Happy Christmas!!

I would like to take this opportunity to wish all our followers and readers (I think we have a few, hopefully) a very merry Christmas.  I hope you are all having a great time and enjoying your day with family and friends.  Don't eat too much!!  Best wishes, Simon and Jilly.

PCH Road Trip

Here's a great article from National Geographic about the PCH.  This only covers the California part, however, it's a great taster and we can't wait to see all these places for real!

Road Trip: California's Pacific Coast Highway

Videos

I've been checking out You Tube for clips of Route 66 and the Pacific Coast Highway.  Here's a great one, a timelapse video of the whole of Route 66 - Chicago to LA - in 3 1/2 minutes!!

Chicago to LA in 3 Minutes on the Mother Road

Enjoy!

Tinkering

We're still tinkering with the route.  Although we have pretty much got it sorted, we are still open to suggestions and considering options.  We recently adjusted our route from Santa Fe to Albuquerque after the suggestion about the Turquoise Trail.  We have now decided to complete the whole of the Pacific Coast Highway from the Mexican border right up to Seattle - we were going to start from Santa Monica.  The main reason for that was that we finish Route 66 in Santa Monica and we have both been to San Diego before and I have done the route from San Diego to LA many times, so we thought it wasn't really necessary to travel down there and back.

However, we thought, "Why spoil the ship for a ha'peth of tar" (as the expression goes), and rather than spend 2 nights in Santa Monica, we will hand in the Harley, pick up the Mustang and shoot down the I5 to the Mexican border and start the PCH from the very beginning.  This serves 3 purposes: 1) we can spend a night in the beautiful city of La Jolla; 2) we will be able to say we've done the whole route; and 3) we can pop in to the Navy Exchange at the San Diego Naval Base and do a spot of shopping before heading North!  After 3 weeks of living out of saddle bags we will probably need a change of clothes and a few small luxuries!!

Route 66

If you are interested in Route 66 and never saw Billy Connolly's series then I suggest you get the DVD - it's well worth a watch.  And if you are ever planning to do it, have a look at this trailer to get the juices flowing!  In 9 months' time we shall be doing the very same, only on a Harley instead of a trike....

Enjoy!

Billy Connolly's Route 66 (trailer)

Facebook Page

We've just created a new Facebook page:

Road Trip USA 2014

Why not visit and like our page?

Our Harley!

This is our Harley - a Softail Heritage Classic.  Nearly 1600cc of muscle and lots of chrome and leather!  Sadly we will not be able to do our road trip on this bike but we will be doing the Route 66 element on the same model.

More Suggestions

I received a great email from Alison (@thebeegarden), who recently completed a road trip along part of Route 66.  She has very kindly taken the time to write and give us a load of suggestions for places to see, eat and pass through.  Thank you Alison, if you read this - we are very grateful.

All of the ideas she has given us we plan to take on board, in particular her suggestion to travel from Santa Fe to Albuquerque via the "Turquoise Trail".  I looked in to it last night and it looks like a great route - one we would probably have never even known about if she hadn't told us about it.

The only problem is - it just makes us even more impatient to get started!!!!!!

Tablet or Notebook?

We have a dilemma!  We have been thinking about the best way of keeping in touch while we are away next year - we are going to be very tight on space as we will have to be able to carry everything we need in 2 saddlebags (panniers) and a small back pack (for the first 3 weeks at least).  That's going to be a challenge - we've never been light travelers!!  Why not just use a smartphone? I hear you say.  Well that would be a possibility, however, we need to be able to run our business (Razay Holiday Cottages) and September and October are key months for taking bookings, so we can't afford to be out of touch for those 2 months.

We could just take a laptop, however, our laptops are quite bulky and heavy, so a tablet or notebook would be better and easier.  However, where do you start?  iPad seems to be the favourite/popular option: small, light, loads of apps, etc but they are expensive and it would seem there are much cheaper options on the market.  On the other hand, a notebook can be small and light and be the ideal cross between the tablet & laptop.

We had a look at some options in the shop yesterday.  The iPad Air looks great - it's light, small but could it be too light, too small - would it stand up to the rigours of the journey (and beyond - we would need it to last a good while!).  We also looked at the Microsoft Surface Pro, which looked just the job.  It comes with Office fully installed (which we use for our business) and has a good size screen, good graphics, etc and has some very good reviews.  On the downside, it is quite heavy and probably works out more expensive than the iPad, although it has Office installed which is worth a bit I suppose.  Plus you can add keyboards, etc.

Decisions, decisions.  It's very difficult.......

Planning

If anyone out in internet land is planning a road trip, particularly Route 66, there is loads of info available on the old world wide web.  In fact, there is probably too much!  Some of the places that I have found good info from I have listed on our "Useful Trip Info" page.  My favourite so far (and I have by no means exhausted the available material) is probably Billy Connolly's Route 66 series, which we watched when it was broadcast and have since acquired the DVD (Jilly bought me it for my birthday).  It is an excellent watch, particularly if you like Billy Connolly and his sense of humour.

Talking of his sense of humour, I remember watching Billy's series "World Tour of Scotland" and in one episode he came out with a brilliant line, which still makes me chuckle.  Talking about a particular hotel, he said something along the lines of: "The hotel was fantastic - the towels were so fluffy I could hardly get them in my suitcase!"  Well, I thought it was funny, anyway!

I was recently contacted on Twitter by someone who has just got back from a road trip including part of Route 66 and they have offered to email me with some of their experiences and recommended sights and places to visit (thank you @TheBeeGarden).  I hope that more people will do that, as I think there can be no better recommendations than the first hand experience of others.

Karen Brown's World of Travel has been a really good source of information for the Pacific Coast Highway part of the trip - an excellent guide, as is Jamie Jenson's Road Trip USA Pacific Coast Highway.  The only problem with his book is that it is written travelling from North to South and we are going the other way!

Accommodation Booked!

All the accommodation is now booked!  There might be some fine tuning to do over the next few months but the beauty of Booking.com is that nothing has been paid out, all the reservations are "free cancellation" (up to 24 hours before arrival) and amendments can be made at any time on line.  I'm amazed that even this far out, some locations have hotels that are sold out already.  I have a feeling that some, especially smaller hotels, just don't accept bookings that far in advance, so I will keep an eye on some of the ones we wanted but couldn't get in to.  I've got some pretty good deals as well (I think) - for example, 2 nights in Las Vegas, just off The Strip, for less than £70!  And, in case you're wondering, it is not a "dive" - it looks nice, has a pool, free parking, free breakfast and has good ratings and reviews.  We'll see.

The only problem is - what do I do now?  Flights are booked, Harley is booked, Mustang is booked, hotels are booked, route is pretty much planned......  there's still 9 months to go!!  However, we will be gradually moving out to France over the summer next year, I have some courses still to do to prepare for life in "Civvy Street", we have next summer's season at Razay to prepare for, the house here to pack up, etc, etc.

Can't wait!!! :)

Suggestions

To date we have had 300-odd page views of the blog.  I don't know whether that's good or bad but it must mean that some people are reading it!  For those of you that are reading and following (we have 6 followers so far, but 2 of those are Jilly & me so we don't really count!) I hope you are enjoying what you are reading.

If any readers/followers are Route 66 or Pacific Coast Highway veterans (or even if you've just been along parts of the routes), we would be happy to receive suggestions for things to do and see - particularly unusual sights that might be slightly off the beaten track and not on the normal "touristy" route.  Feel free to use the comments box to comment or suggest things.

This time last year I put a message on Twitter or Facebook asking for opinions on whether to rent or buy a Harley.  A very kind lady called Tonya from Springfield , Mo, responded and sent me a very long and informative email giving me lots of info an the pros and cons of renting and/or buying.  Everything she said made excellent sense and it was primarily because of her that we decided to go down the rental route.  I would like to publicly thank Tonya from Springfield, Mo for her advice.  I hope we shall be able to visit her and thank her in person next year.

And while I'm on the subject of thank yous, I would like to thank those kind people who are currently following this blog.  I hope we can increase the numbers!

Flights Booked!

Well - we're committed now, definitely going! I booked the flights today: London to Chicago on 7 September 2014 and then Seattle to London on 22 October 2014.

J J J

I'm a bit miffed, though, as I was hoping to be able to use my air miles that I've saved up for umpteen years now. Annoyingly, perhaps typically, the dates I wanted for flights had no air mile flights available. I sometimes wonder whether there's any point in collecting miles, as you never seem to able to use them for flights when you want them. The only points system I've ever had any benefit from is Holiday Inn - in fact a lot of our hotel accommodation has cost us nothing but points, which has saved us loads o' money! I'll have to see if I can use the air miles for hotel bookings, at least they won't be wasted then.

Vehicles Booked!

The trip is turning from a dream to a reality - we have now booked both the Harley (H-C Travel) and the Ford Mustang (Rentalcars.com)!!!  Very exciting!  We have also booked a lot of the hotel accommodation too.  I was checking on potential hotels in Chicago (our start point) and discovered that a number of the good value hotels that I had previously shortlisted were full - already!  So, in order to be sure of reserving the hotels in the locations we wanted, I decided to make a start on bookings.  Critical places are those with either limited hotels or in particularly popular locations, for example: Monument Valley, Grand Canyon Village, Santa Fe, Santa Monica and Santa Barbara.
The great thing about sites like Booking.com is that you can make the bookings but you are not required to pay until arrival - and the booking can be cancelled up to 24 hours beforehand.
The trouble is that once you start you don't want to stop!  Frustratingly, it seems you can only book about 11 months in advance, so I am stuck at the moment until the end of September 2014 - I can't do any October bookings yet.
Similarly with flights, you can only book up to 50 weeks in advance and, because our return flight is at the end of  October 2014, we can't book that yet.  Not long now though!
By the way - I came across a great App/ website the other day.  Its called Trip It and it's brilliant for organizing a trip itinerary.  You just forward your booking confirmation emails to your account on the site and it pulls off all the relevant info (booking confirmation reference, times, dates, etc) and creates an itinerary with all the info you need in one place.  It can all be downloaded on to the mobile app so you can have all the info on your phone and you don't have to carry round reams of paper print outs.  Brilliant!

Rent or Buy?

One of the first things we considered was whether to rent a Harley, ship our own over to the USA or even buy one over there and then sell again at the end of the trip.  We decided fairly early on that buying and selling would be a lot of hassle and very time consuming - it's also not an easy thing to do from a long distance.  We looked in to shipping costs but again, this would be time consuming, probably very costly and a lot of hassle.  Plus, unless shipping by air, it's a lengthy process - especially shipping to mid-USA or the West Coast.  It would be great to actually do the trip on our own bike, but the hassle, liklihood of damage, the uncertainty of arrival/departure dates, customs issues, etc, etc just made it unviable.  So - renting turned out to be the only realistic option, however, renting a Harley is not cheap, certainly compared to renting a car, especially when doing a one-way rental.

When we decided that we were only going to do Route 66 on the Harley and then continue the second half on 4 wheels, we considered renting a camper van or RV.  This would give us the option of stopping wherever and whenever we want without being tied to planning a particular overnight stop in advance.  I made numerous enquiries regarding RV rentals but they all turned out to be relatively expensive, especially considering the low mpg that most, if not all, of the vehicles seem to be capable of (10-15 mpg seemed about the best!).  The extra fuel costs, plus the fact that many RV sites charge in excess of $50 per night to my mind outweighs the advantages of the flexibility of an RV.  As it is perfectly possible to get reasonable standard hotel accommodation quite cheaply, along with the fact that car rental is not only quite cheap but also more fuel efficient (it's all relative - 30 to 40 mpg is good in the USA!!!) a car plus hotels looks like the best option for "Exercise Road Trip - Phase 3".

Those decisions made - the next stage is to actually book the bike and car rental.  One of the problems of planning so far in advance is that it seems it is impossible to book anything more than about 52 weeks in advance.  So far I cannot get any proper quotes for car rentals because the return date is still too far in advance.  I have found one company that I have received a very competitive quote from and, whilst it is far too early to be able to recommend them, they certainly appear to be very competitive (www.rentalcars.com).  I have managed to get a few quotes for Harley rental.  The best quote I got was from a company in San Francisco (www.californiamotorcycleadventures.com) however, when we decided we weren't going to do a round trip a) San Francisco was not a suitable start/finish point for what we wanted to achieve and b) the one-way rental fee was prohibitive ($1000!).  There are a number of companies that rent bikes for the Route 66 Adventure and it is difficult to choose as they all appear to be much of a muchness in terms of cost, etc.  Still much to decide......

Welcome

Welcome to our blog.  I am new to the art of blogging but decided to try writing one mainly to keep a record of the trip that we have been planning for some time now and will be undertaking in just under a year's time.

As background, I am retiring from the Royal Air Force in October next year (2014) and my wife, Jill, and I are intending to move to France and run our successful holiday rentals business full time from there.  We have been running our business, Razay Holiday Cottages for 10 years now.  Check out our website to find out more: www.razay.com .

During the last 20 years as a "Parachute Jump Instructor" or PJI in the RAF I have spent a lot of time in the USA conducting parachute training or, more recently, parachute testing and evaluation.  I had promised Jill that at some stage we would have a holiday over there and at last the time has come! 

This is probably going to be our "Trip of a Lifetime" and is a little reward to ourselves after 26 years in the RAF.  We plan to take nearly 7 weeks in total - the first half to travel Route 66 from Chicago to Los Angeles on a Harley Davidson Softail Heritage Classic and the second half to travel the Pacific Coast Highway, LA to Seattle, Wa, in a Ford Mustang convertible.

The original plan was to travel a round trip from San Francisco via Seattle, Chicago, Route 66, LA and back to San Francisco all on the Harley.  We decided that this might be too much, so then we reduced this to Chicago to Seattle via Route 66 and the PCH, but even then nearly 7 weeks on a bike was going to be hard work, so we settled for Route 66 on the Harley (the only way to travel Route 66!) and the PCH by car.

So that's a bit of background.  As I said earlier, planning has been going on for some time now but I shall go in to more detail in future posts.  Thanks for reading.