We enjoyed a warm lazy morning at the Puyuhuapi Lodge before catching the 12:30 boat back to the parked motorcycles. The prescribed route had us going only 140 miles for the day to Coyhaique. It was an easy day of riding on mostly paved roads south through the southern reaches of the Andes mountain range.

This is officially Part 2 of the trip, the “guided” trip that Michael won in the drawing. For this part of the journey, the company, Ride Adventures, organized the route and made all the hotel reservations. This was a new thing for us. For the first half of the trip we had a few hotel reservations but mostly played it by ear and made reservations as we entered a city or maybe the day before. We were generally content with more “economical” accommodations that were nice but not necessarily the most expensive places in town. The day we took Dee Dee to the airport we moved from our nice but… cozy.. airbnb in downtown Pucon to a swank resort hotel 15 km west of town on the shores of Lago Villarrica. Hmmm, nice for Deby and I but I’m sure not as romantic for Michael and his new room mate Chris a.k.a Dr. Science.

I’m not really sure where Patagonia starts but for the next few days we would be riding towards the top of my Patagonia map, so I’m calling it Northern Patagonia. Here is a map of the whole route with Dee Dee.

Bandwidth, bandwidth, bandwidth….. Ok, that’s my excuse for not posting more often. Yes, it’s easy to upload the text of my posts but who really wants to spend time reading my blah, blah, blah?? The bandwidth intensive part of the post is uploading the pictures which just wasn’t happening in the last few stops. In a way it’s nice not having much connection with the outside world and we can enjoy the ride.

So far the trip has been amazing and all good. Yes, I know that travel trials and tribulations make for interesting and exciting reading in a motorcycle travel blog but so far it’s just been all good. I’ll try to recap a little here and add a bunch of pictures. The map below shows our days, each day in a different color.

Wow, 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”.