Redmond to Kennewick

After saying my goodbyes, I left Josh and Wendy's place at about 10AM. Having Josh and Wendy here and also a place to stay for 2 weeks has been really helpful. I am very thankful that they allowed me to cramp their space for 2 weeks! It would have been so much more difficult doing all the organizing from a hotel, and it was great to catch up with them both and do some stuff together. They also provided me with some valuable insight into American customs and culture.

I loaded all the stuff on my bike, in the hope that none of it was too heavy and wasn't going to fall off! Each bit of luggage has a weight limit, but I had no scales to weigh them with so I just had to pack evenly and hope for the best. Thank god for the Ventura pack, there is no way all my stuff would fit into the panniers alone!

In Redmond, just about to head off to Kennewick

The plan was to go back to the bike dealer and get my 500 mile service out of the way. It. Was easy to ride to kennewick, because at the end of the trip my odometer would have exactly 520 miles on it.

After a long ride, I wearily dropped my bike at the service department and caught a taxi to my hotel. Thankfully the hotel was really nice! Somehow I got a double room, and had lots of space! I spent the rest of the night just chilling and getting my blog up-to-date. It was fantastic to get some time to relax, one of my goals of this trip was to keep it pretty easy going, I didn't want to rush through really fast like I did in Europe.

Seeing as I had no transportation, there was no restaurant in the hotel and my bike needed to kept overnight at the dealer, I just ordered Dominos for dinner. It was actually better than I was expecting!

Tomorrow I'm off to La Grande!

Final Day in Redmond

The Kawasaki OEM top box was not going to work for me for these reasons:

1. Had a paltry weight limit of 4 pounds
2. Speed limited to 80 MPH

Now these might be restrictions made by some over zealous safety person at Kawasaki, but I didn't really want to take the risk. So with a 25% restocking fee and $30 shipping, I sent the top box back to the distributor. What I really needed was a Ventura rack, I knew these could be used at speed and the way they attached to a bike would mean they could take more than 4 pounds. 

Ventura pack racks are hard to fit because you need to get special L-brackets made specifically for your bike model. Most of the time you'd go to a motorcycle apparel store and they'd have to order in the brackets, because it was stupid to keep all the different L-brackets in stock. This was time I didn't have, I wanted to get moving pretty soon.

This is where I got really lucky, it turns out the only Ventura distributor in the United States happened to be in Lynwood, about a 15 minute ride from Redmond. I rang up, they confirmed they had the correct fittings and then I rode over there. The extremely helpful staff there lent me his toolkit, and gave me a hand fitting the rack to my bike. In about 15 minutes we were done!

I even got a free emergency tire repair kit! I now have so much redundancy in that space, I bought one of the bog standard "spike handle with rubber logs" kits from the dealer in Kennewick, then Josh suggested I buy this "Slime" stuff, where you just spray it into your tire and it plugs the hole while inflating the tire, then I got this free kit from Ventura! This kit is way different to what I've seen before, it has these plastic keys that you turn into the puncture hole then snap off.

I managed to get all of my stuff to fit in the Ventura bag and the panniers. Just. As expected the SLR takes up a lot of room. I can save space by removing the lens from the body, but I'd like to be able to have quick access to it if I need it. Also the sleeping bag takes a fair bit of space, even though it's one of those super small goose down ones. I figure if I do end up buying a "Bivy" for camping, I'll just roll it up in that and it can go on the back of my bike. 

It's a pretty tough balancing act, on the one hand I need to pack light and small, on the other this is a solo trip for 5 months so I need to be prepared for anything. I've got a small polar fleece jumper that takes a fair bit of space, but I don't want to ship that back to Australia because what happens if it gets cold? There are lots of considerations like that. I'm guessing that as I progress through this trip, I'll find things that I just don't use and start to trim down the fat of my luggage.