Back home again in California. After riding in 13 countries and involuntarily visiting another (I’ll explain) in mostly good weather (fog and wet at Nordkapp, fog at Timmeljoch Pass, and some rain getting back to Frankfurt) but otherwise sun and warm, we made it back home to Southern California. In order, we rode in Germany, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Finland (helped the economy there by paying a traffic ticket), Russia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Czech Republic, Austria, Italy, and Switzerland. 5800 miles of riding gave us more scenery than we could imagine. Since I had a GPS for the entire trip and it was keeping tabs on us, I have a visual track of the route. Here is a large scale look at the actual route in the GPS.

It matches fairly closely to the planned route

but we added the area in the Alps since we had a bit more time than planned. This picture of the Stilvio Pass

shows a portion of the switchback road but there was much more of it than that as this enlarged look at the GPS track shows.

All in all it was an EXCELLENT adventure and another “ride of a lifetime”. It is good to be back to the old routines (especially the naps in the afternoon)! :=) Oh, almost forgot the involuntarily visited country. Our plane out of Frankfurt had some fuel delivery problems and had to land in Iceland on the way to Houston. Still didn’t have enough fuel to make it to Houston so we landed again in Newark, New Jersey. Just a little more excitement to add to an already exciting trip.
All the pictures are here if you like!
http://www.smugmug.com/gallery/15599906_8ri5r

Stay tuned for further adventures. I need to go to South Africa to complete the “Four Corners of the Globe by Road Tour”.
Rick (glad to be home again).