Ask Susan and me how we plan a trip and the honest answer is: with a spreadsheet. Several spreadsheets, actually, plus a folder of other overlanders’ border-crossing reports and a GPS route file for every single day on the road.
Why It Started With The Tandem
The habit began on the tandem, not the motorcycle. A loaded touring bicycle has no spare energy for improvising — if the road ahead turns out to be unpaved, badly surfaced, or simply the wrong one, there’s no easy 20-mile detour at the end of an already long day. The same went for stopping for the night: after ten hours in the saddle, neither of us had the energy left to ride around a strange town hunting for a hotel or somewhere decent to eat. So we started deciding those things in advance, at a desk, when we were rested enough to think clearly about it.
The Stage-By-Stage Spreadsheet
Every trip since has run on a stage-by-stage route spreadsheet. For the 2025 Panama-to-Alaska ride it runs to 65 stages covering Panama City to Vancouver: mileage for the day, rest days built in, an arrival date, notes on the road itself — potholes, tolls, border crossing points, closures — and, for every single stop, the accommodation options we found, colour-coded red once one is actually booked.
Stage one reads simply: arrive Panama City, four nights at the Hotel Riu Plaza Panama, breakfast included. By stage 10 it’s grown teeth: ‘Shorter day due to border crossing. Before entering El Sal complete TIP application online.’ By Guatemala the notes are comparing which hotels have secure motorcycle parking against which are 40 miles closer to the border but worth the detour for a better rate. None of this is written to be read once — it’s written to be leaned on, tired, at 6pm in a country where we don’t speak the language fluently.
A GPS Route For Every Stage
The spreadsheet only gets us to the day; the actual riding gets its own route file. Before every stage we build a GPS route and load it onto the sat nav, so the bike follows a road we’ve chosen rather than whatever the mapping software decides is fastest that morning — important on stretches where the ‘quickest’ route on paper has, more than once, turned out to be an unpaved track through nowhere.
A Border Researched Before We Arrive
Alongside the route sits a second document, built specifically for the land borders on the route: real crossing reports gathered from other overlanders for that exact border post, covering what a TIP (temporary import permit) costs there, which building to park at, whether vehicle insurance is compulsory, and which photocopies to have ready before anyone asks. Reading it in advance is the difference between standing calmly in the correct queue and discovering, once you’ve reached the counter, that the correct queue was the other one — more on that in Border Crossings On Two Wheels.
Packed To The Item
The same instinct runs to packing. Our checklist runs to 99 items across six categories — Documentation, Bike Equipment, Clothing On Bike, Clothing Off Bike, Personal, and Miscellaneous — everything from the obvious (passports, vehicle registration, six photocopies of the V5) to the specific (tyre sealant, JB Weld, a spare plastic bike key, altitude sickness tablets, a Garmin inReach). It exists so that packing morning is a checklist exercise, not a decision-making one.
A Plan Is An Influence, Not An Order
None of this makes the plan a rulebook. Weather, mechanical trouble, or simply finding somewhere we don’t want to leave all override it, regularly, and we let them. But a plan sitting in the background is a persuading influence even when we deviate from it — it’s already done the work of removing the uncertainty, so a deviation becomes a choice rather than an emergency. That’s the actual point of all this spreadsheet-building: not to remove the unexpected from the road, which is impossible, but to make sure the only things left to improvise are the ones actually worth improvising.
The Research That Matters Most Now
These days, admittedly, one of the main planning tasks has quietly become finding where the good beer is for me and a decent slice of cake for Susan at the end of each stage. Some priorities don’t need a spreadsheet — though we’d never say no to one.