At 13h09 precisely Bonnie and I pulled into the parking in front of my old US office. This is half a mile from our condo and so for all intents and purposes the trip was over. I popped in to say his to the gang in the office. There are many keen motor bikers and I have many friends amongst the team there.
The engineers and bikers are quickly outside. In true engineer’s style I am peppered with technical questions. They want facts and figures, not anecdotes. How far? How much does the load weigh? What is the bikes total weight? I have no idea. There ia a weighbridge a few miles down the road so why don’t I go there and weigh Bonnie and myself while we have everything on her?

Shit guys, I have just ridden 3717 miles (5982 km)  from Valdez Alaska in under nine full days and my condo is less than a mile away and you want me to ride back 5 miles each way, to weigh ourselves. I think we will leave it that we look like “the real deal”.

As soon as I have had a moment to catch up with all the “catch up” matters, I will sit down and send all the vital details of the trip out in one of the final blogs. The quick details are I was on the road for two days over eight weeks. It was 58 days in total and I covered 11,117 miles ( 17891 km) during this period. This was based on my odometer which has a degree of inaccuracy in it due to varying tire sizes and pressures etc.. The GPS, which is probably more accurate, had the distance at a little over 11,250 miles (18,105 km). To put this in perspective, this is about to London and back from Cape Town.
For the benefit of the engineers and others I will include average speeds, max speeds ( I know this one 93.3 mph on the road between Tarkeetna and Denali), average fuel consumption and fuel used etc..

I have achieved all my “big things” and more importantly “the biggest” when I pulled into our drive a few minutes after 14h00  for I knew that I had done so safely. Bonnie was magnificent throughout. She never missed a beat. Started every morning and every other time I pushed the starter. On the odd occasion she was a little rough but I suspect that was due to the quality of the food she was fed in various places. I think that more ethanol than is advertised is mixed into the fuel from time to time. She carried me and a camel’s load uncomplainingly. As my new friend Siegfried from Burwash Landing said ” You are riding the best motor bike in the world, built in Berlin”. Sigfried, if their ever was any doubt, it has to be out the window after this.

My bike fitness is supreme. I was up at 04h00 this morning and made my way to the Lake Express ferry terminal in Milwaukee by 05h15 in time for the 06h00 departure. They want you there by 05h30 and this morning they actually cast off ten minutes early at 05h50. The trip took the standard 02h30 and we were off and on the road at 10h30 due to the time change of one hour. In the rain just to make sure I had not forgotten all I had learnt in Alaska. So gear on and no problem. Helped to clean Bonnie as well, she know looks remarkably spic and span.

As I am riding along between Lansing and Ann Arbor I slow down, I want this time with Bonnie to last. I am in no particular hurry. I am feeling so strong that I contemplate stopping for a proper coffee out of our machine and then riding on to New York to see my friend Trevor or to Massachusetts to see Dianne Michelow and her parents and then riding back, only so that I can say that I have been coast to coast! It will only be another four days and I am at least that much ahead of schedule. But I know DD and jealous mother of the twins need me and the goodies for the babies.

Once here the big job began. First I give Bonnie a big hug and a kiss. A lovers thanks fro an unforgettable experience. every lovers time away should be like this. I then nnpack Bonnie and all my stuff. Piles in front of the washing machines. In fact the last load of normal stuff is now in the machine and it is 22h15. I am already in bed as I am now exhausted. I made myself a vintage Richard dinner. Those of you who know me well and have spent time with me when I am the caterer in one of my places overseas will know what this entailed. It is great to be able to start eating simple fresh food again.

Not that the food on the trip was bad. To the contrary, particularly in Bend at Granny Randy’s, in Vancouver, Penticton at the Enns’s  and in Alaska the food was terrific. But that was a few days out of many. Food on the road can never beat fresh salads at home and simple foods. I will be stocking up on goodness here ( not the Alaskan buttery, syrupy goodness) and will visit Whole Foods in the next two days. I will also be up early in the morning to start running again to improve my cardio fitness, as this has suffered. I may even ride my road bike. I have lost lots of weight and inches around my middle. My riding trousers keep on falling off and I need my one kidney belt to keep them on. It needs to stay this way.

There is lots that needs to be done. Bonnie is going in tomorrow for a full check up and service. They are lending me a K1600 GT to use while she is in the spa. This is the Nikita I was talking about. Bonnie is not about to be traded in, fear not. I also have US tax returns to be completed (A big job), a vehicle coming off lease to be handed back, a myriad of admin to be sorted out as I have done nothing about this over the past two months. Interestingly enough no wheels have fallen off.

I also need a bit of time to do some reading and I have a whole bunch of movies to watch in my Nipple Pink movie room. Tonight was going to be the first one, but over dinner I turned on Discovery channel. It is the 25th anniversary of the film “Jaws” and they have a series of documentaries they have made on sharks around the world. This evenings episode is shot in False Bay and is mainly about Colossus, he is estimated to be about 1100kgs in weight and they footage is stunning and frightening. They rig up a dummy seal with a G meter in it and measure the force with which he hits a seal as he jumps out of the water and takes the meal in his mouth. It peaks out at 29.3 G. To put this in perspective, an ejection seat in fighter, hits the pilot with about 5 G to 15 G, depending on the vintage and model. Over 15 G is invariably fatal, so most seals are dead before the bite in half happens.

To think that I have spent years swimming in that very same water and bay. In fact DD, the children and I saw what must have been Colossus’s mate about 20 years ago in Malindi in Kenya. This was female great white that had been caught in a fisherman’s net. It had dragged the boat for over 20 hours before finally succumbing. On the beach when we saw it, it looked like a baby submarine and the dorsal fin was higher than our children. That fish was also estimated to have weighed over 1000 kg.
So I never get to watch anything else and then, as the program finished my wheels came off. After a second clean up, another shower and all, I am in bed. It is way too empty!

I have had some interactions with Steekoog and Dinah T and have censored both of their latest comments as they are getting too carried away and into things here. I have had a number of people e-mail me to find out where they can access these comments. The one’s I have permitted are reachable by clicking on the Comments RSS link at the bottom right had side of the web page. If you register for the blog you will be notified as and when comments are posted once they have been OK’d by me. The ones that I have blocked are for my eyes only!

I have also been asked why no more GoPro footage. the reasons are as follows:

• My Laptop ran out of disk space after movie no 3 and I was only able to get a external hard drive in Vancouver.
• Then on the Stewart Cassiar Highway (All the roads in the northern part of BC, the Yukon and Alaska are called Highways. It just means that they are not complete dirt tracks, actually not always true because many of them are awful), I stopped for a break and dropped my helmet with the GoPro on it. In so doing the mount broke and had sent the spare back from Granny’s place to Michigan.
• Finally the GoPro has one major draw back in that it does not have a remote control that makes it easy to use on a motorbike. So, if it is mounted on your helmet which is the best place for it, you are continually having to take the helmet on and off to switch it/off.

Over the next few days I will be finishing off the bits and pieces I owe you, a trip summary, and all my thank you’s. These will go out in a blog post. In the interim thank you all for your support.

So from Northville Michigan, Good Night and Good Luck.

Copyright 2012.