How Tank of Coffee Explores Coffee Shops and Scenic Rides

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you love coffee and you love motorcycles? How do you combine the two and find some great coffee shops near amazing roads?

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Welcome to the Throttle and Roast podcast. I'm your host, Niels Meersschaert. We've been finding fun roads and independent coffee shops on the Tank of Coffee site for a while now. We've ridden and published over 50 rides to coffee shops reachable on a single tank of gas from our base in Westchester County, New York. Including the distance from each round trip, we've traveled over 5000 miles exploring these coffee shops, and in this episode I'll share some tips and hopefully inspire you to try out your own coffee rides.

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So let's start with picking your destination. What I found works the best for this is really looking and focusing on some of the smaller towns. And the reason is that they often have better roads getting to them. if you can try to look for some that have an interesting site that you might visit in combination with that coffee shop where you might see, you know, something of history or something of of a natural beauty that you want to do. This is usually makes it a little bit more interesting and makes it a bit more of a destination. The other thing that I'd say is when you're thinking about your destination, most people are probably going to sit there and go and pull up Yelp and that's fine, that's good. certainly in terms of getting some insights, maybe getting a lay of the land.

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Is this a place that actually some people have had positive experiences? What do they think about the coffee? It could be a good option for that. Another way that you can discover which coffee shop you might want to pick out is check out your favorite roasters website. Many of them actually show the cafes that serve their coffee, and this can be a great way to find what places might be. Now, when you think of this too, you want to be realistic of it, of like, what are you going to do if you're doing it as just a day ride? What is reachable for it?

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So part of the reason why we used a tank of gas was a tank of gas felt sort of practical for us in terms of what was achievable, of, hey, we're going to go out for just a single day to ride out there and then ride back while a single tank of gas is pretty reasonable that you can be, oh, I can get out there and then get back and have a tank of gas and either direction, that's pretty reasonable, We're oftentimes looking for something that's more reasonable to get there still, maybe at the latest mid-morning. So it could still make sense to have a coffee. So we tend to find usually that's in that range of, you know, 150, 200 miles of actual riding distance seems to be pretty good as a good rule of thumb.

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What else do you want to do? Well, you want to think about how you pick your route.

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Now, of course, a lot of riders do like to have a preplanned route. It does make it a lot easier for in terms of discovering what how long it's going to get you there, what are the good roads, etc.. And this is great. I happen to personally like using Rever for that. And the reason is that Rever has a couple of really cool features, especially if you're on the pro subscription with it, such as the twisty routing and what the twisty routing will do is it will actually look for those fun twisty roads and try to effectively like pull a magnet for your route onto those roads so you can kind of maybe not go the most direct route or the fastest route, but is the one that has the most curves. And as a motorcyclist, we all like to be on curves and get that lean going on. The second thing that the Rever app will do for you, if you're trying to plan in advance, is it allows you to have these incredible roads features. And these are mostly coming from Butler Maps, which is a phenomenal mapping company based out in Western United States. And what they do is they figure out what are the roads that actually are the best roads out there. And that's having local people have everything ridden them. They're going to give a little bit of an assessment on it and. It's based upon, how curvy the road is.

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It's going to be based on elevation change. It's going to be based upon scenery all these things combined is going to be factoring that, and then you can use that to help maybe snap your route on to there. So I find Rever is a really good resource if you want to plan in advance.

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The great thing also is that if you do have that pro subscription, then Rever can actually also export a GPX file.

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So if you're using a more traditional GPS, let's say something like a Garmin, you can actually then follow that route Of course, Rever also allows you if you wanted to use your phone as a navigation device, you can have that and Rever can plan and show that to you and other devices such as like the Beeline Moto also can take an imported GPX and allow you to follow along there. Now there's a second route, and this is the one that I actually mostly do when I'm doing these coffee rides, and that's actually where I use an as the crow flies, and this is specifically using the Beeline Moto and one of the cool things of the Beeline Moto that I like about it is that as effectively two modes that it can sort of do, one is where it's doing a turn by turn routing and this is what you probably are familiar with with any sort of a GPS that's out on the market. It will give you an indication say, okay, you got to turn left in, you know, quarter mile, half mile or whatever the distance is. It obviously give you more, more notice than that.

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But it makes it really easy to just sort of follow along and do your navigation. We actually have a good review of the new Moto 2 on the website, so I'll share a link for that in the show notes But the second mode that the Beeline Moto has is this compass mode. And this is something that I think is really unique. If you think of any other GPS that's out there, none of them really have this. And this is a bit of a byproduct of just how simple of a design and a user experience that the first Beeline Moto was attempting to do. And fundamentally what it was was just an arrow and it had an indication of how long till your next turn, for example, if you were doing the turn by turn.

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But it really was just an arrow.

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And the cool thing is that they had a secondary version where you could basically just have the arrow pointing to the destination and I really fell in love with this because what's cool about it is when you have that, it's just like sailing.

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It's just like flying an airplane. You just have that arrow is pointing at your destination and you just kind of have to figure out how to get there. It can be a bit unnerving if you're uncomfortable with that, but I've actually found that it's a great way to discover many new routes and it's what I really love about it.

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So if you actually look at any of the routes that we've done on Tank of Coffee, none of those were preplanned Now, what's cool with this is if you obviously know a road and you know, it's a good road, you might then say, okay, I'm going to go and take that route. And it's kind of roughly oriented in the same direction. But if you're not, then what I tended to do is I'll have the compass and it'll be pointing and maybe when I start, it's pointing the same direction that the motorcycle is traveling.

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Great. I'm in a good mode. Most roads, though, aren't a straight line to your destination, so they're going to wrap around geographic elements, be they hills, be they what bodies of water or be they towns or whatever it is. And at some point you might get that that road is no longer aligned with your compass. So now once it gets to maybe 90 degrees one side or the other, I'll then figure I have to make a turn.

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And, you know, let's say it's a left turn and I'll look along some of the roads that I'm passing along and then I'll say, okay, well, is this road, the road that's a good option to pick? And there is some nomenclature that you name roads.

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So if something is named a lane or a drive or a court, that's usually intended to be something that is really has no outlet to it. Whereas if it's a road or maybe like a hollow way, these are their names that are probably going to be an indication of like it's a through road. And so that'll be a good option. You may also look at some of the names that are part of it. So as I mentioned a moment ago, a hollow a hollow is a really wonderful road. It's usually meant as being at the base between two hills on either side and you're in that hollow and it's following along the hollow. So it's going to wind its way around with the natural topography of the road. Another one would be a river road. This is another great road that's going to follow along a piece of water. And usually it's going to be nice and twisty and fun to do.

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Farm roads tend to also be good options. You might sometimes hit some dirt with them, so if you're uncomfortable hitting a little bit of dirt on on your bike, maybe you avoid those.

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Eventually you'll pick a road and sometimes it works out and you're going to get this amazing road that you discover and maybe you stop along the way because you see this beautiful site or this great open vista that you come to. And sometimes you're going to get into that situation where the road was called a road, but it actually was really a lane. And now you've got to turn around because it ended up being, you know, no outlet into there.

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So these things can happen, but it is part of the adventure and I really enjoy it for when you're going out and riding.

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Let's switch gears and we're going to talk a little bit about how do you figure out how much time you actually need for your ride for that day? So you've you've identified your destination and maybe you have a route that you're going to pick or maybe you going to do it flying by the seat of your pants with the compass route. But how do you figure this out? Well, if it's a planned route, most of the planning tools, including the one that I mentioned, Rever, will give you an estimate of the travel time. Now, in general, if you're taking back roads, the average road speed will often be lower than that of a highway.

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But and this is where I think too many people, they're de facto is to say, hey, I'm going to go and take the highway, It'll be faster. The reality is oftentimes the back roads, while the road speed is lower, the distance is often shorter. So it's a tradeoff between those two. And and I generally find that it works out roughly about equal. Like if I take something that's a back road and I'm going to go. But it's a much shorter distance than if I take the highway that goes way out of its way. It's usually faster to do the backroads anyway in terms of actual ride time. you can play around with this. But as I said, the planned routes kind of do this. If you're doing the compass mode that I alluded to specifically with like the Beeline Moto, what I found is that on average, if you think of the distance that you have as your straight line and then the distance you would actually travel to get there, that delta between the two is called a detour index. And I found that in general it tends to be about where I am in the northeast, about 1.6. So what that means is that if the compass is straight line distance is 100 miles, then I'm going to expect to travel about 160 miles to get there.

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And that's I found it's pretty good Rule of thumb. Sometimes it's less, sometimes it's more.

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But that usually gets me in a reasonable amount of ballpark.

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What I then do is I multiply that again by 1.6 to give me the ah, the amount of time. and so the road speed tends to be a little bit less on back roads.

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And so when you take that 1.6 multiplier, that's roughly kind of giving you about like a 40 ish 45 mile an hour average road speed that you might do. I find that that kind of gives me a good estimate so that what I can then do is it gives me time to just sort of maybe stop, maybe I want to take a couple of pictures along the way. Maybe I want to admire a vista, but I still have some buffer built into it to kind of absorb that.

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Whereas if I'm on the highway, I'm not really going to be stopping because it's not a lot of sites along the way. What am I going to see like a a strip mall? It's not the most exciting stuff. So the way I figure this out is if I take that, let's say that my estimated distance was 30 miles and I multiply that by 1.6 to get 48 minutes. So I take the miles times. The 1.6 gives me the total number of minutes, and that's the estimate of the time that it would take for me to get there. Now, admittedly, this is a bit of a hack and of course, if you ride more spirited, you'd get there a bit faster. But as I said, you might stop to admire a vista. So I find it's a good rule of thumb to kind of estimate there. Now, the other thing you're going to want to consider is how much time you're going to spend at your destination. Well, the whole point of you doing if you were going to go and find this coffee shop, you're going to want to actually go and order a coffee, maybe have some sweets, whatever it is, and spend some time there. And I usually find that I want at least an hour at the spot, meaning the coffee shop I'm in. If I'm going to explore something that's in the area, I may even want to put a little bit more time surrounding that so that I have some time to sort of peruse and visit the area. Now return time. I think you have a couple of options that you can do. One is you could say, Hey, I'm going to still do some fun roads coming back and maybe you have it preplanned, maybe have where you're doing the same route that you took out. Maybe you're doing a different route coming back.

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Either one of those is fine.

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Usually for me, I find that I'm really keen on spending as much enjoyment of getting out there, and then I was able to savor it with a nice coffee and just getting back home. I'm fine with just saying, Hey, let me go fastest route, you know, whatever the highway's going to do. And that's fine. I'm I'm ready to kind of take a little bit of a break anyway and just do a highway. So I might point, let's say if I'm using the Beeline, which is what I'm typically doing on these coffee rides, I can then route it to get back home and just do fastest route. It's going to do highways and it will give me a pretty reasonable route. I can then take the time that was estimated for that and use that in my planning. So now I've got ride time to get there, time at the destination and then return time and I've got what my whole day would be. So whether maybe I'm leaving at seven in the morning and I'm getting back home two or three in the afternoon, depending upon how far away it is.

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Now, if you're looking for any recommendations of some shops to visit, well, if you're in the Northeast, United States, then I would actually point you directly at the Tank of Coffee website, because we've actually said we've got over 50 of these that we've ridden and each of the coffee shop rides that we do, we get a little bit of a description of, Hey, what was the ride like? How did we enjoy it? What was the place that we visited? What did we think of the coffee shop? So we have a bit of a review of the coffee shop, a review of the ride. We have on every single one of these coffee rides, we actually have the Rever route that we recorded to get there. You can then connect into Rever, you can download a GPX of the route if you are a Rever subscriber. So it's very easy for you to find these various coffee routes that you could choose to do. Now if you're not leaving from where we start in Cross River, New York, that's totally fine. You can actually see of the roads maybe build your own route by leveraging some of the stuff that we really enjoyed.

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You know, we talked about a few different aspects in here.

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First one is picking what your destination is. What's the coffee shop that you want to go and visit? And is it more than just a coffee shop you're going to visit? Are you going to see some other sites that are nearby?

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how are you planning your route?

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Are you going to be planning the route in advance using a tool like Rever or one of the other many tools that are out there, or are you going to do it a little bit more, seat of your pants and maybe just figure out, here's the compass distance and I'm going to go from there.

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Either of them is totally fine.

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Either one can work. But we talked about a couple of those different options. The third aspect is how long do you need?

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Well, how long is it going to take to get there? How long are you going to spend your destination? How long to get back home? hopefully this was something that was a little bit of eye opening and gives a little bit of the behind the scenes of how we actually do the coffee rides on Tank of Coffee and we have a couple of links that, as I said, I'll share. One is to, of course, link to, moto, the Beeline Moto 2 review that we do this is the device that we actually are now using the newer version of for all of our coffee rides. And the second thing is we actually have an article that talks about how you can explore some of these roads. So it goes into a little bit more detail of how you might pick those particular roads If you're doing it in a compass. One of deciding this is the road that I want to take in this one I'm going to skip and maybe making some judgments of, Hey, you're on a road that is going in the wrong direction, or maybe the character of the road is no longer fun and you want to get off of that. So we talk about that in a lot more detail. thank you so much for listening. I hope you enjoyed this episode Thank you and we'll speak to you soon.