On our last trip to Patagonia we had to wait one month in Buenos Aires for our motorcycles to be delivered. This time…. one day! Oh, yea. Of course, we were not waiting for OUR bikes all we had to do was take a cab to the offices of Ride Adventures in Pucon where they had our bikes shined up and waiting.
Continue readingWow, thanks for all the comments here and on Deby’s Facebook page. I hope this is an adventure worthy of everyone’s time. You just never know….
So, what’s the plan? Well, like most things it started out simple and became more complex. That’s OK, I’ll start at the beginning.
Because of Michael’s “win” of a free tour we are going with an outfit called Ride Adventures – Tours and Rentals. They specialize in adventure motorcycle tours around the world taking people on grand adventures in amazing places. But…. they have one, select, very special tour in the United States. Guess where???? WISCONSIN! What? Most of you probably know Deby and I grew up in Wisconsin where we met and moved to Seattle after college. We learned Eric Lange, the founder of Ride Adventures is also from Wisconsin, small world.
Michael’s free tour was one of the more basic self guided Patagonia tours they offer so Michael decided it would be worthwhile to pay for an upgrade to what they call “The Patagonia Experience“, a 14 day motorcycle tour.
What the? Where have we been? I’m continually amazed at how many people I run into that mention how much they enjoyed following our blog. Sure, mostly people are just nice, but it does mean a lot to us and those comments are truly appreciated.
I’ll skip to the good part. We are leaving in less than two weeks for a return to South America! So many people have asked to follow along via this blog that I decided to dust off my WordPress skills and give it a shot.
As you may recall the whole thing started with our original MotoRaid trip in 2013 with Keith Thye and David Yaden. That trip was documented in this blog (Click HERE or the tab on top). Keith immortalized both his 1963 trip and our 50th anniversary trip in the book, The Whole Story, that can be purchased from his website here: http://www.keithsrides.com/books.html
There is a back story to our return and it’s probably worth telling…..
It started with this guy…
We met Michael Hansen on the original MotoRaid trip in 2013. Over the years we’ve kept in touch, and without our meaning to, became good friends with Michael and his wife Dee Dee. Michael and Dee Dee live in Idaho but we’ve managed to schedule numerous visits and motorcycle trips together.
Last June (2018) we attended the Touratech Motorcycle Rally together in Plain Washington with a small group that attends almost every year. We camp in a back corner and keep a little bit to ourselves but have a huge amount of fun.
When we checked into the rally we were each given 4 raffle tickets, over the course of the event we had the opportunity to visit the variety of vendors onsite and if we liked their product we could drop off a ticket with that vendor. I like this idea because if your ticket does get drawn at least you end up with something you might like. One of the vendors was an outfit offering tours of Patagonia, Deby and I immediately dropped all eight of our combined tickets into that bucket. Hey, we had been back less than a year from our last trip there but why not try!
Michael, who is very well known for being, um.. let’s say, frugal, decided to drop in only ONE ticket and save the others for who knows what… a t-shirt? Ok, you can guess what happened. It’s towards the end of the night and we’re standing around with some cool beverages not far from the fire. On stage there are a couple of the organizers picking tickets out of a big bucket. They save the big Patagonia trip for last…. out of our whole group and a combination of probably 20 tickets we haven’t won anything yet. With way too much drama (just like this paragraph) they draw a ticket and call our Michael’s name! Holy Buckets! We’re all jumping around laughing and slapping high fives. Suddenly it struck me… I turned to Deby and said in my most calm and serious voice, “this is gonna really cost us”.
I’m writing this from the comforts of the USA. It’s good to be back and ride roads that are mostly in pretty good condition, speak in my native tongue and slip into the easy travelling mode that will describe the rest of out trip home.
I’m concluding the blog at the Mexican border although we still have some weeks before we are home. The rest of the trip will be easy, mostly paved and take a roundabout route visiting family along the way. Fun for us but maybe not up to the level of adventure the readers of this blog are used to (really big grin here…). Continue reading
Our last border crossing before the final one into the US. On Friday May 19 we rode 140 miles from Chichicastenago to the La Mesilla border crossing into Mexico arriving about 1:30 in the afternoon. It was a surprisingly quiet border crossing with no people hustling us and no lines of people, nice. That didn’t mean it was fast, we still needed to make copies of various things running to a tienda across the street but after about an hour we were let into Mexico. Yooohooo, we’ve been to Mexico so many times it just seemed easier. The roads in general were nicer and we started switching over to the toll roads just to avoid all the topas (speed bumps). Continue reading
unday May 14, 2017
An easy day’s ride from what we now call the “Waterfalls” hotel near San Pedro Sula Honduras to the small tourist town next to the Copan Ruins. I think the town is actually called Copan Ruins but it might be called Nueva Esperanza. Either way most people just refer to the city as “Copan”. Continue reading
I see it’s been a few days since the last post….. Central America will do that. It’s HOT, WET and HUMID. The close proximity of countries with their border crossings and narrow roads through cities filled with topas (speed bumps), slows everything down. In a way we want to hurry through Central America, in another way we want to explore places we haven’t been. I’m counting border crossings in my head, two more until the USA. I’ll be glad when we are done with those and am worried about having only one blank page left in my passport…. Continue reading
Imagine a cat hissing and screaming while in a fight for it’s life, multiply that by 100 cats at the same time in a giant brawl and have that sound reverberate in a dark cave made out of marble walls. That is what we heard as we dropped into the marble caves of Rio Claro in the tropical rain forest of Colombia. We couldn’t see these loud birds but they obviously didn’t like our intrusion into their den of darkness and showed their displeasure by hissing and screaming at us.
On Saturday April 15, 2017 we crossed from the southern hemisphere into the northern hemisphere at where else but The Equator! A momentous event as we finished the southern half of the globe and transitioned closer to our home hemisphere. It also occurred to me that we also transitioned from fall to spring in one step. Ha, how cool was that? Since we left Seattle before the first day of winter we managed to totally skip winter 2016/2017. I’ll take that. Continue reading
Warning – there is nothing in this post having remotely to do with motorcycles. Being a motorcycle blog I feel the disclaimer is in order. However, if you are interested in seeing some amazing wildlife, me being attacked by a Sea Lion, the Albatross mating dance, boobies (yes.. boobies) or me swimming with a shark…. read on. Continue reading