A post written before we set off and that is something more for us to remember things by in the future than anything very interesting...
We finished the last leg of our round the world trip in 2019. We were lucky, a year later we would have been right in the middle of the pandemic. We are not sure where, or even when, the idea for this trip came along. It does, however, feel as though it has been a long time in planning. There were a number of reasons or excuses for when we set off in 2014 but we can't point to anything in particular about this trip. Perhaps it was down to listening to all those exciting stories being told at Overland Events? More than likely it was something to do with long trips now being in our blood and this is one of the ones we would like to have a go at whilst we still can.
The normal route for 'Pan America' seems to be from North to South; start in Alaska, finish in Argentina. Our friends at GlobeBusters even do this as a group trip but we already know that our pace is not theirs and we would be far too slow to ride in a group. We read books, we looked at what other people had done, we investigated what other tour groups were proposing and we started to plan our ride. Paul, being the Engineer that he always will be, started looking in detail at what we would be likely to encounter weather wise on the trip. This was based on a pace somewhat more leisurely than what the tour groups were proposing and what he found was that we were likely to encounter a lot of weather en route. A lot of wet weather. And that might dampen our enthusiasm a tad.
So we turned things on their head and looked at going South to North instead.
That way we seemed to be in perpetual summer whilst also avoiding quite a bit of rain at the same time.We were also likely to cross the paths of a lot of different people travelling in the opposite direction with whom we could swap stories en route. As we are travelling on our own it is always good to meet up with people on the way for a chat - and no excuses are necessary the next day if you decide that you don't really get on with them - as everybody will be travelling in different directions.
But it was not possible to wave a magic wand and get the bike to the bottom of the Americas in order to start. There doesn't seem to be an international port or airport in Tierra del Fuego. So we had the choice of either freighting the bike to Buenos Aires, by air, or to Montevideo by sea and we chose the latter.
Sea travel on a container ship is somewhat slower than freighting by air. So we handed the bike over to our friend Kathy at Motofreight in August.
Travel requirements were the usual ones; just a whiff of petrol to be left in the petrol tank and the battery disconnected. Normally the latter is quite straight forward on a motorcycle; lift up the seat and disconnect. However those technical wizards at Harley decided that the battery on the Pan America should not just sit in front of the engine but almost underneath it which meant that what should have been quite a simple task to undertake was the opposite!
