The idea for this trip started about a year ago.  My first decision was whether to do an organized tour, like Edelweiss or Beach, or go the do-it-yourself route.  If I was doing the trip alone the organized tour sounded appealing, but expensive.  Since I’d never been there it might make sense to have someone else make the ‘right’ decisions for me, and not worry about making mistakes.

Over dinner one night with my friend Jim (trflyboy on stn) on the way out to the MotoGP race at Indianapolis last year I casually asked if he had ever given thought to going riding in the Alps.  His response? “Only from when I go to bed at night until I wake up in the morning.” With another person along, I was much more interested in rolling our own trip, so we started to make plans.

The first big decision was where to go.  With guidance from folks on sport-touring.net and advrider.net, and from John Hermann’s excellent book “Motorcycle Journeys Through the Alps and Beyond”, we settled on the Italian Dolomites and the area around Andermatt, Switzerland as our base camps.  We didn’t want to mess with moving from hotel to hotel every night, so we figured we’d stay multiple nights in just a few locations. 

When to go? This turned out to be pretty easy.  I wanted to go while my son was still in school, and I had already sort of penciled in a week of vacation for Americade in June.  Jim had also planned time off for Americade, so we made the decision to forego Americade and use that time for the Alps.  Now with the dates set, and me being a planner, I made reservations months ahead at all the hotels we’d be staying at. I kept my eye on airline ticket prices, and USAirways had a big sale the day after they landed a plane in the middle of the Hudson River. Got a nice price on a ticket from PHL to ZRH, nonstop. 

For me, ½ the fun of a trip is planning and organizing.  I don’t mean that I plan all the activities, or that we have a schedule that we stick to every day, but I do want to know where I’m sleeping and a rough idea of where we’ll be going.  Once the trip is underway, I’m very flexible as to what we do. 

Next decision was which bikes to rent, and where to rent them from.  Searching on the web led me to Ad-Mo Tours, who have rental bikes in many locations.  For our trip, it looked like the best selection of bikes would be a place just outside of Zurich called Oberentfelden.  Prices weren’t too bad, but this would still be the single biggest expense of the trip (with MY plane ticket coming in second).  A little further digging turned up a dealer in the same town called Moto Mader, that had a remarkably similar selection of bikes, but with prices 30% less. Turns out Ad-Mo just rents from them and charges you for the service.  I sent some e-mails to Moto Mader (dealing with Tommy Pabst, top notch all the way), and we quickly decided to cut out the middleman and just rent from Moto Mader.

We wanted bikes that were nimble, but had luggage since we had a weeks worth of stuff to haul around.  After much thought, and test-sitting at local dealerships, we settled on a BMW F650GS for Jim and a BMW F800GS for me.  Both bikes would come with hard saddlebags and top cases, and included aux outlets for plugging in a GPS or heated clothing (once I bought the BMW plug adapter).  My first choice would have been the KTM 990 SM-T, but it only came with tiny non-waterproof soft saddlebags and a tankbag.  I’d have to pack really, really light to make that work.  My other possibility was the BMW F800ST, but that bike was already sold out.

One of my other big passions, apart from motorcycling, is photography.  I knew I’d want take lots of photographs, but I didn’t want to lug around too much gear.  In the end I settled on just 2 cameras.  For serious pictures the Nikon D300 with only the Nikon 18-200 VR lens, and for casual snaps my trusty Panasonic TZ-3.  20 gigs of memory cards and I was all set.