Some people choose to ride their motorcycles through town on short cruises or as a commuter vehicle. Others, though, hearken to the call of the open road and take their bikes out for rides of hundreds of miles over several days’ time. Long-distance riding is a popular pastime, but it does require more preparation than a brief ride through your city might necessitate.
With the right gear and prep work, you’ll be able to have a successful long-distance trip with no mishaps! This guide to long-distance riding by Bright Power Sports of Lincoln Park, MI, will help you get started on the right path.
Before you head out on a long journey, you’ll want to take some time to practice and build up your endurance. Just like you’d do before attempting any sport, you’ll need to make sure your body can handle the ride. After hours in the same posture, your muscles and joints may ache, your eyes will grow tired and your mind will become fatigued.
Take short rides around town and little hour-long jaunts to other places nearby to see how well you do at riding for shorter lengths of time. You’ll want to slowly increase how long you ride in a day until you’re about where you want to be for a long-distance trip. Day trips are a great starting point before your multi-day motorcycling adventure. This building up of strength and endurance is particularly important if you just got a new bike, since it will handle differently than you’re accustomed to.
You can get away with being spontaneous on a short ride. Take a different road, explore for a few miles to see where it goes, then find your way back home. However, on a long trip, this isn’t an effective strategy, as you can easily find yourself lost or going miles out of your way, wasting fuel. If you don’t know where you’re stopping each night, you may be riding at night while tired, trying to find a place to stay, and that’s extremely dangerous. Or you could be starving for hours because you didn’t look to see whether there were places to eat on your route.
Avoid all of these travails by planning your route in advance. Map out your way from home to your destination and look up traffic conditions and weather forecasts to make sure it’s not going to be too difficult to travel. Check to see where gas stations, hotels, campsites and restaurants are on your route so you can plan a stop every few hours and also know where you need to end up each evening to rest. Then you can book your lodging, whether it’s a campsite or motel room.
You’ll also benefit from this strategy by learning about cool tourist destinations that you can visit that you might never see from the road.
Finally, you’ll want to be certain that your motorcycle itself is up to the task of traveling for hundreds of miles without breaking down. Do a thorough inspection of every part. Make sure the tire pressure is even and up to manufacturer’s standards, check for embedded objects and adequate tread depth. Get your oil changed if it looks sludgy. Fill up your gas tank completely. Check lights and signals so you know they function well.
Go on a brief ride around the block to make sure your brakes respond as they should. Doing this now will save you a headache down the road, but you should also carry a repair kit in your storage compartment just to be prepared.
Bright Power Sports serves the entire Detroit metro area with our location in Lincoln Park. Come see us to check out our inventory of new and used motorcycles by all the top brands! We also welcome our customers coming from Oakland, Wayne and Livingston counties as well as Macomb, Michigan.
