10 Essential Tips For Your First Motorcycle Road Trip

Motorcycle touring is a great way to explore your city, state, or even the entire country from an entirely new perspective. While riding can be fantastic way to spend your hard earned vacation time, there is a certain amount of preparation and planing that is needed to fully enjoy this great pastime. Give yourself plenty of time to create a check list of things you need, prepare your bike, and practice packing your things with a dry run.

Helmets and daytime lights are required. We've rounded up some key tips in having a fun and successful trip on your bike. Roads are nasty, disgusting places, and by the time you reach your destination 10 hours later, a lot of that nasty, disgusting stuff will be on you.

I've done a bit of motorcycle touring here in Australia, including a 9 week free food tour from Brisbane through NSW, Victoria, SA and Tasmania in 2009-10. For detailed information about RoadTrip Self-Guided Motorcycle Tours please see our Touring Page. He racks up anything between 35,000 and 40,000 miles of riding a year, so it's safe to say he knows a thing or two about Britain's best roads for two-wheeled fun.

I may have had no idea what I was getting myself into when I left, the last several hours of my ride home were completely miserable, and I had painful knots in my back for weeks, but despite all that, I would take a motorcycle road trip again in a heart beat.

When I was planning the trip, six or seven hours didn't sound horrible, but for someone who had never ridden a motorcycle for that long, actually doing it felt like an absolute eternity. For most riders, the bare minimum they bring in terms of clothes is their regular riding gear (boots, jacket, pants, gloves) - and rain gear.

Communication is key, in both relationships and adventure bike travel trips. Something that you can only check while riding, is how a map shows detail-situations: sometimes a T-junction on the map is, in reality, an ongoing road with a byway to the left. Plot a combination of autoroutes for pace, and minor roads for fun, culture and halts.