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The Long Road - Adventure Touring Ride a dual purpose bike ? Want to turn your bike into a sport-tourer? Rack up big mileage here!

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Old 06-25-2008, 06:42 PM   #1 (permalink)
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C2W?'s Avatar
 
Join Date: Jan 2006
Bike: "Little" 6Fiddy
Location: Carlsbad (Not NM)
Posts: 127
Default StromFestWest 2008 – Cedar City

Getting ready for the third annual western Vstrom gathering (held in Cedar City Utah this year).
Wednesday afternoon I did my pre-ride maintenance . . .

Changed the oil and filter, checked and lubed the chain and put on the Happy Trails panniers.

From San Diego I guess I coulda just slabbed it up the 15 all the way to Cedar city. . . Google says it would have been
482 mi or about 7 hours one of the most boring slab rides I can think of.

Instead I decided to do what I have done every year for the StromFest. . . .
Make it a No or Low-Slab trip. All in all I clocked 2114 miles in 5 days of riding.
Actually ended up being 852 miles each way staying off the slab.

So Thursday morning, armed with my fresh from Dazzle, semi-unofficial STROMFESTWEST 08 Tee shirt I hit the road about 7:30.



First day was gonna be a long one....I had reservations at a Notell Motel in Flagstaff. It would turn out to be 570 miles to Flagstaff.

3 ½ hours later, Over the hill through Julian and down into the desert to beautiful downtown Brawley (my apologies if you actually live in Brawley).

Thinking about gassing up as I cruise down the main drag I noticed a local SD area Strom Rider (Craig) and his wife just finishing fueling up.



After fueling my 6FIddy Craig and Lisa and I head for Blythe.
Craig and his Wife Lisa have 50K (Probably 30% dirt) miles on their little 6Fiddy including a trip to Alaska

Out of Brawley and heading for Blythe we notice a monster fire in the distance.




As we get closer it's pretty obvious it's a controlled burn of some sort so it's on to Brawley.



From Brawley Craig and Lisa are taking a different route to the StromFest so we part company. I'm heading east now on the only slab I couldn't avoid. . . I10.

Even using the frontage roads I ended up doing about 60 miles of slab.

CONTINUED. . . .