The Beginning of The Epic Journey

 Hey its Suicide Mike here and I wanted to share with you an epic journey I went on with my motorcycle, it started in Grand Rapids Michigan when I decided to move to Oceanside California and I was going to ride my bike the whole way. My dad once told me that when he was in his 20's, around the same age I was, he rode his Honda 750 from coast to coast. He said one day he decided that he was going to go on a little trip, he packed his sleeping bag and road all the way to the coast. When he got to one coast he would turn around and drive all the way to either another coast or to where it got to cold to ride in which case he would turn around and keep going. His trip went on for a few weeks but him and I shared the love of the ride so I basically did the same thing, I packed my riding gear, iPod, and some weather gear and got on the road headed to the west coast. 

          The journey began with the bike, I had traded in my first street bike which was a 2002 Honda 600f4i for a brand new 2006 Suzuki GSX1300R Hayabusa. The "Busa" as I called it was my dream bike, I saw one a long time ago when I had started considering purchasing a street bike and immediately fell in love with her, I had been riding dirt bikes since I was about 13 but there was no way I was going to have that powerful machine as my first street bike. I got my Busa as impulsively as I get everything else, I woke up one Saturday and decided that I am ready for my dream bike so I went straight to the dealer and said "I want to trade my bike in and leave with that bike right there." I was pointing at the brand new Hayabusa that was in the display case. I sat for a few hours as I waited for them to prepare the bike, it was so new that it had just come out of the crate and wasn't even ready to be taken out on the street yet. The bike had "0" miles so I was told to ride it carefully to break it in and bring it back after I put 600 miles on it for its first tune-up. So this all happened on Saturday and I left the shop in the evening right before they closed. I brought the bike back to the shop on Monday when they were open again with 700 miles, they were blown away telling me they had never had anyone bring a bike back in that quick. Within the first few weeks I had already put on 2000 miles, I had a car but hardly every used it, in fact I worked in an office environment and had to wear suits and ties and I would still ride my bike to work. 

          It was middle of July when I saved enough money to move to California to be with my family, I dropped my car off at my parents house to be sold, moved all my belongings to storage, and sold everything I no longer needed. The only stuff I kept with me were the essentials for the ride, my riding gear, 2 sets of clothes (warm & cold weather), my iPod, and some little stuff. I packed everything onto the back seat of my bike, said goodbye to my friends, and got on the road. There are only 3 things you need when you go on a ride, your gear, your music, and traveling money. At the time I had $5000, I mailed some clothes to my destination, and the few items I had packed on my bike. My destination was a friends house in Oceanside California, some Marines I used to be stationed with said I could stay with them while I got on my feet so I called him and said "I am leaving today, I will see you in a couple days." On my ride out it was warm so I was just wearing a green Marine T-shirt, and some workout pants, I wore my iPod on my belt with the buds in my ears at a low level so I could still hear my surroundings. On the back seat I had a backpack that I stuffed everything in, I had bought a tinted visor for riding during the day, hard knuckle gloves, and a knife for the road (just in case). I also packed a weather proof bag that I was issued in the Marines that we used in our packs to keep our gear from getting wet, I also used the  bungee nets to tie everything down on the back. 

          There was one thing that I had not considered, and I didn't even think about it until well later into the trip. Like I said I had put quite a few miles on the bike already so everything was broken in, and I had changed or tuned everything up to that point...except for the tires, I was still using the stock Bridgestone tires that came on the bike when I bought it, but like I said this doesn't come up until later on. I had packed my iPod with as much music as I could fit onto it, riding for 2300 miles by yourself is going to get very boring, especially when most of it is across the Midwestern flat land and straight roads surrounded by nothing but fields. When I got close to the Iowa border I came across two riders on cruisers, they looked like what you would stereotype a rider like that, they wore black leather jackets and chaps, they had lots of patches on their vests and stickers on their bikes. Neither of them wore helmets, their bikes were loud and looked as if they had been well ridden. If you don't already know this I am going to fill you in, there are two different types of riders out there, sport bike riders and cruiser riders. Neither of these groups get together to ride, most of them don't even get along together. Motorcyclists in general look out for each other, they wave to each other while riding on the road and stick together in clubs and on the road. When a rider encounters another rider on the road headed in the same direction it is not uncommon that they will start to ride together, as long as they are of the same class (sport or cruiser) this will also depend if one or both of them belong to a club already, if they do the chances go down but sometimes they still will depending on what club they belong to and it those clubs get along. That being said I would say the chances that a cruiser and a sport bike meeting on the road will ride together is about 1 in 1000000. I personally don't hold grudges against other class riders unless they give me a reason so I began to investigate this situation by riding behind them at a safe distance. If you know the club follows 1% diamond patch rules then you try to avoid them as much as possible (unless you want to get killed) if you don't know then its best to play it safe before you get involved, a 1% diamond patch means they allow and can be prone to violence if you make them mad and a rider trying to ride with people who don't want them is a good way to do that.
 Well these riders happened to be ones who didn't mind a rider coming in to join them so I rode with them from the border of Iowa to about Des Moines. In Des Moines they broke off the interstate and I kept going, only here is where my iPod started to die and I had to pull off at a truck stop to charge it. This truck stop was not rider friendly by any means and I ended up having to find an outlet that was between an isle and stand there for about an hour waiting for it to charge. I still had a long ride ahead of me, it was getting dark, and in Iowa it is nothing but long straight roads........

To Be Continued...