If it were me, I'd do a bit fewer motorcycle miles and more bicycling miles:
That's a BMW G650X, not to be confused with the much more popular GS650 or 800. This is a single cylinder dual sport and as such is much lighter and thus more nimble and off-road worthy than the bigger bikes. So far it seems fine on the highway, even, but it's not *great* there, certainly. I love it. But I can't find a hard pannier solution that doesn't lose the rear pegs, so while I do have the hard top box (thanks to the
2x2 Cycles rack, now made right here in the triangle!), I'm still trying to find a pannier solution. Should be able to do some soft ones, just haven't gotten to figuring out what's best yet.
Note that is an XL 29" tired mountain bike, and the angle makes it look a little bigger than it *really* is. A road bike on there would look a good bit more sane, or even a "normal" mountain bike. And you really don't even know it's back there.
As for routes, if I were doing this on a road bike, I'd look for a lot of places to take cool pictures and enjoy the scenery. If dualsport, I'd do the same thing, only I'd be WAY less careful about what roads I take. I've found that the Garmin 800 with the road map card added to it is kind of perfect for the dualsport. It's really a bicycling GPS, and thus the nav sucks. But because of that, it'll just route you the shortest way it knows, which once you get in rural areas like the mountains is *often* some washed out gravel road. Winning!
Plus, unlike an iPhone or something, the touchscreen is old-school and works fine with gloves on.
I'm not really a BMW fanboi, but I wanted a really good dualsport for dirt riding, which puts you looking at KTMs, the Kawasaki KLR (owned one already), etc. But the BMW was one of the few in this class that's fuel injected, which means I can take it to Colorado next year and go to 14,000+ feet without needing to re-jet the carb and all that hoo-hah. Can't wait to do that.
--Donnie
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