To Canada and Beyond!

I wish we could update this more often. We have been doing do so many things and seeing so many beautiful places it's hard to remember everything. Jason and I ended up spending one more day at Irene's house in Kimberley. We left the luggage at home and hit the road to see Lazy Lake, Wasa Lake, and a natural mineral hot spring. The plan was to take a dirt road to see the lakes, have a picnic lunch, and then head up to the hot springs. Well... evidently we took a turn to early and a huge logging truck made us turn around; so we ate our lunch in a scenic wooded area instead haha. We went back out to the highway to find the hot spring and found that the road to the hot spring was a long curvy dirt road anyway so we still had a good ride.
Hot springs are amazing!! Best experience ever! There was an upper pool which was too hot for me and then there were several other pools which varied from medium temp to super cold river water temp.  It was so relaxing.




We were so grateful for our stay at Irene's house. We were able to wash our motorcycles, wash clothes, shower, and have some great meals. All re-energized we packed up and hit the road again. Several locals had asked us if we were taking Grey's Creek Pass, so we did some research and decided that was a great path to take out of Kimberley. We were a bit concerned about the difficulty of this mountain pass but could turn around if it became too rough.

Not too far into the pass we ran into some other riders. We stopped to ask them if they were ok because their gear was spread all over the ground. One of the guys had packed their bike poorly so the exhaust caught his gear on fire. He had put the fire out and were repacking whatever gear he had left when we showed up. A good reminder to always tie your stuff on your bike right the first time haha.

The pass ended up not being too bad. It was very beautiful but had some rocky sections so I was sweating my butt off by the time we were done. Jason just floated over everything as usual haha.


The mountain pass came out near Kootenay Bay. We took a huge ferry across the bay and looked for a camp spot in Nakusp. Instead of staying in the campground, we found a great spot right next to the river. It was close to the road but secluded so no one could see us. We cooled off in the river, cooked potato soup, and went to sleep early.
 
We are slowly being ok with camping away from other people due to the threat of grizzly bears up here. We bought a cool new toy called a bear banger. It's about the size of a pen and has a cartridge that screws on the end. If a bear comes around, you pull back the spring loaded pin and let it go in the direction of the bear. It makes a loud shotgun noise and scares the bear away. The locals said it's better than bear spray because you don't have to be as close to the bear when you use it. Thankfully we haven't needed to use it but of course Jason wanted to shoot one off "to make sure ut worked" haha. It's definitely loud! We have a set of flare cartridges for it too.
 
We highly recommend riding through B.C. (even if you are in a car). It is some of the most beautiful scenery we've ever seen. Imagine Colorado and Minnesota combined...pine trees, rivers, lakes, waterfalls, and mountains everywhere! Everything is super green and the water is super blue.




From Nakusp, we headed to check out Revelstoke, Lake Louise, and Banff. Revelstoke is an amazing ski town. It's definitely a place we could see ourselves living in.
 
We did a little shopping and ate lunch there and then hit the road for Lake Louise. There was a lot of traffic but the mountain pass was beautiful. They had tunnels built where avalanches occurred frequently.

 When we arrived at Lake Loise, we were a little disappointed by how touristy it was. There was as much traffic as Yellowstone National Park. Lake Louise is beyond beautiful but it's not a place to hang out for too long.



Because of all the tourists and the difficulty of finding a campground that allowed tents, we ended up in a crowded campground between Lake Louise and Banff. The plan was to run into Banff to see it in the morning and then cruise up to Jasper.


Banff is a cute ski town. It reminded us of Vail, Colorado. We grabbed a yummy coffee, walked the main strip of town, and then decided to head to Jasper. While in Banff, it started raining and it rained for the rest of the day. It's amazing how quickly the weather can change. 2 days ago were record high temps near 100 degrees and sunny and then yesterday was pouring rain and cold enough to wear our heated gear. As cold and rainy as it was, we absolutely loved Jasper National Park! Beautiful icey glaciers everywhere which had huge waterfalls going down to deep blue lakes and rivers. We would have stopped to explore more but we had a hard time pulling our frozen selves off our warm bikes haha.



On our way out of the park, we saw a red deer (I think it was a reindeer though).


Despite all the rain, our moto gear has been keeping us dry. Super thankful for Klim gear! It was still rainy and cold though so we got a hotel room in Edson. Our plan is to find a shop here to get new tires (something a little more for off roading) and hopefully meet up with his cousin, Kurt, again before heading up to the more secluded areas of the northwest territories. We are so close to Alaska now! From here on out, there will be a lot more dirt roads and having to calculate gas mileage between towns. Wish us luck! :)

Action Packed Days

We have finally had some beautiful weather for camping, so we haven't had wifi access to keep everyone up to date on our travel stories. When we left off, we were heading into Bear Tooth Pass. Such a beautiful road! As long as you don't get stuck behind slow motor homes, you can carry speed through S-turn after S-turn.


You keep curving and climbing in elevation until you reach the peak. There were piles of snow still on the sides of the road! Once again I was thankful for headed grips haha.



We highly recommend Bear Tooth Pass for all motorcycle riders. It should be on your bucket list.

From there we headed into Yellowstone National Park. Yellowstone has beautiful scenery and amazing wildlife but the traffic is horrendous! It took most of the day to get through Yellowstone because one animal near the road would cause the biggest traffic jam ever from tourists trying to take pictures. There were a couple instances of super long lines of cars and we thought there must be a bear or something really cool to look at (people were running down the street between cars with their cameras) and all it would be was another bison. Don't get me wrong...bison are cool but there are millions of them everywhere in Yellowstone. There's definitely not a shortage of seeing bison there.

We ended up seeing a grizzly bear (from a distance thankfully), a black bear, a herd of elk, and lots of bison. The last part of our day in the park was saved for checking out Old Faithful. Who knew it would be such a production?! They had bleachers all around it, restaurants and gift shops galore, and a ton of people arriving in big buses. It was still cool though. We bought a soft pretzel and sat on a log away from all the crowds. The coolest part was all the smokin hot sulfur pools.


Once we made it through all the traffic leaving Yellowstone, it was too late to try and find a campground (all the campgrounds in Yellowstone were full) so we got a cheap hotel room in West Yellowstone.

The next day we headed out to Bozeman, Montana. Jason's dry bag had a hole in it, so we spent most of the day driving through all the streets of Bozeman looking for a rafting store that sold dry bags. We finally found one in the late afternoon, got his stuff switched over, and headed out of town to find a campground. By the way...Montana is absolutely beautiful! If we hadn't of just bought our first home in Colorado, we would have bought a home here. Anyway...we found a cute little campground near the mountains and next to a creek called Aspen Grove. Bob, the campground attendant, was the nicest person ever. He stopped by to chat and even gave us firewood for the evening. Side note...there are lots of great secluded places to camp in Montana but we are now in grizzly country and everyone has recommended either camping with groups of people around or camping in a campground that has bear boxes (metal storage containers for your food and stuff that smells good that bears cannot open). That is why we have only stayed in campgrounds so far. Here was our site in Aspen Grove:

 All the nights we have camped up until that night we had made freeze dried soups and chili (bought from the Amish stores back home) and they have been so yummy. Better than normal camping food! That night however we made backpacker meals. Definitely not as tastey but very filling.

We made it through the night without any bears so we packed up and headed toward Glacier National Park. It was quite a long drive through Helena and some beautiful twisty back roads (plus we had to drive through a vicious thunderstorm) so our plan was to camp outside the park and then spend all day the next day driving the Road to the Sun. We found the most beautiful campsite on Hungry Horse Lake (they even had bear boxes)! We had a little extra time so we bought a couple fishing licenses and a few beers and spent the afternoon fishing. We didn't catch anything but we had fun trying.


We had a deer walk right up to us at our campsite. We named him Charlie since he looked like a bigger version of our dog haha.

The next morning we fueled up and entered Glacier National Park. Thankfully we started somewhat early so the traffic wasn't too bad. Glacier National Park is absolutely beautiful!! We highly recommended adding the Road to the Sun to your bucket list too. There were waterfalls everywhere, glaciers in the distance, and beautiful mountain views everywhere.






We didn't want to try crossing the Canadian border in the evening, so we found a campsite at Talley Lake (recommended to us by our friend Shahn who grew up in this area). We have been very fortunate to have all our campsites near a creek or lake. We love hearing the sound of the river while we are laying in our tent. Oh!...almost forgot...we had quite the gourmet campfire supper that evening. We bought a small collapsible cooler to put beers and stuff in so we bought hotdogs and beans to cook over the campfire. They were delicious!! The campground host came over to chat while we were cooking and told us stories about his motorcycle adventures. He said he bought a Harley and didn't come home til 70,000 miles later. It's amazing all the random people we meet at gas stations, grocery stores, restaurants, etc that have been on some kind of motorcycle adventure. We have even ran into some riders we met in one city and showed up again in another city.


Anyway...the morning had come for us to try and cross the border into Canada! We were a bit nervous because Jason's ability to get into Canada determined the fate of our trip. We grabbed a coffee in Eureka (the last US town before the Roosville border crossing) and sat in a parking lot making our last few phone calls before our phones stopped working. When we rolled up to wait in line at the border crossing guard stand, there was a small line but we had a couple other motorcyclists to chat with. They were heading up to Jasper for a little vacation. Once it was our turn, Jason went first. The guy took Jason's passport, asked him a few questions, and sent him on his way into Canada. Then it was my turn. Same thing happened...hand the guy my passport, asked me a few questions, and then went on through. We were kinda shocked at how easy that was compared to past experiences of other people. The border guy was super friendly too. Jason did his happy dance and we headed off toward Cranbrook.


Our bikes really really needed oil changes so that was our most important task to tackle in Cranbrook before heading to our friend's house in Kimberley. During lunch we asked some locals if there was a dirt bike shop in town and thankfully there was. It was called All Season Motorsports. They were the nicest people ever! Jason bought a new front tire for his bike because his knobby tire was all worn out and then we bought all the supplies we needed for our oil changes. The bike shop was super kind to loan us a corner of their shop to work on our bikes. Jason did a quick easy job on his bike but mine on the other hand was a pain in the butt!! BMW seems to make everything complicated. Normally to do an oil change there is one main oil pan bolt you take off to drain all the oil and then empty the oil from the oil filter compartment, etc. Well...I drained all the oil from the drain plug...blah blah blah...and then went to fill it and the oil tank was still half full of oil!! Neither of us knew what was going on so we did all sorts of things to try and figure out this issue. It wasn't until we researched on the computer later that we found BMW has a second drain plug on the bottom of the upper oil reservoir! You have to take the left side panel off to access it....ridiculous. At least we know now.


Our bikes were so happy to have clean, new oil. They were so much smoother after that. A huge thank you to All Season Motorsports!!

We arrived in Kimberly early evening, grabbed a few groceries, and settled in. We are so grateful to our friend, Irene, for letting us stay a couple days at her home. We were able to shower, do laundry, and reorganize ourselves. We enjoyed great company, explored the cute little town, and had some amazing food. Irene went over some maps with us, so I think we have an idea or a general direction for where we are going tomorrow. From here on out we won't have many days with available wifi, so we apologize for not updating things as often. At least our gps tracker will follow us the whole time. We uploaded a bunch more pictures too:
http://mommer.smugmug.com/Motorcycles/Alaska-2015/49948984_NtmPzL#!i=4132717478&k=qHFcmx7

Thanks for following along! :)

Catching up on things

I have to make this quick because we are using Jason's phone to hotspot internet for us. When we left Shannon's house in Fargo, it rained cats & dogs all day til we arrived in Mobridge, South Dakota. All our gear worked really well. The Klim gear and our boots stayed completely dry on the inside. Make sure when you shop for waterproof gear that it says waterproof not water resistant. The rain was so cold we ended up wearing our heated gear. I absolutely love the heated grips on my BMW. My gloves were soaked but my hands stayed toasty warm. We ended up getting a hotel room for the night to let everything dry out and warm up.

The next day Jason had one of his "scenic routes" planned into our route. I told him it wasn't a great idea to do dirt roads after it had been raining for several days; but he said I needed to get used to my bike on dirt roads before getting to Alaska. Well...the route was definitely scenic. The second the road turned to dirt it was mud as deep as our rims. Jason was like "oh it looks better after the bridge so lets keep going." We slipped and slid about 5 miles into that road before we decided to turn around (and for the first time ever I was holding the camera when Jason slid sideways off the bike haha). Jason looked at his gps and it said we had about 20 more miles of this crap; so it was in our best interest to turn around. I must say though my BMW was quite stable through that mess. Slow & steady! Once we reached pavement again, we had to knock all the mud out from under our fenders and then put the pedal to the metal for the Black Hills.

We have had so many beautiful twisty roads (since we avoid highways like the plague). We were heading around some twisty curves getting into Custer National Park and there was a huge buffalo on the inside of the curve! We passed quite a few of those giants on the way to our campsite. Our campsite was nice (right next to a creek). As we were setting up camp for the night people kept coming up to us and warning us about a huge storm that was coming. We had just enough time to cook up some amazing minestrone soup before lightning started going off everywhere. We threw our boots, tank bags, and camelbaks under the tent rain fly and got cozy for the night. It was the loudest, wettest thunderstorm we have ever seen haha! We were quite impressed with our tent though. There was 2 inches of water flowing around our tent all night and we stayed nice and dry.

From there we cruised through the twisty pigtail bridges of the Black Hills and past Mount Rushmore. We were hoping to make it all the way to the Big Horn Sheep mountains that day but we ran out of daylight. We found a beautiful little campsite in Pine Haven, Wyoming right on a lake. It was a great spot but once again we had a thunderstorm through the night. Definitely not as much rain though.

Today we made it to the Big Horn Sheep Mountains with all the beautiful twisty roads and even took another one of Jason's "scenic routes." This scenic route was supposed to just be a dirt road but they had put a fresh layer of deep gravel down; so it slowed us down quite a bit. We have some amazing pictures from the last few days so I'll put the link below for the photo gallery again. We are currently in Red Lodge, Montana for the night. Tomorrow we head to Bear Tooth Pass and onto Yellowstone National Park.

Copy and paste the link below to view our photo gallery:
http://mommer.smugmug.com/Motorcycles/Alaska-2015/49948984_NtmPzL#!i=4132717478&k=qHFcmx7

Stories to come...

All is good here. Just don't have WiFi yet to update the past couple days of riding.

Adventure postponed another day...

So...I said early we were in a hurry to get on the road...well fate had other plans. While Jason and I were packing up our things, his sister's property manager came to the door and said one of our motorcycles had a huge puddle of gasoline underneath it and was smelling up the whole condo building. We didn't believe her at first but sure enough most of Jason's fuel was sitting on the garage floor. He had installed aftermarket safari gas tanks and the main petcock gasket broke (or actually shredded). Several people have told us today that that is a common problem with these tanks; so if anyone buys these tanks, replace the main gasket before you leave your garage.

We had the best possible situation to break down. We were visiting Jason's family in Fargo & Jason's niece wanted us to stay another day anyway; so we gratefully accepted to stay one more night and fix up his bike. Please say prayers that Jason's bike has no more leaks tomorrow.

Pictures & more pictures

 Lets see if this works...here is the link to our smugmug photo account. There are a lot of pictures in there and we have to get on the road so I'll let you guys explore them.

http://mommer.smugmug.com/Motorcycles/Alaska-2015/49948984_NtmPzL

Minnesota to North Dakota

Today was a good ride. We were sad to see Kurt go but we'll meet up with him down the road. We left Grantsburg around 9am and weaved through the scenic route roads of Minnesota. At one of our random rest stops we met a guy by a lake and started chatting with him about the area. He recommended we eat lunch at the Y Club and then go take a picture by the gigantic fiberglass walleye fish. That was the best walleye lunch we have ever had! We highly recommend that restaurant to everyone now. During lunch we discussed our route. Everyone (including the weather radar) said there was a huge storm sitting between us and Fargo, North Dakota (our final destination for today). We decided to just gear up and hope for the best.

As we went along we could feel the temperature drop and the clouds started moving in but thankfully the storm stayed North of us. We could see the darkness off in the distance but beautiful sunshine stayed with us the whole way. We made good time getting there, so we were able to spend the evening with Jason's family. We met his new baby niece for the first time! So cute!

Not quite sure what our plan for tomorrow is but I will try to post the rest of our pictures in the morning. :)

Day 2...

Well...I'm having troubles connecting our new tablet to WiFi so I have to try to update our blog with my cell phone for now. Day 1 was great! We had a late start due to some last minute odds & ends (we officially own our first home now!). We'll have a place to come back to in Colorado once our trip is done. Anyway...we left Iowa around 2pm with Jason's cousin Kurt. Here are our bikes all loaded up with gear...

We headed out towards the Mississippi River and caught a ferry across to Wisconsin. That was pretty cool. I highly recommend that trip.

Here we are waiting for the ferry. We didn't make it too far that day. It was rainy all day and got dark early so we wimped out and stayed in a hotel that night in Cassville, Wisconsin. We figured it's best to not start out with all wet gear.

Today (June 13) was a long haul. I think we did 400-500 miles. I love my bike so far! It's smooth & nimble even with all the gear weighing it down. We had some beautiful curvy roads despite the on & off rain again. Jason and I both have waterptoof Sidi Adventure boots and waterproof Klim gear so the rain hasn't bothered us much. We purposely changed our route though. Our goal was to camp at the top of Wisconsin with his other cousin, Sarah, but thers was a nasty storm lingering up there so we cut West and avoided the storm. It's nice not having a timeline or strict route so we can see what we want to see or avoid cities and storms as much as possible.

We have a bunch more pictures but I can't upload from our camera til I get the tablet working. We have been taking small roads instead of highways which is much more beautiful. There are so many cute little towns along the Mississippi River.

Our plan for the next day or 2 is to head to Fargo, North Dakota to see Jason's new baby niece and family. We'll get as far as we can but it might take a couple days from here (we are in Grantsburg, Wisconsin for the night). Kurt will split off and head back home to Iowa tomorrow. He has plans to go ride in Colorado and then he'll meet up with us again in Alaska.

Goodnight!

The Day Has Come!

Alright...here we go! The day we never imagined would get here is finally here. All the prep work and planning is "done" so it's time to hit the road. As much as you plan for a trip like this you still don't feel prepared but that's where the adventure side of things takes over. We are in a hurry this morning to get on the road so I will post pictures later. We have lots to share about the packing process but I'll save that info for the end of the trip when we can say what we wish we had packed and what we didn't need to bring with us.

As far as my bike goes...it was quite tall when I first rode it.  The Sertao is much taller than the regular 650gs; so we put a lowering link on it. I went from only being able to touch the ground with one tippy toe to having both balls of my feet on the ground. There are a lot of things people need to know about this bike before taking off on a long trip, so I'll post more info about that on Advrider.com.

Adios for now!  We have some miles to accrue before it rains again!