So, today I woke up and took my shower – for the note, even though I’m usually taking a shower after my riding day, when I’m all settled, camping or motel, I still need to take a shower in the morning too to get fully awake and throw away my sleepy face 🙂 Then I did a few trips between my room at the second floor and the parking spot downstairs to move all my stuff to the bike and attach the multiple bags with the straps.
Talking about straps and all the stuff I carry around, although I now always attach everything the same way – I’m a very logical person, so when something works, I have it pretty easy to reproduce the exact same setup – it still takes me easily 15 minutes to do it. I usually start with removing the gas jerrycan from the top box – I don’t bring it to the room or tent, for no particular reason other than thinking the place of a gas jerrycan is not where one sleeps – and putting the big bag with the food and cords in the top box. If I’m camping, I also pack the power cord and battery tender in the top box (I like to be sure the bike’s battery is full in the morning). Then I lock the top box, and start adding the tent, chair and tripod bags on the rack on top of it, using 2 basic elastic straps. Then I strap my duffel bag to the pillion seat using the ROK straps – these were a pretty wise and happy purchase by the way, they are really good and allow me to easily unstrap the bag in less than 10 seconds at the gas station to fill the tank (which is under the pillion seat, as opposed to most other motorcycles). Finally I use 2 more elastic straps to attach the rain bag that contains my sleeping bag, my inflatable pillow and the inflatable mattress on top of the duffel bag (but not tied to it, so that I don’t need to remove it when I fill my tank). And finally, I attach the gas jerrycan on top of it, tied to the rain bag’s straps. And mostly I’m done with packing and ready to go.
So let’s get back to today’s trip.
Leaving Page, I did a quick detour to get a view of Powell Lake, before heading toward Oljato, Monument Valley. 
If you look at the map, you could wonder why I went north east to Page, went finally I started today going south east, and could have saved myself some travel by going from Grand Canyon to Tuba City instead of Page. Thing is, I had initially planned to go to Grand Staircase Escalante, but then desisted thinking maybe there was not so much to see there after the Grand Canyon – I hope I was right. So I skipped Grand Staircase and went directly to Monument Valley.
After a couple hours riding, I finally saw the famous profile of the Monument Valley buttes.
The Monument Valley park is not part of the US national parks, but an indian park – Mojave I think, can’t remember – so I had to pay the $10 entry fee anyway. The guy at the door joked about my bike looking pretty loaded and insinuated I’d probably not go off-road… I wasn’t sure what he was talking about, so I said I also doubted I would. But then I came in front of the main visitor center building, which I skipped visiting by the way, and saw the view and I was like, “okay, there’s just a view and I paid $10 for that…”. But then I saw the off-road circuit were a few regular tourist cars and some well-equiped off-roads vehicles were taking, that went around the various buttes, and I thought to myself, “well if I put off-road tires on my bike, it’s certainly not just to go on highways”, and I decided for it: off-road I go!
After about 45 minutes of going around the various buttes in a mix of gravel, sand and rock roads, I finally came back to the starting point of the tour and then left the park, through roads that seemed to go to the infinite (and beyond!).
I finally reached a campground in Bluff, UT just a little before sunset, which I was able to capture.
When saving the videos from the GoPro I also noticed how many mosquitoes were taking the off-road tour in Monument Valley with me…
