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Fourth of July Journey

 The good ole fourth of July. It is my favorite holiday. Caleb and I have spent this holiday apart for the last two years due to travel and work and all of that dumb adult stuff that we have to do sometimes. But this year.. This year was different. We were going to have close to a full week together in Big Red and I couldn't have been more excited. Of course, in true Laura fashion, things went wrong and plans changed.  We had a campsite reservation just north of Grand Rapids, Michigan Sunday night and the following days were going to be Upper Peninsula state forest camping. We decided to take the Africa Twin with us on the Versa-Haul to be our commuter vehicle. That is so much easier than packing up camp just to go sight seeing. The big bike is definitely a load on the back, but everything was within the weight limits of the hitch and the hauler. We had just left home and hit a small construction site in the road. The kind where they leave a big bump down and a big bump up. Yo...
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To Savannah and Back. Or So We Thought..

To Savannah and back was the plan. It was going to be a six day road trip through the southeast. A part of the country that I had not seen before. We were packed and ready to hit the road the morning after Christmas. We piled into to the van and wouldn't you know it, it wouldn't start. The battery was dead. Caleb did quick work getting us jumped and off we went! The interstate is about 5 minutes from our house and was the next stop (literally). We made one turn and basically everything in the van shifted to the other side. We made a quick stop on the side of the interstate to secure everything and away we went! If you have ever traveled with me, you know that I have bad travel luck. I have delayed flights. I have canceled flights. I hit ridiculous traffic jams. I have terrible hotel rooms. It never fails. Things just go wrong. The way the morning started should have been the warning for the rest of the trip. While nothing terrible happened, nothing went as planned. Let...

Springfield

I knew what I was getting into when I started dating Mister. A life of racing. Moto. Road. Flat track. Enduro. Harescramble. Late nights in the garage working on bikes. Early mornings traveling. Hot humid nights sleeping in tents. Long days baking in the sun. It was a life fit for a king, if you ask me.  Springfield is the pinnacle of flat track motorcycle racing. It is known as the "Fastest Mile on Earth". Every Memorial Day and every Labor Day, the grandstands fill with moto enthusiasts and the track fills with the best racers in the World. From the time that we started dating in 2004, Mister and I (and usually a couple of friends) went to the Springfield Mile, twice a year. It was about 5 years ago that the streak ended. And somehow we never made our way back. Until this Labor Day weekend... This was a perfect opportunity to take Big Red on an actual camping trip. So we loaded her up with the bare necessities and headed West. Sticking with the current lifestyle, we ma...

In The Beginning

It was during our trip to Kansas that we decided to purchase a van and convert it to a camper. It was mind blowing that we hadn't came up with the clever idea until then. Kansas, as you might know, is windy. Those tornadoes don't just come from thin air! (Well, they do... But there is always wind involved.) As we were bucking a gnarly headwind on the way back to Indiana (also infamously windy) chugging along racking up a whopping 11 miles to the gallon, we started brainstorming better ways of traveling long distance. From Battle Ground, Indiana to Emporia, Kansas was about 12 hours. This would be our furthest camper pull yet. While having the camper during the weekend was a godsend, tugging it to and fro was not.  We talked about upgrading to a driveable camper, but those are $100k. We talked about just tent camping like we did in the good ole days, but we kind of like a little comfort during race weekends. How can we still have the comfort of the camper, but not pull a camp...