Planning & Preparation
For family reasons, I have decided to limit my 2023 activity to an area within a 650 km (400 mi) radius of my home. This distance was chosen as it would allow me, if needs be, to make a bee-line dash for my home within 1 day-light ride.
This distance is certainly not in the realm of the Iron Butt Association, but I am a senior citizen ( as in old ), and I know my limits. My night-time vision is not as good as it used to be, and my knee joints can be troublesome.
As they say, “old age sucks” but then, it is still better than the alternative.
I live in the Northern Beaches region of Sydney, and there is nothing East of my home except the vast expanse of the Pacific Ocean.
This meant that I ended up with a half-moon-shaped area of approximately 665,000 sq km (255,000 sq mi) in which to explore. This area is a little less than the size of Texas, so I won't be overly restricted, travel-wise.
So now that I had my “target area” defined, it was time to identify just where the potential bonuses were located.
This area contained several large cities, as well as a few large regional towns, and an assortment of smaller rural towns, so I had high hopes of identifying enough murals to make for some interesting rides.
Please remember that the purpose of the Grand Tour is to get you out riding your motorcycle to places you may not normally visit.
During the 2022 GLMC GT, I visited the rural town of Grenfell for a photo of their Go-Kart Race Track, and while there I spent some time admiring their large painted grain silo, which is part of a growing art movement known as the Silo Art Trail. Here is a photo from that ride :-
A grain silo complex consists of one or more large buildings or structures, about 90 m tall by 50~200 m wide, which greatly exceeds the minimum GT mural size requirement, so a quick Google search on “Silo Art” provided the location of these murals.
Unfortunately, most were in the nearby state of Victoria and outside my target area, but there were still a few painted silos that I could ride to, so their locations were quickly added to my potential bonus spreadsheet.
Google also identified a “sister” project known as "Water Tower Art", and these locations were also duly noted.
It seems that Silo Art has proven to be very successful in bringing tourists to small rural towns, so much so that towns which do not have a grain silo have started to paint their water towers in the hope of also attracting tourists. From what I have read, this has proven to be the case.
It should be noted that the Silo Art movement which began in Australia in 2015, has now spread to the USA and Canada.
My next Google search was for “Street Art” and this turned up a list of towns that have been designated “Street Art Towns” because they possess multiple murals. These are now my new “favourite” kind of town, and my bonus spreadsheet was filling up fast.
Other productive Google search arguments were “public art”, “town mural”, “street mural” and “street art”, and variations on these themes.
The next step was to formulate some rough ride plans, linking up the various towns to produce the maximum benefit, and here I re-cycled my basic ride plans from last year’s GLMC GT.
I mean, the highway network has not changed, just some of the destinations.
After considering our highway network, and the mural towns involved, I came up with this “block map”, or as we would say in Oz, a “mud map”.
Seven big blocks, based around the highway network, plus three large city-specific rides. Again for family reasons, each block will be a three-day ride, with two of the cities being two-day rides.
The Sydney ride will be done over a few hours across multiple Sundays as I find city traffic horrendous Monday through Saturday.
Having laid out the “big picture”, I now had to plan out the actual routes, identify and confirm the location of the murals using Street-View and other online resources and plot the Latitude & Longitude into my spreadsheet, for later transfer to my GPS.
The next part of my P & P was to work out how to improve/reduce my time at an actual bonus location, as during the 2022 GT, I realised that I was spending way too much time at each bonus location.
The process of getting my Rally Flag out of my saddle bags, positioning it on my bike, stepping back to take the photo, realising that the flag was in the wrong place, re-adjusting the flag, waiting for the wind to stop blowing the flag around, deciding to move the bike, etc just chewed up way more time than it should.
This “off-the-bike” time reduced my “on-the-bike” travel time, which resulted in fewer bonuses visited.
There had to be a better way, and here is where I took some advice from a friend and I decided to use an inexpensive ($7) Selfie Stick instead of draping the Rally Flag across my bike.
Now I don’t need to worry as much about the bike position or the wind blowing the rally flag, as all I have to do is jump off the bike, just point the S/Stick and take the photo. Simple and surprisingly quick.
The Grand Tour Rules allow for some modification of the Rally Flag, so I also used PhotoShop to create a re-sized portrait image, which better suited the S/Stick, rather than the landscape image originally supplied.
I glued 2 small circular magnets to the S/Stick head and glued a thin piece of an old tin can on the back-side of the Rally Flag. This makes it quick and easy to attach and remove the flag from the S/Stick.
The last piece of my Planning & Preparation puzzle was that I also decided to use a small digital camera that I had bought years ago, rather than my mobile phone’s camera as I found the digital camera was easier to handle than the phone when I have my riding gloves on.
This just about wraps up my Planning & Preparation, and all that is left to do now is “go for a ride”.
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