Why, Where, and How?

Three weeks and counting until departure. This will be the first big trip away since our return from our big 4.5 year around-the-world trip over 5 years ago! I'm psyched! We are always asked "What was your favorite country?" We answer "We don't have a favorite country but we do have a favorite continent...South America!" So that is where we are headed.

Chris and our friend Paul are prepping our KTM 950 Adventure right now as I write this. In two weeks the bike will be shipped by air via Lufthansa from Denver to Santiago, Chile (via Germany and Brazil). Many of you wonder why we are only taking one bike for this trip. The simple answer is that it is cheaper to buy one bike, ship one bike, and easier to find storage for one bike when we leave it in South America in January. Why KTM instead of BMW? We got a screaming deal (nearly half-price) on the KTM from our BMW dealer who got it on a trade in.

The plan is to ship the bike down to Chile, crisscross the Andes with Argentina, catch up with old friends in both countries, explore some new areas of Patagonia, catch a bit of the famous Dakar Rally, and finally store the bike in late January near Buenos Aires until we return next November. That's it. No hotel reservations and no itinerary other than a flight home in January.

This will be our international travel bike, to hopefully be used annually, and in 2010 will probably move on to southern Africa for more adventures. Our big around-the-world trip taught us how to survive being together all the time. For the past year we've successfully worked together in our real estate business. This trip should teach us how to survive literally being pressed together 24/7!

Since we've done this before and we know what to expect, the planning has been easy and less stressful. Much of what we need we already have, and what we did need to buy we knew how to source. Old friends in the motorcycling industry have been very kind to us and provided us with a few new items and replacement parts. But all in all, if we forgot something...oh well! If we learned one thing from our previous travels,it's where there's a will there's a way.

Next entry will likely be an update on the process of crating the bike and getting it shipped. Stay tuned!

-Erin

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