ATW 2010 forwards

Departure Minus 1 Week.

Still at Home
Us and the bikes on a cold February morning.
Everything is packed, we just need to organise ourselves.

First proper entry will be posted once we are under way.

This is at our last stop before heading off, at Bob’s brother David’s place in Surrey.

Harbour at Vada, northern Italy.

11th March – Made an executive decision to travel down Italy’s leg to avoid the snowstorms etc in northern Italy and Balkans. Found small pension right on the harbour at Vada. Bob took the accompanying photo, which his Dad would be ever so proud of.
12th March – Motorway miles to head south. Lovely mountains on left and Med sea on right.

Phrases you thought you’d never hear. Here’s Bob cooking tea! The best rice I’ve ever tasted.

30th March - moved to Alexandropoulis, 40 km from Turkish border.

The nylon shell-suit is alive and well in living in the Eastern-bloc countries of Bulgaria and Romania. I’ve never felt so bang-on-trend!

April 15th - Border crossing between Romania, Moldova and Ukraine was a nightmare – had to go into Moldova twice, and got stung for a Green Card the second time. Stayed in a state-run hotel in Izmajil in Ukraine. When we booked in, we had to choose our breakfast for the following morning – “you may have porridge or one egg or one omelette, and tea” said the receptionist, and she wasn’t joking.

Our track is not only shown by our maps and GPS, but also by the increase in chocolate consumption. Bob seems to have kick-started the slab chocolate distribution industry single-handedly – almost every bar we’ve bought has been close (or past) its sell-by-date, and we’re currently up to about 3 bars per day. So anyone following us through these countries will at least have ‘fresh’ bars to buy!

May 28th – there are probably worse places to be stuck than Ulaanbaatar, but at the moment, I can’t think where. We’re just leaking money here for some reason. I thought this part of Asia would be relatively cheap but not so. The shipping company are messing about, and the guy we’re dealing with seems not to understand words like ‘important to us’, ‘precious’, ‘all we own’. They don’t seem to have any idea of how to ship the bikes, and have just printed off the Internet a ‘how to prepare a bike for air-freight’ document. It’s all so frustrating.

June 14th – The shipping company operative has now decided that the fuel tanks should have been emptied, and that it’s too difficult for him to empty them, and would we like to post the keys, or return to UB to do it ourselves! What an idiot this guy is -we sent him a youtube video of how to siphon fluids. Decided to go to Cambodia for a couple of days, since the bikes seem to be going nowhere still.

July 10th – took the bikes to a car-wash place, to get them jet-washed. The Aussies are paranoid about dirt and dust on anything they import, so everything has to be show-room clean. Including us allegedly – that could prove a bit more difficult!

Since we’re now technically out of Asia, I thought we’d also include a generalised summary of what we’ve thought about Europe and Asia so far:

August 17th – started talking to a lady with a crash helmet who appeared at breakfast time. She was from Sydney (although originally from Bexhill years ago) and was touring round the coastal roads for 5 months. She’d come off her bike (F650GS), and it was being fixed at the same BMW dealer. So we swapped stories, realized we had a lot in common and got on really well. Lizzy was also responsible for our first trip in a police-car with Perth’s finest!

September 17th – travelling South through Ayr, Mackay and Gladstone, we realized we hadn’t seen the Great Barrier Reef yet, and were in danger of going past it. So we stopped at the strangely-named Town Of 1770 and treated ourselves by booking a day-trip to Lady Musgrave Island.

October 30th – dropped campervan off early, and got the Metro to the Airport. We reckon we’ve done another 1970 miles in the last 9 days on our second visit to Oz.

November 19th – Went past a place called Sheffield today. And we had to go through a U.S. Border Patrol checkpoint – they were looking for Mexican illegals, and they allegedly drop over the mountains into America.

November 20th - Went to the Alamo, in San Antonio, although the museum was more about the John Wayne film but very interesting nevertheless – another educational day.

And we had our first “we’ve been there” moment, when we watched Prince Caspian on TV, and the beginning showed Cathedral Cove (New Zealand).

December 2nd – Spent all day at the Kennedy Space Center, with a tour to the enormous Vehicle Assembly Building, and as close to the launchpads as you can get. (There was supposed to be a Shuttle launch tomorrow, but it’s been postponed as they’d found some problems.) Saw an amazing Imax 3-D film about the Hubble Telescope. Another fantastic day.

Explorer – seemed apt somehow.

Well as promised, we’re off again. We arrived back in Sheffield just in time for Christmas, and just after the minus 15 temperatures Britain had been having. Needless to say when we arrived back all the pipes in the garage had burst, so the first two days were spent replacing those, so we had no heating and no water. Just as well we’re used to roughing it!

Our first trip included lots of natural disasters and extreme weather, but usually had the decency to wait until we’d got out of the country before happening. But not this trip.

Given the amount of coverage the snowy weather has been getting on the local TV, we’ve come to the conclusion that it’s definitely not normal weather for this time of year. This was confirmed when it mentioned on CNN that Turkey was having their worst snow in 10 years – just our luck really. Sub-Saharan Africa is not going to know what‘s hit it once we get there!

April 19th: We seem to have broken Robert’s GPS completely (who’d have thought a piece of marine-standard equipment wouldn’t have liked being washed!), so it was good that Sheila had a back-up one, even though she had no idea how to use it. Fortunately it was a straight road out of Nairobi (Kenya) and into Tanzania.

April 30th:

May 15th:
Today we drove to the southernmost point of the continent of Africa – Cape Agulhas. The Indian Ocean meets the Atlantic at this point, and we got our bikes as close to it as we could, so we’ve gone the whole length of Africa. The further south we’ve come, the more familiar things have felt – although the most-of-day power-cut made us feel as though we were back up north! I suppose the pizza by candlelight was fairly romantic though.

Well it's been a while since we got back from our Sheffield to Cape Town trip on the bikes in May 2011.

And now we're ready for round 3.

This time we're planning to visit North, Central and South Americas. On our first trip around the world we had to rush across North America, west to east, trying to keep ahead of the snow, which meant we didn't get to see lots of the places we'd planned to. And there was also a cock-up on the financial front, meaning we were running out of money, so we missed out South and Central America altogether.

"The best-laid schemes o' mice an' men gang aft agley" as Robbie Burns said.

Our original plan was to be on our way early February, but things conspired against us.

Our first spanner in the works came when the US government changed the rules earlier in the year for getting a visa. The US Visa Waiver Programme (VWP) allows most British Citizen passport holders to visit the US for up to 90 days without a visa, and we had to get authorisation from the Electronic System for Travel Authorisation (ESTA) before we left home in 2011 for our round-the-world bit.

The thing about travelling independently is that you can't always control what's going on around you and what's affecting you. Our journey to Manchester Airport was relatively easy, but once we got to New York things started to go pear-shaped.The weather was really bad (high winds and rain) and so after 2 interesting failed attempts at crashing at JFK Airport the pilot decided to take us to Philadelphia instead, where we landed safely. We then sat for 3 hours while we refuelled and Air Traffic Control worked out a way to get us back to New York.

After many more cock-ups and frustrations, we finally left New York on Monday 18th April at 5pm. We couldn't get far but were just relieved to get Foxtrot back - fortunately the container place had a very helpful fork-lift driver who placed the tent back on the roof and Bob tied it on securely'ish.

Tuesday April 26th
This was our first experience of a winter storm in South Dakota and Wyoming, and it was relatively manageable, so we set off for Mount Rushmore.
It continued to snow all the way there but was still OK - it's a very impressive place, and there is a pretty good visitors centre explaining the history of the place, and the logistics behind the sculpture.

Fascinating Mount Rushmore.

Thursday 12th May
Mainland Mexico is a completely different place to Baja. We're in a university town called Moralia, which has a lovely feel to it.We went for a walk to find some cash, and there was a square with people ballroom dancing to a band. People just doing what Mexicans do of an evening. We were doing what we normally do - arguing.

Four prickly things in a row.

Thursday 26th May

Wednesday June 8th
Across the border to Canada today, at Coutts, and into Alberta.
Barn in Alberta.

Friday 24th June
After an interesting visit to the Maritime Museum of the Atlantic in Halifax (where there was a Titanic exhibition), a wander around the lovely harbour-front, a tour around the Citadel and an awful lot of people-watching in the public gardens, we decided we'd exhausted all of Halifax's attractions.

We spent the following days organising the shipping of Foxtrot back to the U.K. And made some decisions.