Spring 2011 Adventure

Marlene and I decided to take a little spring break trip this year and test our gear to make sure we could handle a "big" summer trip of scooting and camping. I had plenty of camping experience last summer with the trip to Alaska, but we hadn't gone on a significant trip together. We settled on a campground in Concan, TX and purchased a new tent (the tent cot wouldn't cut it!) and planned for a 3 day trip. The area north of Concan, including Leaky, is a motorcycling dream. The roads have plenty of hills and curves, and little traffic. Of course, as the sign shows, you have to be careful!

We also upgraded our cooking equipment with a larger pot and pan set and made a sterno stove. We normally don't cook much on our trips (who wants to clean dishes in a campground) but there's always the chance you'll get somewhere and be so tired you don't want to travel to dinner, so we keep an "emergency" meal with canned foods that we like and we can heat them up with the little stove.

I carried most of the gear this trip, and even though the tent was much larger than the tent cot, it folded down to a much smaller package. I bolted our camping trunk to the luggage rack on my scooter so I was able to cut down on the number of bungee cords needed to strap the whole mess on each time I packed. It was nice to have a better balanced load than what I carried for 10,000 miles last summer, which hung off the sides.

We set out on the trip after wearily watching the weather forecast because rain is not fun on a scooter and we were staying along a river that floods easily. We ended up with no rain, but the high 90 degree temperatures and very strong winds made for a rough ride. My windscreen even developed a large crack around one of the mounting holes.

The campground didn't have much wind, just dust and thousands of big ants. Fortunately, the ants were harvesting the pollen pods falling from the trees and didn't bother with our tent or bags. The evening was another story, but the pests were human. Near our campsite was a group campsite and the occupants "celebrated" very late into the night. When we departed in the morning we made as much noise as we could to help the hangovers next door, but Scooters just aren't very loud.

After a nice day of riding through the hills we returned to our campsite and settled in for a comfortable second night - we had figured out where all of our stuff should be stored in our enormous tent and just how much air to put in the air mattress. It was still hot enough that we had to sleep with just the thinnest sheet for cover, but we were used to it at least.

Packing up the third day went very quickly, and we made it home quickly too. We were very happy that everything worked just fine and we were ready to take a bigger trip during the summer.