Almost ready....

After a weekend of motorsport - karting most of Friday with club100 then a trackday at bedford in the Subaru on Saturday (the TVR was sold last week :-( ) - I'm now back to sticking the roadbook together.

The roadbook comes as 3 strips of tulip diagrams per piece of A4 paper, these need to be cut, and taped end to end ; so 1 A4 peice of paper results in a metre of roadbook instructions. For the 4800 odd miles there are 94 meters of roadbook to cut and tape together !! The roadbook is then mounted in a roadbook holder, with two knobs for rolling the roadbook forwards or backwards to see the directions for the trail.

The roadbook contains a rolling mileage, so that you know how far the next junction is - this means if you have 'wrong slotted' (gone the wrong way), you'll know pretty quickly - i.e. if the roadbook says at mile 256 there should be a fork in the trail, and your odometer is reading 280 miles, then you have done something wrong. At this stage, you need to back track to the last known good junction, set the odometer back to the last known mileage reading, and try again. Usually a rally trip computer is used for this - and you can set the computer to increment or decrement the mileage, or manually wind back the mileage. These computers are quite expensive (several 100 £), and will be a pain to mount on the bike with limited tools, so I've bought a mountain bike computer - this will be simple to mount, tiny, and will allow me to manually set the mileage. It doesn't have any decrementing features, so I'll just have to be accurate with my navigation !!

I will also have GPS backup, which will contain the waypoints for the trail. I'm not sure how accurate these waypoints will be - they were created by Doug by following the roadbook on Google Earth, and entering the waypoints into Google Earth at the junctions  - respect !!!!!!

So, I fly out tomorrow to Phoenix, Arizona to meet Phil - the guy we met when we were offroading in Russia last month. He and some of his buddies are going to join me on the transamtrail.

In fact plans have changed a little;
Originally I was going to do the trip solo, and intended to buy a Kawasaki KLR650 to do the trip - this choice was based on the fact that the bike (as standard) had a large tank range, and good load carrying capacity. The KLR was always going to be a plodding lump, but it would be fine for the job.
Phil, then said he would like to join me, and his choice of bike was a KTM 950 Super Enduro !! He also said is brother was likely to join us in a backup truck, and would carry luggage,  fuel, spare tyres, etc, etc.
Knowing this, I decided that the KLR would be the wrong bike, so I called Phil, and he very kindly offered to let me ride one of his enduro bikes - a CRF or a KTM ( I can't remember which he said, as I was too excited by the news to recall what he said on the phone!!).

I received an email from Phil last night, inviting some of his friends to join us on the trip - he has 5 bikes (!!), the backup truck, and his private plane to fly his buddies in from Arizona to whereever we are on the trail, so they can join the ride for a few days.

This got us thinking... and after a couple of emails, Caroline is now going to join us for a week - hopefully for the Colorado and Utah sections. She'll fly from Heathrow to Phoenix, then get collected and flown to (hopefully) somewhere near Trinidad, Colorado.
Then she can either ride with us (if her wrist has repaired after an operation) or drive the backup truck.

Best get back to that damn roadbook.....