Tag: travel

Adventure Plans for 2026

The first year at a new job is often difficult. You walk in the door with no relationships, no political capital, and a lot to learn. This is exponentially more true as you move up the management ladder and I now have north of 120 people working for me in the new role I picked up in February of 2025. 2025 was my least productive riding year in the past 10 (despite adding another bike to the stable), and my least productive writing year possibly ever. I’m one of those people who makes goals (not resolutions, I mean goals) every calendar year. As I survive the Upper Midwest Winter where I can at most sit on my bike in the garage waiting on the ice to melt, here’s what I’m thinking.

Mamma Tried

I’ve gone to Mamma Tried quite a few times but not the past couple of years. After meeting some of the folks who went on to create the Motostate Podcast in Missouri (one of the Lost Adventures, see below) I’ve been following their adventures more closely and I’m headed to Flat out Friday and Mamma Tried with some of these folks in February.

“Lost Adventures” – Clear the Backlog

As of today I have 32 draft posts of short and long trips I haven’t written up yet. By short and long I mean “Went leaf peeping in my own back yard” through “5,000 mile solo trip to Idaho”. I’m going to recover all the media and remember as best I can and get caught up this year.

Trans Wisconsin Adventure Trail (TWAT)

One of the Lost Adventures was my 600mi ride of the Trans Wisconsin Adventure trail in May of 2025. I’m planning to do this again in 2026.

Land in the North Woods

One of my most fundamental dreams in life is to have a cabin on a lake or river somewhere, somewhere I can do what I want and ideally not see other people. I am two years into the journey of exploring Northern Wisconsin and Especially the UP of Michigan (more Lost Adventures) to learn the area, look at land, and save money.

Late in 2025 I found the first serious contender for a purchase, but as I write this area is under 30″ of snow so the necessary diligence won’t really be possible until April. I’ll either start the slow & expensive development of this land this year or continue the hunt.

GBL 2026

An excellent human being and fellow ADV rider has a side project lifestyle brand: Get Busy Livn’. Every year he gathers like-minded individuals to do a trip that truly puts life in airplane mode, usually out West somewhere. July of 2026 will find us in Marble, CO at 8000ft with 4WD vehicles and ADV bikes.

One of the reasons I started ADV riding was to get to places that weren’t easy to get to with camping gear. I want to sit by the shore of a mountain lake, no light polution, maybe put a line in the water, maybe just sit and think.

Beach w/Mrs. RoadRunner

For a married man of a certain age, I do pretty damn close to whatever I want, as long as certain conditions are met. One of those conditions is that Mrs. Roadrunner really needs a week of white sandy beaches every year where possible. A few years ago she convinced me to join her in PADI certification and I’ve been writing about how Diving is Mindful, and we did get to a beach but didn’t get to dive in 2025. I believe we’ll try for Belize this year.

Two-up with Mrs. RoadRunner

After college and having kids, I took a long hiatus from riding. It ate me alive nearly the minute I sold the bike and it only got worse as the years went on and my career progressed and I realized I could be riding any bike I wanted.

In a supreme act of stubbornness, Mrs. RoadRunner insisted on taking the BRC and getting a Honda Shadow to do some riding of her own. One of my favorite pictures of us together is out riding some of Wisconsin’s Rustic Roads.

Damn, I used to be thin:

It’s crazy to realize the Victory Cross Country I was on that day was three motorcycles ago. Over time, Mrs. RoadRunner got less enthused about riding her own the the Shadow has sat for a bit now. In 2026 we’re going to sell it, but she has expressed interest in doing some proper 2-up touring.

Long Two-Wheel Weekend

The only problem with my new ADV bike is that it didn’t come with any extra vacation or add any weekends to the calendar so I wind up splitting my time between bikes. Since I’ve got actual people to do the TWAT with, my annual touring bike “big trip” will likely just be a long weekend to the Smokies, a bike rally, or around Lake Michigan most likely.

Bourbon Trail Weekend

A good friend is looking to finalize his divorce this year, and to celebrate we intend to hit the Kentucky Bourbon trail. Buffalo Trace is by far the best tour I’ve done personally, but they have apparently redone quite a bit of Four Roses and there are some interesting buildings at places like Green River.

Camping

I’ve got various camping setups: moto-camping, moto-glamping, hike-in, Bronco-camping, and a winter hot tent setup. Hot tent camping in 2025 was a real eye opener: during the shoulder seasons you’ve got very few bugs and very few camp neighbors. I plan to do some camping off the ADV bike this year, some hot tent camping, and one hike-in or canoe-in.

Rebuild the Crew

For a while there I had some good motorcycle traditions: do an Iron Butt here & there, camp at the Tomahawk Fall Ride, one week long trip with 3-5 guys, and some weekend pickups. As I think about 2026, though, I see that Corvus, Harley Mark, and Wingnut Dave have moved far away, and Lefty is considering getting rid of his bike. I’ve got to find a few more people to ride with!

So there’s the plan in 2026 for doing what really matters. It feels like a lot right now, but I used to do a lot more! See you out there on the road.

I Hate the Word “Content”

There was a brief moment where I thought maybe the next chapter in my life might be making videos of all the amazing motorcycle roads in America: how to get to them, where to stay, where to eat, and the glory of the roads themselves. Then, I made two discoveries that greatly attenuated this idea. One was Adam Sandoval: no way what I could do with my yearly vacation would compete with what he had done. The second was the fact that I hate setting up shots and editing video. I love talking, pontificating, philosophising, but it turns out I actually hate the core part of moto-vlogging. I do some small amount of video editing, but it turns out that this turns one of my favorite things into just a goddamned job.

I have a GoPro 13 Black and I capture some moments for friends and family whether it be ADV, scuba diving, or random camping shenanigans. I watch a lot of motorcycle-focused Youtubers though: Shade Tree Surgeon, Dork in the road, Ride to Food, Her Two Wheels, Off She Goes, Just G Kue, Doodle on a Motorcycle, Kidmoto22, MotoState Podcast, Whit Meza, Rever, RIDE Adventures, DanDan the Fireman, Meghan Stark, Lowbrowcustoms, Real Riders Ride, RevZilla, Klim, and others.
Jesus, just the thought of actually properly linking to each one of those channels reminds me of why I don’t produce motorcycle content.

Ugh, and there’s that word, “content”.

I have seen a number of Youtubers who ask the audience what kind of content we, the watchers, would like to consume. These words make me think of a nest of baby birds. Momma flies to the nest, and the baby birds open their mouths for momma to regurgitate whatever directly into their mouths. I went out and got this, now let me vomit this into your face. Motorcycle riding, ADV riding, scuba diving, camping, any kind of adventure travel: these are sacred things to me, the things that I wade through corporate America and 401ks to get to. When someone reduces this to “I will create the content, and you will consume the content”, it makes me sick just a little bit.

You’re on Youtube, with 300,000 subscribers, making cool videos for me to watch. You need money to do this full time. You work with companies who sponsor you. I get all that: just don’t reduce this to yet another transactional interaction. Riding across, discovering a cool restaurant in a small town, camping, seeing amazing sights: these are sacred experiences.

The ADV Thing

I added a Husqvarna Norden 901 to my garage. Why?

On an episode of of This Motorcycle Life, the host interviewed Melissa Holbrook Pierson. She’s most famous for taking a very long ride on a Ural with her disabled child, but also for writing a book called “The Man Who Stop at Nothing“, in which she claims that Iron Butt style riding is the most pure form of motorcycling. As a multiple Iron Butt finisher , I must disagree.

For a long time, a couple of extreme events have been calling to me. The first is the Hoka Hey Challenge, in which riders cover around 10,000 miles in short order, often 10 days or so. The rules include no staying in hotels and no using GPS. You have to sleep by your pony and follow a set of written directions with paper maps. The first years, people wrecked and died because the trip included gravel and a lot of extreme terrain.

The other is the James Dalton Highway, riding all the way to the Arctic Circle in Deadhorse/Prudhoe Bay. The last 400 miles of this trip is largely shitty gravel.

Beyond these trips, it should come as no surprise that significant miles of dirt and gravel on a 1000lb touring motorcycle is at best impractical. The tires don’t grip, the suspension isn’t built for that kind of rut. The appeal of a machine that can gobble some highway miles but then just take a sharp right onto a gravel road, a Backcountry Discovery Route, maybe some muddy Jeep trails, is strong.

There are views and settings that are hard to get to, and some of those are precious and likely to be much more sparsely occupied than the paved roads to a county park.

The Challenger, of course, is still in the garage. The American highway system is amazing, and that is the machine for long road trips.

I didn’t grow up on dirt bikes like a lot of people did. The guy who’s been putting patches on his black vest for years is buying the full Klim riding gear and hopefully putting some stickers on “panniers” soon.

Adventure touring is the purest form of motorcycling.