Preamble and Beginnings

The picture above is of Carol and I on our epic ride across America in 1982 on our 1970 Honda CB750. We’ve waited a long time to replicate a trip of that magnitude – now it is coming to fruition! After years of planning and dreaming, we are finally leaving for our trip by motorcycles from California through Mexico, Central America and South America, with our goal to reach Ushuaia in the southern tip of Argentina in about a year.

I (Jim) retired in June of this year (2018) and after a vacation (visiting family and motorcycle camping trip through Oregon and Washington) Carol and I began the tasks necessary to get us on the road. In planning for a trip of a year or more duration, we had many tough decisions to make, including “do we sell our house or rent it?” and “what do we do with all of our ‘stuff’ while we are gone?” We eventually decided that our best course of action was to sell the house and get rid of as much “stuff” as possible. This turns out to be a major task! From July until now we have worked many and long days. We moved out of our San Jose home of 16 years to a rental an hour away in Hollister, then commuted every day into San Jose to work on getting our home ready to sell. We rented a 10’x20′ storage unit with the determination that all we had that wouldn’t be with us on our motorcycles had to fit in that storage unit.

Not part of our plan: In the midst of getting our home ready to sell, I developed an extruded disc (beyond bulging or herniated – a 2 cm extrusion) in my lumbar spine (at L4/L5 for those who know their vertebrae). I conferred with two doctors and they both agreed that surgery was my only option. Our house sold and closed (thankfully very quickly) a few weeks before my surgery at the end of October. The surgery detour set us back from our initial goal to be in Mexico by Christmas, but the surgeon felt we should be able to be on the road by mid-January if my recovery went well. And mid-January was when our Hollister lease ended, so it all tied together nicely and that became the new plan. The picture below is pre-op. I wasn’t smiling in post-op!

During my recovery from surgery we kept focused on pruning our possessions and getting the bikes and gear ready for the journey. This has been a great opportunity to “pare down” our belongings and should make our life much simpler when we return and re-establish ourselves. The only two things that didn’t go in the storage unit were the various stringed instruments (safe now in climate controlled storage – a bedroom closet – at a relative’s home) and my Ford pickup, which I just couldn’t part with and is stored at a vehicle storage facility.

The picture below shows what the storage unit looked after it was mostly (but not completely!) full. We had to buy and make storage shelving to use the third dimension (vertical) to get it all in. Many thanks to a cohort of our children and their spouses who came at Christmas and helped to get things out of our rental house and into the storage unit.

And in the end … we did it! We got everything (by definition) into the storage shed, I got the bikes ready to go (long list of modifications – for another blog post), our youngest son and his wife (Richard and Jodi) came and spent most of our last week in the Hollister rental helping us get out the door, and out the door we went … on one of the most miserable, rainy, windy storms we’ve had this winter! We couldn’t really wait it out – our lease was up, the house was empty, and we had to go.

Jim

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