intelligent life is not so intelligent after all...

more great riding on the way to the New River Gorge Bridge

after 250 miles of the most techincal riding of the trip we headed for Knoxville, 300 miles away! we slabbed it down I-81 and saw some beautiful VA countryside

Sun 23rd - Our final shot, back in Birmingham in my garage... all good things must come to an end, after 4,000 miles for me and 4,250 for Mike, he still had 250 miles left to Niceville, can't you see how excited he looks about that!

In summary, we found that there's a hell of a lot of corn in Iowa, it's great to have great friends in Minnesota, Lake Superior is a majestic place, Canada is beautiful, the power of the Falls is awesome, Gettysburg is a very moving place, WV has some awesome riding and it really doesn't matter where you go, as long as you go, but you can't beat spending 12 days and 4,000 miles riding FJR's with your childhood buddy!

Videos to follow later this week....

 

[wheatonFJR]

WOW! :yahoo:

Now THAT'S a trip. Thanks for taking all the time to do the report. Great pictures! :clapping:

 

[gypsy]

Thanks I really enjoyed that. This summer I am riding vicariously through other people's trip reports.

I agree that WV has some great roads. Can't wait to get back there again at some point.

gypsy

 

[Bungie]

You had 2 women??? OMG!...........oink!

Ya, that way they have each other to talk to when I fall asleep.

 

[user 6393]

You had 2 women??? OMG!...........oink!

Ya, that way they have each other to talk to when I fall asleep.

now, is that falling asleep thing before or after? cuz they might be doing more than chatting, depending on when, well...erm :bleh: , yanno

 

[JT 384]

Glad to see you guys had a great ride, to bad the weather here that week sucked. Try to come back up here again some day.

 

[FJRBandit]

Glad to see you guys had a great ride, to bad the weather here that week sucked. Try to come back up here again some day.

Thanks JT, and everyone else for your nice comments. Actually, the weather heading into Ontario on Sunday was rainy, but we were prepared and actually enjoyed the added element of the cross winds :blink: the rest of the week the weather was awesome. all of the Canuck stations were talking about the "heat wave". We actually were using our heated grips one morning....

Here's a link to all the pics that were selected from our lot of over 1,000. Since I am too stupid to figure out how to link video to this site, I h\am posting the link to my PIcasa page. https://picasaweb.google.com/turkbence

I have also uploaded four selected videos to the Picasa site. One is from around Superior coming down a mountian overlooking Old Woman Bay (awesome!) one is from Pennsylvania, we're on PA 153 (check out the 20 mph Truck Speed Limit signs, that obviously we didn't adhere to because we're not trucks :clapping: ) one is from US 250 in West Virginia and the final video doesn't feature us, it is from the NHRA and is one of the Top Fuel races at Brainerd (make sure you stick around for the final 4 seconds of the video)