Discover Hidden Motorcycle Roads: Explore Beyond the Obvious

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I, I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all of the difference. Welcome to the Throttle and Roast podcast. I'm your host, Niels Meersschaert. In today's episode, I'll discuss finding those hidden gems, the roads that stick in your memory forever, and probably the ones that few others have taken. This accidental arrival seems like serendipity, but it all starts with how you point your bike and where you're willing to let the road take you. Now, we've all heard of these legendary roads, the roads that everyone always talks about as these must-ride roads, and there's a number of different examples of them. The Tail of the Dragon down in North Carolina and Tennessee, 318 curves in just 11 miles. This is often on the bucket list of a lot of riders. We want to have this aspiration of the kind of road that we want to ride and go and explore and then have just a experience that's unlike any other, and it is one of these ones that's out there. Of course, another great one, if you aren't looking necessarily for the curves, but you're looking more for the scenery, would be something like the Pacific Coast Highway. Now, this is in California, offers 656 miles of ocean views, cliffs, and an iconic coastal cruising, especially in the Big Sur stretch. It's a beautiful road, and I've driven it before, and it's absolutely gorgeous. But again, it's one of these almost, you start to get into a bit of the cliche feeling of, it's a road that everyone has done. They tend to be a little bit more busy, and therefore, it's not really one of these hidden gems. Another good example for some of our European listeners would be the Stelvio Pass in Italy. This is just a breathtaking view of just roads switching back and forth back and forth as they're trying to climb up over the pass, it's very tight corners. Nearly every single corner is a hairpin turn, and people dropped their bikes on the corners because it a challenge as you're going through these hairpin turns, as you're also having a very sharp uphill. And change in the position and the shape of the road can make it harder for people, especially if they're maybe not keeping enough momentum going. So these are good roads. I don't mean to diminish them in any way, but the thing is, they can get a bit crowded. Everybody knows about them. So the weekends often finds them crowded with a ton of bikes and cars, trying to experience them for themselves. And by all means, they're definitely something that I would encourage you to try out and explore. But in this episode, I really want to focus on some of the roads that might be closer to home that you don't even know about. so let's discuss a couple of ideas of some of the tools that you might be able to use to find some of these hidden gems, some of these hidden roads. Well, one would be some of the resources for almost a rider reviewed map. These might be things like MotorcycleRides.com, where you're really getting to explore and find what other people have found of these really good roads. And maybe they haven't sort of bubbled up to be in those top legendary roads quite yet. But they're definitely something that you can locate and find and then maybe look at being something that you want to explore. Another one that I would say is maybe look at some of the GPS tracking apps, some of the apps like Rever or Curvager. And these let you track, plan and filter paths by twists and turns. So one of the cool things with some of these GPS apps is you can enable a twisty road routing. And this allows you to just sort of find the fun roads that you'd want to go and travel along. And so they are a good resource for discovering some of the roads. Another great one would be some of the curated guides. So you can look at some of the physical and digital collections different companies. Some like Butler maps is a really good one. These are expert rated difficulty and scenic ratings for each of these different roads. And really encourages you to find something that is unique, something that's going to be more fun. with the curated routes and specifically with Butler maps is if you happen to have Rever and you have the pro plan for Revver, the Butler maps are sort of built into the app. So when you're looking on a map and you're trying to find some cool roads to show, you can display these Butler roads and find them that are close to your area. So you can be like, okay, I'm gonna go there and that's the road that I'm gonna try to travel on. So it is a really cool resource when you're combining these curated maps along with the apps to let you kind of string together and find the route that is right for you. I will say though, one of the downsides, I think for some of the curated routes and in particular like Butler maps, while I do love them and they have some really great things, depending upon where you are in the world, there may not be a lot of the stuff that has been sort of curated or bubbled up right in your local riding area. Like for me with the Butler maps, I've got to ride a good 75 to a hundred miles before I get to anything that is showing up on Butler maps. So it's, it's not really something that is directly in my of course, these epic roads that we talked about, the tail of the dragon, the Stelvio pass, the Pacific coast highway, these get a lot of press and they are great roads, but there's a lot of roads that are probably really local to you that you might have discovered almost accidentally. Maybe you take a wrong turn and you end up on a road that just surprises you with how good it And it might not be the longest route, but it's clearly a hidden gem. Or you pass a road every time going along, maybe one of your favorite roads, but you've never taken it before. And maybe you try turning down that road and you just see what you've missed. Maybe it's nothing, maybe it's terrible, or maybe it's this amazing road. If you never try it, if you never explore it, you'll never So, and at least in my own experience, I found oftentimes the best roads were the ones where I just made that decision. I'm going to turn left over there because that road looks interesting. Now I'm going to go through a couple basics of how you might sort of change your approach of how you look for these roads or how you ride and really to make it easier for you to have this opportunity to find some of these really cool roads. So I'll start with some basics. One of the most basics, of course, is using some of these riding apps and allowing you to find the twisty Now these are done with an algorithm that is looking at the variance in straight line along its path. And these can be a really good way to find some good roads, but since the app is really trying direct you between like where you are starting from and where you're trying to go to as your destination, it has a relatively narrow corridor where it can pick some of the roads that it might choose that still kind of get you in the direction you're trying to go, but might be more interesting than this is one of the problems of where you have a destination in mind. You might miss out on a lot of roads because the good roads are just not anywhere near where you're going. Another good resource for this is also road rating. So sometimes a road has been given a rating by an individual user. And some of these other resources that we talked about earlier can be good ways to find and discover them. what I really like is actually in beeline beeline lets you basically thumb up or thumb down any road that you're riding on. And this will effectively help route the other users as they're kind of finding the fun roads. The fun roads are really going to cater more towards the ones that already have twists and turns in them. But also it's going to use the ones that have been rated with a thumbs up by a lot more riders. And when you combine not just that it's twisty, but that it actually also got a thumbs up, that's going to kind of give almost like an extra bump into the likelihood that it'll pick that road over another. Likewise, you could have a road that looks very twisty and fun, but a lot of riders have thumbed it down. Maybe it's got a lot of traffic on it. Maybe it's just a bunch of shopping malls, whatever it ends up being. And so it will turn that down and it's more likely that you'll skip that particular road. So the road rating can be another useful tool in your belt as you're thinking about how you're going to go. And so I think the twisty routing and the road ratings, they're a good baseline. They're a good way to get started and for many users that might even be just like where you're going to begin with and you're going to get a lot of enjoyment from that for possibly even many years. But if you want to bring it to the next level, this is where I think you need to start looking at some other tools and other resources to really kind of figure out the best way to do this. Well, one of my favorite things to do, and you can do this on apps like Rever and Curvager, is switch it on to a topography map. And when you look on a topography map, one of the big things that changes is you're now starting to see the elevation changes. And when you start to see those contour lines get closer together, you see it's a much steeper area. And usually when you get by some of these steep areas, that's when it becomes kind of interesting. They're just geographically more interesting. If you're really interested in having where you're climbing up and over a mountain pass, they're more interesting. And you start to look also for some of the rivers, which very often actually also combine with these elevation changes. So you might find a valley and at the bottom of the valley is a river. And it's twisting along the bottom of that. And you've got some great roads that are right next to it. That's a road you probably want to take. getting in the habit of being able to look at the maps and find the roads that look interesting just by looking at some of the topography surrounding them is a great resource to do. I'm going to go back to Beeline because I actually think Beeline sometimes doesn't get as much credit as I think it deserves. While tools like Rever and Curvager and a few of the other ones that are out there are often sort of held up as the gold standard. And I think they are extraordinarily good, especially for planning a route. But there are some features in Beeline that are almost hidden and you really don't take advantage of them because you're not using Beeline on a regular basis. And my favorite feature, I'd say, from is that it actually has this journeys page. And this will show you every road that you've ever traveled on. And if you've ridden it more than once, it will be a dark gray. While the roads that you've only tried once will be sort of a lighter gray. And you can then just very visually kind of look at a map and you can zoom in or out as much as you need to sort of see, well, where have I ridden and where have I not? And while some other apps will let you sort of see a little bit of this, like on Rever I can see, hey, here's a map and it shows me maybe my past like five or six rides. That's only the past five or six rides. This is showing you your entire history. it's very, very powerful. So what I love to do is I'll look for areas that I've not ridden in before. And so there'll be sort of a, you can think of it like a blank spot on my map of there's a lot of gray lines all surrounding it, but there's this hole in the middle where I haven't ridden in that specific area. Well, half the time what I'll do is I'll just kind of pick the point right in the middle of it, set that as my destination in Beeline, and I'll use compass mode to get there. And I will just navigate my way to that. And I've got to find the roads and discover how I'm going to get there. And that kind of leads into the next way that I think is helpful. If you're really trying to find these hidden gems, if you really want to see, well, what's this fun road that I'm not going to even be aware of, or it's unlikely that I'm going to be routed there with a normal turn by turn app. And the big thing is why I like the Beeline for using the compass mode specifically is that the app is not really giving me any turn by turn directions. It's just pointing and saying, you got to go that way 114 miles. How the specific roads that I choose to get there is entirely up to me. so what you end up doing is you'll look at the compass and as it starts to get maybe to 90 degrees to your left or 90 degrees to your right, you'll realize, hey, I have to make a turn. The road I'm on is no longer aligned with the direction I need to go. So you start looking at the roads that are kind of aligned with and now you start to say like, okay, well, that's where I have to go. But when I'm riding, I'm also often looking at the road names. And this is the other thing I really about the Beeline is, you're not just blindly following a map on the screen. You're actually looking out in your environment. You're more aware of the environment through which you're riding. So you start to see some of the scenery. You start to pay more attention to the road. You pay attention more to the road signs, et cetera, but I'll look at the road names and based on that, I might actually then start to choose like, and I'll pick a road that I think will be a option and likely to turn into being something that's fun. So what I've found is if you see a road that has hollow somewhere in it, this is usually going to be a really good road because you're going to be in that hollow, you're going to be in that valley, and you're going to be kind of riding along the natural terrain that is at the bottom of this valley. Or if you find something that has river in the name, same thing applies. You're going to be following along a river, it's going to be twisting, it's going to be turning, and you're going to actually then have this really fun road. And the thing that's interesting about this is when these roads come in and you have like a hollow or a river, they're usually not the main drag. They're usually a secondary road that might've been one of the original travel roads from way back when, but as people start to find faster ways to go, they're going to find and maybe they're going to go over another section where it'll be more of a straight line, but these roads will still be there, but they're the roads that you typically would bypass, but they're the fun roads. So look for a river, look for a hollow, if it has a mountain in the name or a hill in the name, these are also usually good options because you're usually going to be climbing or descending this hill or this mountain, and you're going to be twisting and turning as you're going up there. So it really can make for a really cool experience as you are just finding these different roads that you want to explore. And again, coming back the fact that I'm looking for an area that I've not ridden in before and I'm intentionally riding there, I don't have a really destination. It's not like I'm going, oh, I'm going there for lunch. I'm just, I'm going to this big blank spot in my journeys map. And so because I've not been there before, everything is new. And since any of the paths that are on a normal twisty routing engine would put me along, didn't ever have me go in that area in the past. I just might discover some really cool hidden gems. Now I've, I've had my beeline for a number of years at this point. So it's something I don't use it on every single ride, but I do use it on quite a number of them. And it's not that I'm necessarily following it let's say pre-planned route, but I'm oftentimes doing these compass sort of approaches. I did this a lot with the, the coffee rides that I did. If you check out the website, throttleandroast.com, you'll be able to find some of those where I was just trying to find a cool coffee shop within one tank of gas. And so I just would find the coffee shop, point my compass or I get at it and then figure out the path to get there. And I'd find all these really cool roads along the way. But in the course of doing this, I mean, I've ended up tracking about 34,000 miles with my beeline. when you think of the journeys page, the journeys page is now made up of capturing all 34,000 of those miles on that page, which is really cool just to see. Now, of course, as anyone, you are more likely to ride more often in a radius closer to your house than, you know, riding hundreds or thousands of miles away when you're doing a long trip. You're not doing long trips every single day. So when I look on mine, generally, if I kind of look at like a 75 mile radius around my house, and I mean straight line radius, 75 miles, it's kind of weird. Like nearly every single is colored in on my journeys map. I've pretty much ridden every single within that 75 mile radius. Obviously, I have to start going out further and further to be able to find the roads that I've not ever ridden on before. this means that for me personally, I end up having to ride usually a couple of hours before I get to that, because 75 miles is a straight line, isn't 75 miles ridden. No one has a straight road right from your house to the part where you've not been before. So it's going to always be, you're going to follow the road and you're going to have some diversions and everything. And just after having done this for so long, I kind of find that on average, at least where I live in the Northeast US, it's usually about a 1.6 diversion ratio. And what that means is that if I have 100 miles is where I'm trying to go as the crow flies in that straight line, I usually have to end up traveling about 160 miles along the roads to actually get there, because you're not going to have that straight line. And you're going to sometimes double back, you're going to switch back and forth and back and forth, and then eventually you'll get there. But it's never going to be a straight line. And so since that 75 mile radius is kind of where it's really colored in very heavily, I have to ride a couple of hours to get to an area that I have not really fully explored. And of course, I'm skipping high population centers like New York City. Even though that's fairly close to me, I'm not really going to go into New York City and be like, "Wow, look at these amazing cool roads that I found in midtown Manhattan!" No, you're not going to find that really there. So there are some areas that I am intentionally sort of skipping over. So major population centers, when you're getting into an urban environment, you're not going to find the really fun roads there. That's just unfortunately one of the byproducts of them. I do ignore those and so I tend to, at least where I am in the New York area, it tend to kind of look more like North and West sort of directions as I'm trying to get going, because it's where I'm usually going to have more opportunities for it. And of course you can travel along the Connecticut coast and see some really great things there. But again, if you get into that I-95 or U. S. Route sort of corridor, again, super, super populated and not necessarily the most fun roads, because you're just going to be stop and go all the time. So you have to sort of use your head of what are the areas that are going to be the most likely candidates for me to find good roads, and the more you get away from population centers, I just found that that's more likely you're going to find the fun roads that are not overcrowded. And so just point your compass there and head on out. So we touched on some of the legendary roads that you've most certainly heard of, like the Tail of the Dragon or the Stelvio Pass. And we also looked at some resources for finding some lesser known, but still ones that people are kind of aware of. We looked at how you can discover roads in your own backyard using tools like twisty routing and road ratings. But then you can kick it into high gear by reviewing topographical maps to look for elevation and water features and the roads that are nearby them. Or take advantage of the Beeline Journeys screen and set your destination to an area that you've never ridden before. So my question for you is, what is the one road that you've found by accident that you always think about? Share your thoughts through the text to show link in the show notes or leave a voicemail at throttleandroast.com/voicemail. Thanks for listening. I'll talk to you next week.