Two Pegs to Patagonia, The 3 Americas

Bit the bullet, bought the flight tickets.

September 8th 2010 is the day we fly out to Toronto to start our 3 Americas trip .

Now we just need to get the panniers made for Jean's bike, buy lots of stuff to live off, sort out paper work so we can get through borders, starting with Canada. We have bought one way tickets, we expect to be be questioned at immigration. Better practice our smiles.

Not a major change, (but an expensive one) decided that my XJR was not the right bike for the trip. uses lots of fuel, tyres expensive and if I "ding" a wheel (alloy) I'm stuffed. Getting a replacement will be expensive, at least with spoked wheels I should be able to get local repairs done.

My old XJ900F reached a milestone today, 100,000 miles.

She is a 1994 "J" reg, I've had her since 1997 with 11,500 miles.

She has never let me down.

And then she rolled over.... just like new again.

Spent a few hours with Vern (Project VND) trying to work out how, where and what size panniers to stick on the bike. There was a lot of hmmming and arhhhing. Much measuring, re-measuring, head scratching and discussion.

Finally a decision was made, he will need to make a cut out around the exhausts and there will be relatively flat tops with hooking points.

The mortgage. Finally paid off this month. Took it out when I was 21.

Its been a long time..... maybe I'll go on a little trip to celebrate.

While riding my Pegaso last month I heard a vibration, so I crawled over the bike and noticed the radiator was loose. On closer inspection the 2 top rivets were missing. I popped into Pitstop and Paul had a look, then started to fix it by widening the hole and adding a pop rivet. The 1st one went in OK, the 2nd punctured the rad :-(
When we looked more we realised the radiator was slightly bent (from previous owners drop). After checking a new one was 300ukp ! I went to see a local radiator repair shop, only to be told it was knackered.

I'm not panicking, honest. But with the bikes due To ship out on the 1st September it would be nice if everything was in placeWe are waiting on 2 major items at the moment

1) The panniers
2) Anti-malarials

We seem to have got into limbo with the surgery pracice nurse and the doctor over getting our prescription for the Malerone, and if we order online it we need to post off the prescriptions to get the pills. It is over £100 cheaper to order online though.

And of course we want to pack the pills in the bike panniers.

Finally, after what seems like an age, we have the panniers fitted to the bikes.
The tightly fitted garage, 4 bikes are squeezed in here, you can just see the XJ900 buried at the back.

This month has been a nightmare of organisation, originally I had a great plan where these last 2 weeks would have been a case of relax, throw the bikes on a plane, and then we run away.

Managed to fit everything in :-)

Bikes are sorted with Panniers

After a frantic few days of packing, repacking, buying extra items to aid packing (once we had the panniers we had a better idea of how we wanted to fit things, we delivered the bikes to James Cargo for air freighting to Toronto.
As we pootled down the M56 it occured to me that this was actually our shake down run, it was the 1st time we had both been out with the full kit load. We resisted the temptation to pitch the tent and repack as a final experiment.

On a trek to find his fellow penguins.

Touched down just before 17:00 local time (22:00 GMT), pretty uneventful flight, smooth, on time (heck we actually had a plane !) and food as well.

After being hit with $25 taxi fare to go less than a mile (as the crow flies) because no one would let us walk across the runways, these were the words we were met with on Thursday morning when we did find them.
Yes, nearly £1000.

I'm still not sure what had gone wrong, but the bikes had been put into storage, at a cost of $596/day, they had been there since Monday. We got James Cargo on the case while we went to sort out customs clearance and it has been 95% resolved, I am still awaiting a refund from JC.

On the shores of Lake Champlain, Vermont.

Does my bum look wet in this ?

Results of wearing Dainese "all weather" pants for 2 hours in heavy rain.

Since crossing into the US, we have been wandering around the North East (New England) states, in fact we headed East and North into Maine before dropping south.
The border crossing at Cornwall was very un-stressful, we were asked the expected questions about status and financial situation then stamped through for 6 months, I think the B2 Visas helped. I resisted any jokes with Officer Geiger over his name in case a sense of humour failure ensued.

After our soaking in Pennsylvania the weather has picked up as we have dropped south, after a stop over near Washington with an ex Sun colleague, Christin Tran, we headed on down to Colonial Willamsburg. I've written about the area last time we here in 2007, so I won't go into detail again, other than saying it is the home of the 1st permanent colony in the US (forget that Plymouth Rock crap).

Why "Yee Hah!" ? Well, we are now in the Confederate South and joined the locals doing what locals do.

Kill Devil Hills, Kiitihawk, North Carolina. The track marks the world's first successful powered flights, by the Wright brothers, on a freezing cold day in December 1903. A piece of the plane was sent to the moon and back on the Apollo 11 mission in 1969.

Those Wright brothers were damn clever people.

We have just spent a couple of days camping on the beach at Kitty Hawk (North Carolina). The Atlantic swell was "awesome" thanks to the recent hurricanes.