I had read about the great riding in the Ozarks and figured the 2008 Sport-Touring.Net (STN) National rally in Eureka Springs, Arkansas would be the perfect opportunity to check it out. So I laid out a quick route in Streets and Trips and it was over 3000 miles. This trip would require five vacation days plus the weekends on each end. To date, my longest ride had been five day jaunts to Stowe, VT in 2005 and Sparta, NC in 2007.

I decided to go for it and made my reservations for the rally. I would leave Pittsburgh after work on Friday, June 6th. The group dinner was on Tuesday night (10th). That gave me 3.5 days to get there via southeast Ohio, Kentucky and southern Missouri. I would ride the Ozarks on Tuesday followed by the group dinner. Then work my way home via the Barber Museum, Deals Gap, The Snake, and the great twisties in NC of WV, arriving home on Sunday, June 15th (Fathers Day). Here’s an overview of the route (nearly 3600 miles):

Many variations of daily routes were created and I finally settled on a plan. Turns out that my riding buddy Doug (from Morgantown) had a route very similar to mine, so we decided to share hotel rooms at the National and on the way home, even if we didn’t ride together the whole time.

Given the number of days on the road and the complexity of the daily routes, I decided to buy a GPS for the trip. I bought a Garmin zumo 450 when Amazon had them on sale for $430. Of course that meant learning how to use the MapSource software and converting all my routes to MapSource.

I really hated MapSource at first (and still find it ugly/clunky), but once I learned the “trick” of clicking on the route to select it (turns yellow), you can click anywhere on the route and can drag the route to the roads you want to ride (creates “Via” points). I added Via points at all road changes and a few in between to force the route to stay on the good roads.

The other bonus of the GPS is finding gas stations. My KTM 950 Supermoto “R” gets about 40 MPG, but only has a 3.7 gallon tank, so I need to stop for gas every 100 – 120 miles to be safe. I packed a 2L Nalgene bottle made of HDPE (same stuff as gas cans) to carry spare fuel. It turns out I never needed it, but it was cheap insurance for another 20 miles if I ran dry in the boonies. I only needed to use the "find nearest gas station" feature on the GPS once.

A few test rides with the zumo confirmed that I needed to manually check every mile of the trip to be sure MapSource wasn’t doing something stupid with the route in a misguided attempt to save me a quarter mile. Once a route is fine-tuned though, the zumo is a great tool for following a complex set of road changes. I loaded up the zumo with my routes and a few hundred MP3s and was good to go. Of course I had printed maps to use as a backup in the event the GPS died.

Most people wouldn’t think of the KTM 950 SMR as a sport-touring bike, but with the KTM/Shad 46L topcase holding my clothes, Cortech Sport saddlebags holding my rain suit, spare gas, chain lube, tire repair kit and tools and a Wolfman Enduro tankbag for camera, wallet, etc, I had just enough room for all my stuff. The Alaska Leather sheepskin butt pad makes the stock seat tolerable and the Laminar Lip windscreen does a fine job of taking the windblast off my chest. Here’s the bike fully loaded and ready to roll on Friday morning:

Next