Keith,
You raise some excellent points, and ones that are certainly valid for anyone considering this type of ride.
There are a couple of factors for my particular ride. The sights I wanted to see were mostly after Texas heading West. Not trying to diss the states I went through in a hurry, but I have spent some time in most of them before.
Additionally, I was focused on using minimal vacation days. Since I was headed to a conference in Phoenix that my job was paying for, the travel time is all that was extra and had to be paid for with vacation.
Going the shortest route straight to the conference site in Phoenix is about 1700 miles. Going out and coming back, we only want to spend three travel days (each way). Fortunate for me, the conference starts on a Monday and ends on a Thursday. That meant that I only use two vacation days (both Fridays). The Thursday on which the conference ends would be a travel day for business purposes anyway.
Now, as I said, the shortest distance to and from is about 1700 miles. To cover it in three days, assume that I divided it equally, then I needed to cover almost 600 miles a day anyway. However, I also wanted to add about 300 to 350 miles of detours into the trip - to see the Grand Canyon and some other things. In the end, this meant we were really going to cover almost 2000 miles in three days. Any way we sliced it, we had a lot of miles to cover. It made sense to do 1000 on one day and about 500 the other two days. By covering only 500 on each day in the Western part of the trip, we were able to enjoy the sights more and we were in the part of the trip where we had not traveled much before. So the trip itself just gave me the opportunity to get the Iron Butt.
The goal led us to ride when we otherwise might have parked it when the weather was less than optimal (dismal actually).
I am glad that we were able to succeed and I will enjoy having the badge/plaque. Would I do it again? No, at least not with the setup I had. Picture attached. One goal was to do this with the bare minimum of extras, hence, no fairing, no communications devices and no radio/music etc. This was to be similar to how it would have been done when these bikes were new. Standard seat, mostly standard parts. The only modifications to the bike are the luggage rack, the vintage Shoei SB-4 bags, the dyna ignition and the Randakk's grips on the handlebars. From a comfort point of view, a Honda ST-4 bend bar and the grips are the only upgrades.
If I was to try this again, I would probably try it with a KZ1000 Police bike with full fairing and enough electrical output to power some gadgets. But for now, I have checked this off of my list of "hey it would be cool to _________".
Now for the ride back. It begins tomorrow morning. Early.
I will post some info on the return trip in a few days if all goes well.
Oh, you can't see it, but the sign in the background of the picture showed 40 degrees. It was taken about 1:15 AM at the hotel when we arrived in Vega, TX after the first day of riding.
