Riding a Motorcycle from Texas to Canada in 60 days |Episode 1|

Oh my god, I haven't recorded in almost a year. This is crazy. What's up everybody? Alex here. I know it's been a very long time since you've seen a YouTube video of mine. That's because I took a very long and extended hiatus to kind of grab my thoughts and grab things back together because doing this for the last seven years it's been very difficult and I have just been completely burnt out. If anybody knows anything about traveling the world and anything about filming it, it's very difficult to do it alone and solo and let alone in the heat and especially driving a motorcycle. The complications of it and the logistics of it are just very very time consuming and difficult. So doing that for many many years was very difficult. So I invite you back to my channel. Thank you everybody who's been following and commenting and doing all these things. It's great to be back finally. It's taken quite a quite an effort to be here but here we are. To update you on things, I am currently in the United States. I am driving a motorcycle and I am outside South Dakota Wyoming border area and for the next few weeks I will be driving this wonderful motorcycle across visiting great sites and I will be filming three very unique cinematic videos and I will be doing vlogs and I kind of want to show you behind the scenes of what it takes to capture a cinematic journey and try to film it and have some help and do it solo, fly drones, the whole deal. I'm going to be more about the human experience of what it is to travel in 111 degree Fahrenheit heat like I did yesterday to what it is to get to these monuments in the summer and what my personal journey is all about in the difficulty I've had this last year and trying to get back on the YouTube. Motivation, inspiration and just that energy to want to keep doing this because I love sharing my journey and inspiring others and informing everyone else but after about seven eight years it really starts being very very difficult tasks. For today's beautiful thing we have the Devil's Tower which is behind me. It's very busy right now. It's a very touristy season and yeah it's just a very nice monument. It's a very weird geological formation that has really no scientific evidence as to how it really formed and there's always been old wives tales, there's always been Native American stories about how it formed but there's nothing that can prove how this thing was actually created geologically. We see theories and stuff like that but there's nothing that's been 100% proven which is quite interesting so really unique site. People can actually climb all the very top and yeah that's it. Thanks for everybody for being patient with the videos and there's a lot more coming up a lot more consistently hopefully weekly, bi-weekly and yeah here we are. I'm gonna get on the road and head to Wyoming which I heard is really awesome so we'll see you there. Here we go the adventure begins. My glove has a hole in it that's so I can actually touch my screen on my cell phone and give myself the proper directions and for those of you who are wondering who is this delightful young lady in front of me this is Grace. She is my wonderful and delightful friend we met a few months ago at an event in California. She came to the event in South Dakota and we were both there and we said hey listen we both want to do a trip why not go together save cost and logistics. She's gonna help me film a cinematic video so she'll be here with me for the next week or two and we're gonna be filming some cool stuff and with her help hopefully we'll be able to document a really nice motorcycle journey so all right Grace you ready? And before anybody asks Grace is not my girlfriend. Grace and I are not romantically engaged because I know that's what everybody's gonna think when they see this video. Yes you can have female friends and yes there are badass female riders out there and she is one of them so this is her. And the thing about South Dakota and Wyoming area right now is there's a lot of Harley people because the world's largest motorcycle rally called Sturgis Rally is around this area and it's coming up in about uh two weeks so lots of Harleys and cruiser type looking bikes. The park rangers over here hello they literally have like seven of these park rangers just dictating traffic. The tax dollars are going towards parking attendance very very expensive parking attendance is what it seems like. So on another note uh if you notice i got a nice quad lock phone adapter for my cell phone here i got a gopro on this side i got a gopro facing me and i got a gopro in which uh you're seeing this footage from so hopefully i'll be able to capture things a little easier and not make it too difficult for me. Look at that we got an annual park pass now which means i can visit any national park for uh the same price okay thank you so much off we go. All right so for those of you who always have questions about my gear i got a Schuberth C5 helmet that is right here it's really cool it's made of fiberglass it's super light and there's an integrated comm system from Senna and the battery pack is on the back here so i no longer have to carry that huge Senna thing on the side which is super super nice. Currently wearing the Alpine Stars boulder jacket they were very nice to sponsor me again this year so i've got nice gear and yeah quad lock as well has my cell phone now which has been very very nice and i'm currently waving to some bikers okay hi uh yeah so that's my gear if you're curious because i get a lot of comments on what i'm wearing but again it doesn't matter what gear you're wearing it doesn't matter whether you have a hole in your glove or not any motorcycle can be an adventure motorcycle any gear can be good gear i drove from alaska to argentina on a terrible helmet and a terrible jacket and a pair of jeans basically and i did it so you don't need all this fancy stuff all you need is the ability to go out there the vision and a little bit of motivation and inspiration and you can make anything happen 20 p.m and it's time for another gas up and as you all probably have figured out during this time gas is getting quite expensive luckily on motorcycles it's not too bad but with two motorcycles it's almost like filling up a car so four dollars eighty cents diesels at five 4.5 so yeah it starts adding up i think every time we've been gassing up it's been uh i don't know like 22 gassing up it's the half the price of a car for two bikes there we go good stuff yeah it is about 95 degrees it's pretty toasty out here these people doing it right they can put down the top when they want to but they can also have the air conditioning as you wish that's always the hardest part about gassing i was making sure that gas doesn't drip on there one thing i've really been enjoying uh from this trip so far is my equipment sw-motec super cool they give me all my all the bags and stuff that i won't need and this thing actually has a magnetic lock so grace has straps so you got to take them on and off it takes quite a while with this one you just basically put it here and it sticks on there and you're good to go so very fast very efficient and cool technology absolutely love it would have killed to have this when i was driving alaska to argentina so i gotta say one thing about wyoming that's been really interesting has been all the little towns like this uh little old timey looking hotel the saloon then you have a little fair going on over here which is also very nice some people on a horse carriage which is super cool you got the little concert going on to the left over here wish we could go there but we got places to be and yeah just this whole building architecture these little small towns and cities drive through in wyoming very very cool very cute guys we have made it to this little off-road gravel they're kind of cute and you'll never guess the name of it it is called crazy woman road and it just has a hilarious name it's good stuff good chuckle lots of horses well we ran into a problem here apparently the road is closed which sucks because it basically means we got to go all the way around which we were not planning for it's garbage all right drove for another four hours and finally made it to some sort of uh camping area which is great there's a little fire pit going on down there and it is uh almost 9 p.m and there's still a lot of light and this is a really cool camp spot because it's free and there's a little stream behind there i don't know if you can hear it but it's super cool super homey gonna put the tents up here uh next to the trees pretty great area and yeah what a pretty adventurous day pretty awesome and just enjoying being out here in nature because this is what it's all about right you get these little beautiful spots and you know the struggles are just kind of melted away after the whole day so just hearing the stream and just being in nature and having a moment like this is just um it's what really makes it worth it to me so love it i can smell the air i can feel the adventure it's awesome so good all right time to build the tent oh man it got super super cold it got down to uh like 57 degrees fahrenheit which after you know 100 plus days it's uh it's quite cold we were not prepared for that but luckily we zipped up everything and we made it just fine so if you're asking why we're putting our tents next to each other well that's because number one safety out in the wilderness there's always animals and stuff number two the human animal also very dangerous so we don't want anybody sneaking up on us or whatever it is so this is uh for safety number one also in case it gets really windy it'll help dissipate the uh the wind and so forth so yeah whenever you're camping the main idea is always stay safe and um one of the ways you can do that is by doing that all right so for those of you wondering what i am doing now i am pumping up my air mattress in my tent and i'm putting my sleeping bag and my pillow and to do this i used to do it manually just blowing all the time but that gets very tiring very quick and i've almost passed out a few times by blowing so much air so now i have a really cheap small air pump it's definitely worth it a little loud and takes away from the sounds of nature but definitely worth it then on this little thing you have here you actually are able to blow air manually and the air doesn't come out so you close the main valve and then you open a smaller valve and then you blow in it to get that extra air that you lose when you're trying to actually close it from the pump sounds pretty good all right pillow is done usually people like them pretty firm i like pillows pretty soft and all these are inflated by air which is super great super convenient and uh yeah packs up very nice in this little bag this little air pump and it's amazing grace does not have an air pump and she saw my air pump and she's like oh my god i should get an air pump finally this is a sleeping bag and this sleeping bag has a lot of history because it has traveled with me since the beginning of my travels starting 17 years ago when i was 17 years old myself and this one was my dad's that he took to alaska one time i purchased it off of him for like uh 50 or 40 and it has been to like over 50 countries around the world and it still works fine and it's absolutely amazing the fact that it's lasted 17 years this sleeping bag pretty much my trophy and memento of some of my travels is my backpack's been with me everywhere sleeping bags we've been with me everywhere i think that's pretty much it that's been with me everywhere everything else changes pretty crazy to think huh 17 years with the same sleeping bag that's life one thing that's pretty extreme that most people don't understand is um whenever i travel and i camp in random places i always bring my most important stuff with me in the tent i don't like leaving it on the bike even though there's a you know small chance of anything happening um i don't want to take that chance so when i was camping out in south america there's people that walk around everywhere so you never know somebody's gonna do something and then sometimes i sleep with earplugs as well it's hard to wake up to sounds when you're wearing earplugs so i always like to keep the most important stuff like my camera gear my laptop with me inside the tent most of the time that's when i travel today uh pretty safe so i'm only taking my usual stuff in case it does rain or anything happens uh always bring it in the tent for safety first and i think the hardest thing about this trip and everything is getting back in the vlogging i haven't vlogged really in almost a year so even just getting the camera settings right even trying to figure out what i wanted to tell the story behind it i really couldn't figure it out it's taking me weeks and months to just be like okay this is what i want to do and even just talking to the camera and even talking to you guys it's been very difficult just because i got so burnt out doing it and what this trip has taught in the last week of filming this even though this is just day one i've been trying for seven days to film but i haven't filming the way i did every single day when i did south america when i did all the other countries it was a nightmare it was basically i could only film the only thing i ever had to do was time to film i had no time to enjoy i had no time to see and i don't want that to happen again and i got super burnt out uh doing this and it was just it was just very very bad awful to say the least i'm trying to find ways that isn't going to kill me to do this uh because i love sharing and inspiring and giving some sort of hope for people or details and ways to do things i just love doing it i love being out here i love having these moments but it's just incredibly difficult to document edits and do all this stuff it's just too time consuming you lose you lose everything that is um the journey in the moment time so i'm trying to get a better balance on not too much but not too little and most people that are watching this just will never experience to know how difficult it is to travel on the motorcycle and document it as best as you can quite a lot of people don't do it it's incredibly difficult the fact that i was able to do it for so many years five years i think non-stop um baffles me because now i find it so difficult just to do one day i can't even imagine to do it again for five years strip i'm going to try to do cinematic videos some creative stuff uh evolve my cinematography and just document as the cool things that i think are cool and share with you guys inspirational moments all right i'm gonna go make dinner and go to bed all right grace telling nice people what exactly we are having for dinner salad in a bag um a rotisserie chicken and how magnificent this is oh look at that rotisserie so awesome that's $9.99 you can buy hell yeah totally worth it so there you have it we got chicken salad and macaroni and cheese i think some chips as well so that is our dinner and that is the end of the day today and the sun is officially going down at 10 p.m pretty much anyway thanks for joining me on this adventure today and we'll see you tomorrow