GoDometer: Alone or in a group

You have to decide if you’re going to travel alone or with others. There are advantages and disadvantages to both choices. I like both depending on my mood and who the others may be. During the past five years I’ve found that whenever I travel alone I get rained on about half the time I’m on the bike, sometimes more. If I travel with someone else I never even take out my rain suit, even when I can see thunderstorms on all points around me. There may be some cosmic meaning here but I’m too dense to figure it out. Touring Alone If you travel alone you can do whatever you want whenever you want. This can be very nice. You also tend to make much better time – high mileage days are MUCH easier when you’re alone. It’s also easier to find a place to sleep since you only have to satisfy your own motel or campsite requirements.

On the down side there is no one to talk to on breaks or during meals. If you breakdown you’re on your own. You’re also more vulnerable to the crazies and the local rednecks that like to mess with bikers. This isn’t common but it still happens. Touring In A Group In a group there is more security and people to talk to but at the price of lowest common denominator behavior and decision-making. The degree to which this is a problem varies with your personality and that of your travel companions. Remember that the IQ of a group is the IQ of the dumbest person in the group divided by the number of people in a group. As a consequence, groups can do some pretty stupid things – things that the individual members would never do on their own. You will not make as high an average speed in a group as you would alone. This is true for ALL groups regardless of makeup. With a group all stops will take longer. On average planned stops for groups take the planned amount of time plus a minimum of an extra 5 minutes for each bike beyond one. For example, a planned 15 minute stop with three bikes will take 15+((3-1)*5)=25 minutes. You can see that for large groups once you stop you run the risk of never leaving until it’s time to go home. This rule is true for day trips, multi-month tours, and everything in between. You must also consider the frequency of stops, also known as the pose factor. Posers are not touring motorcyclists. They seldom ride more than a couple thousand miles (3200 km) a year, mostly from their house to the nearest biker hangout and back. To them a serious road trip is about 100 mi (160 km). Don’t get me wrong, I have nothing against posers per se, many of them are really nice people. It’s just that if you want to actually ride your motorcycle having posers in your group can be really frustrating as they always have some silly reason to stop. They say things like “we’ve been riding nonstop for 50 miles (80km) and I need a break.” On a day-trip this can drive you...

We hope that you enjoyed reading this excerpt from "Alone or in a group". If you would like to read the entire article and more, you can order a back issue of Jul / Aug 2006 where this article was originally published.

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