12 Dec Post TAT #6 – How We Rode on the TAT
DISCLAIMER!!! All figures are approximate. The maths mostly adds up, but please don’t get upset if there are a couple of errors here and there.
We rode a total of 11,388 km (7,090 miles) over 45 Days from New York to Port Orford. That means our little 12 inch Grom wheels did almost 40,000 revolutions over all sorts of terrain.That is a LOT.
That 11,388 km is according to the odometer on the bikes, the GPS seems to think we did 11,202 km which is close enough in our opinion. Remember, the GPS is only pinging every couple of seconds and drawing a straight line between points so won’t have picked up every single curve in the road. Simon had a look at our GPX tracks and tried to come up with a bit of an analysis as to what we had planned to ride vs what we actually rode and how much of the TAT we actually did.
The actual TAT from Damascus to Port Orford is approximately 8,848 km (5495 mi ) and although our GPX tracks show that we rode an extra 795 km (494 mi), when Simon overlaid the tracks on the original route, we estimate that we only rode 74.3% of the actual TAT. It’s kind of hard to get your head around initially. How could we have ridden more, but ridden less? Well, we had to go off route and miss some sections of the TAT. The biggest missed section was when Simon’s shock failed and we left the trail and zooted over to klaviators place near Huntsville. We were also not TAT purists. When we left the trail to go find gas or accommodation, we got back onto the TAT where it was convenient for us rather than backtracking to the same point we got off.
Longest Day – Day 34 – 438 km from CCC Camground UT to Tremonton UT,
We averaged around 270 km per day. This is based on my daily odometer readings not the GPX records. When we were preparing for the TAT, we thought we would be having a rest day every fifth day, and riding on average 300km (188 miles) every riding day. We thought it would take us 50 days in total to get to Port Orford. It didn’t work out that way. By the time you factor in rain days, extra riding days for Slick Rock, White Rim, Deals Gap etc.. we landed up riding less km, but riding for longer time than expected. Honestly when you are riding coast to coast, taking a day off in a random town to just do some laundry seems like a waste. It is hard to estimate how much time you need for a trip like this. It didn’t work out exactly how we planned, but we had sufficient time. We rented a U Haul to drive from Port Orford to LA and were able to bring our flights forward a couple of days too, so all in all it worked out just right for us and we would have had a bit of a buffer is something more serious had gone wrong.
It looks like most of our riding days were around 8-9 hours. Sure beats sitting in the office. The GPS didn’t do a great job of distinguishing moving time vs stationary time as it tends to “hunt” when stationary, but we reckon that most of the time recorded was actual riding time. We tended to only stop for short breaks every hour or two and lunch time was usually a brief pause on the side of the road instead of a sit down restaurant affair.
We generally aimed to get out on the road by 8am at the latest most days. Of course this didn’t always happen. On a good day we were up and gone by 7:30 on a bad day it was closer to 9am.
Riding early morning is always the best time in our view. It’s quieter and the light makes for better photos. The hard part was getting out of bed early.
Highest Day – Day 26 – 3,952m (12,965 feet) California Pass in Colorado.
No surprises that the highest elevations were out West and the lowest elevations were in the middle, but kind of interesting that we did a lot of ascending and descending out East as we crisscrossed the Appalachians.
Hottest / Coldest Day / Night – umm… that doesn’t look right
The little blue tooth temperature logger in Simon’s tank bag was not very accurate at all. Temperatures were significantly different to what we were getting on the little fish tank thermometer on Vicki’s handlebar. Neither thermometer was calibrated, but it definitely got colder than what the logged results were. We distinctly remember the morning we did Ophir Pass, standing outside the shop in Silverton eating muffins for breakfast. It was Bloody Cold! Certainly closer to zero degrees than the whopping 22 degrees logged. We also remember having lunch in the blazing sun somewhere in Utah. Simon’s Tank bag seemed to do a good job of avoiding extreme temperatures. Good for the electronics in there, not so good for measuring actual temperatures. Night time temperatures are probably a more accurate representation as the tank bag would have been in the tent with us. Basically the whole trip was pretty warm. It got warmer in the middle and cooler in the west. Night time temperatures took a dive while we were at elevation and morning s were pretty chilly riding. Logger ran out of memory around day 40.
Fastest Day – Day 32 – 99.9 km/hr (62 miles /hr) Green River to Gunnison
Whoa!!! a whole 99.9 km/hr. Man we were flying that day. Must have had a tail wind. The speedometers on the Groms over read by at least 10% compared to the GPS. It looks like our average daily average (does that sound right?) was around a whopping 30-35 km/hr.
DISCLAIMER!!! All figures are approximate. The maths mostly adds up, but please don’t get upset if there are a couple of errors here and there.