Lessons from Flight of the Magpie, my 8,000 mile loop of the United States on my Honda CB500x in August-September 2020.
Reinforcing one of the lessons I thought I learned on the Pilgrimage: Get to camp well before 7. At least an hour before the sun goes down preferably. Because of the very strict amount of time I had to do this trip and my ambitious plan I spent a lot of days going as long as I could, and that meant that on the whole trip I only ended up at my location before the sun set a handful of times, and I only set up my tent without having to use a headlamp once. To be clear I am NOT lamenting how many miles I was doing or my plan because I did that on purpose, and all of you keyboard warriors who are about to write “maybe you would have enjoyed it better if you had taken your time” can shove it right now. What I AM saying is that I am still learning that I could probably sacrifice that last hundred miles for getting into camp with daylight left to set up and make my food. It’s good for my mental health AND good for the youtubes because I would be able to document it.
Finding campsites on the East Coast and in the Midwest during a pandemic when seemingly everyone and their Grandma has suddenly discovered how awesome it is to be outdoors, means reservations are almost a requirement, or getting well off the beaten path far away from any highways and interstates. Once you get to those backwater and backwoods campsites though they may or may not be open as I found out in Mississippi. Since a lot the places you might find sites left are also so out of the way, they don’t always have up to date information online including whether or not they have been closed due to recent events..
Have waterproof redundancies. Again, a lesson I seem to always be relearning. Even a cheap poncho as a backup that folds down tiny is good just in case you have a bit of a gear failure. That’s all we’re going to say about that.
If the weather is such that you feel you should put on your rainfly. Always stake it out. Also staking out your fly ensures that you have the best form of ventilation your tent can provide which will keep most of the moisture building that happens on the inside of your rain fly from also building up on the mesh on the inside of your tent.
Having more than a headlamp for light is awesome and a bit of a game changer. I took a long some Biolite string lights that I could hang in my tent which were so much better than trying to hang my headlamp and since they can be plugged in via usb to a battery pack meant I wasn’t worried about killing the battery in my headlamp which is my emergency light.
Waterproof Phone Cover. Enough Said.
Don’t Underestimate a good zoom lens for travel. I said it when I first got back and this is the one that has still stuck out to me the most is how much I missed having a good zoom lens, or even a telephoto on this trip. There’s so many things in National Parks, State Parks and just out in the world that you can’t get close to but you still wanna document it, but if you only have a wide lens or a prime that’s only really good for portraiture you’re missing out on really capturing every aspect you could of a place. I broke my 28-70 at Rocky Mountain Roll this year so I had to compromise on an 18-15 apc lens and a full frame 50 lens. I do have a manual telephoto but it’s big, it’s bulky and well choices were made and I’ll just have to live with them. Not the worst but also not the best kit I could have had. When I got back I invested a pretty penny in a 28-200 lens so I in the upcoming future I’ll be a little more prepared without having to bring a dedicated telephoto lens. I’m sure some of my photographer friends are cringing but Zoom lenses are just so much more versatile and practical for travel. That’s all there is to it.
I’m gonna wrap this all up with a few things I took but didn’t use:
-Extra Phone which was a bit of a POS before I left and just sat in the bottom of my saddlebag because I couldn’t even get it to work when I wanted to use it.
-Rev’it Gloves, they were the wrong size to start and I was hoping they would stretch but they didn’t so they were also just taking up space.
-Moto Mod Battery for my phone because I have to take the case off my phone to use it and I never got to a point where I used up all the juice in my battery packs and because my usb adapter on my bike actually worked so I didn’t have to rely on the battery packs while I was riding to keep my phone charged.
-Tiny Tripod, I normally bring two tripods because a lot of the time I’m too lazy to get my big tripod out, but since I bought the new tripod before the trip I never pulled the little tripod out.
-This one is my own laziness not for a lack of use, I have this little kind of egg timer thing you can put the camera on and do timelapses with, I just never was anywhere long enough in the day light to be able to set up a good timelapse to use it for.
-Drawing bag, another one that I was just too lazy to use, I normally sketch at least once or twice on a trip I feel like I’m more apt to do that than sit and read when there’s down time but this time I did do a drawing at the ranch in Montana but that was it. The rest of the time I was too busy keeping up journal pages, editing, responding to emails all the things.