Malecha Re-Onion 2009

PaulC has not had an adventure since Hanson, Sean and I went to the Sioux to get Clowntown, so I am due for one.

This isn’t much of an adventure, but its all I got. I am going to drive the bike to Northfield for the family reunion this year. I am leaving Concord Sunday afternoon, I will stay overnight at Melanie’s and head for Northfield Monday morning.

The total trip is 1,407 miles. On a trip that long my main focus is of course safety which includes finding ways to stay focused. So to keep focus and make the trip as quick as possible, I massage the numbers on the GPS constantly for the entire trip, and for this trip it looks like this:

I figure that I can easily hit a “moving average” speed of 55 mph. Moving average does not include stops of any kind: if the bike stops moving for traffic, it does not impact the moving average. But when I stop for gas the slow down and speed back up will impact moving average as will slow traffic. So I figure that I can easily average 55 mph, so I am going to try for 65. Now, I want to be safe doing that, so I wont go more than 10mph over the speed limit. Since most of the trip is on wide open stretches of route 90 where the speed limit is 65mph, that works out well. Of course, Toledo is slower, and Chicago is all but guaranteed to be stop and go traffic. But parts of 90 are 70 mph, so I think that it might work out.

The second number to play with is “stop time”, and importantly “stop time” vs. “moving time”. I am going to shoot for a stop time of no more than 10 minutes per hour of moving time. That FEELS like it should be a pretty easy goal, but we’ll see. If I hit stop and go traffic in Chicago, that will eat into my stop time. And don’t forget exit 12 on route 90 east of Madison! Cheese curds, A&W and fireworks! So that will prolly be a 30 minute stop including gas up.

More short stops eats into the moving average, but stopping for a break while traffic is slow could help the moving average overall. That's the massaging part. Of course the GPS is turned off when I stop for the night in Fremont Indiana and turned back on after breakfast, before I hit the highway.

So with those numbers plugged in (65 mph average moving speed, 10 minutes/hour break) I get:

	Miles	Drive Time	Stop Time	total time
Day 1	159	2.45	.40	2.85
Day 2	692	10.65	1.77	12.42
Day 3	556	8.55	1.43	9.98
Total	1407	21.65	3.61	25.25

Times are hours and fractions of hours.

Day 1 is a bit off as I will drive straight through to Melanie’s with no stop, so that .4 hours (24 minutes) can be used the following two days. It will make a day go over, but the trip could still work out.

The “big unknown” for me is stop time. In the truck this schedule would be a BREEZE. But on the bike I can’t eat, or drink coffee. So how much time will that take up? Also, that’s a long haul on the bike, will I be forced to stop to stretch and give my back a rest? Dunno, I will let you know. :)

If you want to see where I am on the trip, you can follow me here as I will post from my Blackberry when I can, and you can also see where I am on this page. In the upper left corner there is a widget called “Where is PaulC?” That has my location updated every few minutes.