WR longer distance touring

This past weekend, I finally got to test my WR250R on a longer ride. Up till then, I mostly took the bike off-road and did not cover much distance. This time around, we went from NH to VT on an overnight camping trip. The majority of the ride consisted of unpaved roads, although on the way back we did hot about 20 miles of pavement (I screwed up a turn somewhere). Anyway, the trip was a rather interesting mix of roads, from trails to class VI unmaintained roads to maintained unpaved roads. The WR excelled on all of them, especially when running over sweeping hills.

With the bike fully loaded with tools, camping gear, and some extra clothes, I noticed how differently it behaved. The extra 30 or so pounds on the tail end changed the handling completely. Bike wanted to stand up more often then not, and the ride was more plush. But it still behaved rather well and carried all the extra weight without any issues.

For luggage, I mounted Oxford Sports Humpback side bags. I bought these almost 11 years ago for a Bandit 1200 I owned back then, and the bags are so well made that I'm still using them today. I did turn them around the 'wrong' way, so the hump was towards the front, which helped bring the weight down closer toward the center. On the left side, the bag rested nicely against my new too tube (which carries a 0.8L fuel bottle), and on the right it rested against the stock heat shield. This made me somewhat uncomfortable, so I quickly manufactured a bar from some old tubing (pics and writeup in a separate post soon) that moved the bag about 1/2" above the heat shield. No melting issues whatsoever and the bag didn't even get hot.

Even with my new gearing 14F and 52R, the bike did great on long, open roads. One downfall from the gearing change (I guess) was increased fuel consumption. The fuel light came on at about 70 miles each time.
Nevertheless, the gearing change made the bike much more fun off-road, where it would climb and descend anything (short of a bridge at a swamp).