Equipment notes:
I bought a new tent for this ride. My 23 year old North Face VE25 is a bit too big for packing on the motorcycle, and my other tent is a floor-less tee-pee. On a whim I stopped by the North Face Outlet in Bezerkeley and found the tent I carried on sale for $125 OTD. It was worth every penny when it started to rain. One of the key factors was the large vestibule where I could leave my dirty boots and still find them dry in the morning.
There were two places we went where having a smaller bike would have been nice, and a bigger bike would have stopped us. Even just unloading the gear from the bikes would have been beneficial, had we the ability to come back the way we came. In the future, trips like this might be better planned with a "base camp" for a few days and plan big loops from there. For the most part I think the 640s were a good size- we could hustle them through the rougher sections and they still kept up on the highway.
Luke and I both bought new tires for this trip, and as it turns out, we both bought the same set; Dunlop D606 front and 908 Rally Raid rears. After around 2500 miles the rear tires are showing wear but the blocks are still square. The 908 is a really stiff tire, and it makes me wonder if it's not made for even heavier bikes than our loaded 640s. The tirees are 3-ply nylon with an additional 2-plies of aramid (Kevlar) on the tread. They were super stiff and super hard to spoon on, and when I checked my pressure in Port Hardy, I found that it had 10 pounds in it. I don't have rim-locks, it never spun on the rim, and if you go back and look at some of the pictures, you'll see that it didn't really look low. The 908 also took some getting used to. Initially it tracked every parallel grove of every surface we rode. As it wore, that eventually went away. The 606 front is perhaps the finest tire I've put there, though it will clearly wear out sooner than the 908 rear. We were both running heavy duty tubes and neither of us got a flat.
Gas... If you can't carry at least 5 or 6 gallons depending on your gas mileage, don't go. Many of the reservations had gas stations, but you can only get 87, and they're still a long ways apart.
My 640 has the Hepco Becker rack. It's been welded twice on the left side where it's been prone to breakage. It's a design fault, but I'm not sure how it could be better other than to just be more robust. I had it buttressed before I left, and it's certainly not going to break there again. The aluminum boxes though... In the past I'd had problems with the aluminum rubbing off on everything. So this time I stitched together a couple of liners from rubberized cordura. They worked fantastically, but it still doesn't stop stuff from getting pulverized inside them as you go bouncing down the dirt roads.
Don't use el-cheapo PVC rain slickers for motorcycle rain gear. Find a good reinforced nylon set- preferably one where the pants are "bibs." You won't get water down the back of your pants that way.
100,000 miles plus on the Combat Touring Boots. There's nothing else to say.
When we got to Canada, it was hot. I thought that I had brought the wrong riding gear. Instead of my riding jacket (with pads built in) I was thinking that I should have brought a pressure suit and jersey. When temps came down to normal, the riding jacket (with vents) was just right. As the rain came in, I still needed to layer a fleece underneath.
I'll post up more if I think of anything.