This is the first Team Elephant blog post for 2013. It is a month late because we are a month late recovering Elephant from the shippers. There must be reasons for this delay, but I am yet to have anyone explain them and, to a great extent, we don't care about the reasons. Our own preparation and planning has been sufficient but sometimes people, or organisations, just let you down. What matters to us is getting on the road. The rest is just waiting around.

With Elephant safely delivered to the docks in Brisbane on 22 July, Jo and I flew out to London to spend six weeks with our daughter Sarah, her husband Mike and our grandchildren Erin and Conall. It was six weeks of family time, renewing our relationship with Erin and starting our relationship with three month old Conall. A week before we left London, four year old Erin started school and we watched her depart for her first day in a smart check tunic not unlike the one her mother had worn just a short few years before. Time flies.

Elephant was due to arrive in Seattle by 10 September so allowing a couple of days for it to clear US Customs and Homeland Security, we flew out of London on the morning of 12 September and arrived in town later the same day. A routine enquiry the day before our London departure to confirm the arrangements delivered a shock. Elephant was not entering the US through Seattle as we expected, it had been delayed and was shipping into Los Angeles. It would be transhipped after customs and security clearance and we would get it in Seattle in the second or third week of October. We had a long flight from London to Frankfurt to Seattle to consider the implications, none of which were good.

For our first four days in Seattle we stayed with our acquaintances Mary and Dennis and their daughter Sarah whom we had come to know through Mary's sister who is Jo's life-long friend. Apart from a bed, some excellent local knowledge and warm hospitality, this respite gave us a few days to think of a new plan. We knew that if we picked up Elephant in LA we could take delivery at least two weeks earlier than if we waited for delivery in Seattle. It was a simple decision to change the delivery location, rent a small car and ramble down the west coast.

We spent the first week driving a large circle around the Pacific North West starting in Seattle, running anti-clockwise around the Olympic Peninsula then sweeping to the east to Mt St Helens and Mt Rainier. Our second week crammed in as much of the coast road as we could muster from Portland Oregon south to Los Angeles. This detour from our plans had the added benefit of giving us a soft introduction to travel in the US that will certainly make the next few weeks on Elephant easier than it might otherwise have been.

As for the Pacific North West and the coastal drive south, it was a gem. It lived up to a reputation for stormy weather, spectacular scenery and cosmopolitan cities. While our visit was merely something to whet the appetite for later explorations, we enjoyed both the scenery and the relaxed hospitality of the locals very much.

The grand hatchback road trip got us into LA and an old Ramada Inn on the border of Little Korea and Little Saigon in south Los Angeles. The place catered to Vietnamese package tourists and had certainly seen better days. The local businesses were almost exclusively Korean or Vietnamese with a dozen excellent restaurants within a few minutes' walk. Any excitement for our location was, however, muted. We still needed to get our hands on Elephant which had arrived on the docks the same day we arrived in LA. The shipping agent informed us that the container which held our bike had been selected for x-ray inspection by Customs. That night the US Government, including Customs, shut down. We sank into a funk of depression and decided to fill our spare time with a little tourism and some necessary administration.

I last visited LA 30 years ago. My memories from that time are of a suburban sprawl over an improbably large area held together by a tortured maze of freeways. It was at the time a place dominated by cars and nothing much had changed. LA is huge, covering 1,000 square miles about 2,500 square km). Scattered throughout the sprawl, the clustered towers of isolated business centres seem like islands adrift in a sea of humanity. But even on those islands, that critical mass of humanity needed to build a vibrant city are hard to find.

After a long day's wait, the shipping agent confirmed that Elephant's x-ray would go ahead as planned as it had been scheduled before the shutdown, but it was still another two days before we caught a taxi to the warehouse armed with one gallon of super gasoline, a set of jumper cables and a few hand tools. There was paperwork, of course, then several hours of unpacking and reassembling Elephant. When the bike was screwed together I pressed the starter not expecting much of a response. Elephant rumbled into life without complaint and the jumper cables stayed in the bag unused. Things were, at last, looking up.

We got Elephant back to the hotel and spent the remainder of the day sorting through our gear, slowly building a pile of clothing and other items we would leave to the housekeeping ladies and a second pile for the rubbish. There were a few hours the following morning of remembering and re-learning the tricks of packing our life on a bike. By check-out time on Saturday 5 October everything was stowed, our bills were paid and we were finally ready to go.

By Sunday night, we were well up the coast eating a celebratory fish dinner in the beautiful city of Santa Barbara and feeling confident about the journey ahead. I had been humming a  tune all the time we had been in London much to the annoyance of Jo who grumbled that I should find another. I had stopped humming it for the few weeks of waiting and frustration but as we walked back to our digs along the stylish streets of this attractive town the tune came flooding back. It is an old 80s' number by the Melbourne outfit Boom Crash Opera called Dancing in the Storm. Some of it started to play over in my head. First the catchy tune, then some lines from the second verse: Gone are the days of complacency. Gone are the nights of indifference. Then the whole thundering chorus roared up in my head and I couldn't help but grin:

Here we go, here we go for one more turn
We can shake, we can shake the trees and earth
We can spin, we can spin and not fall down
Hold on tight, we can both become unwound
You and I are going out And we're dancing in the storm.

For those who would like to sing along with Team Elephant or the non-Aussies who have never heard of Boom Crash Opera, here is a link:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sElDAKxvRPc