What did we leave behind?

I'm sitting in the sand on South Miami Beach. After having slept 4 fit-full hours in my airplane sleep on a redeye from Seattle, I feel a little dazed and somewhat confused when I look up and see an entourage (pun to be explained later) of photographesr running down the beach and squatting in front of us. "Oh, look," I think. "They came to take my picture. After all, we have put in about 2 months worth of work of the past 3 weeks getting ready to head south and I guess that is newsworthy." Of course, I didn't really believe this. It is only in my half conscious mind that this thought passed through. 

Getting ready for the Motorcycle trip this year has been both more difficult and much easier than last year. We have a lot more going on in our lives this year and wrapping up all of that up has been a logistical challenge.

1. We took a 10 day intensive Wilderness First Responder course in mid-December.

2. We had to get 25,000 small cards and associated figurines together and boxed up to send to Chicago in March.

3. I hope to wrap up the work I did with Gore and get prepped for next year.

4. We had to do our 2010 taxes.

5. We had to pack up our house and get it ready for our renter(s).

6. And somewhere in there we had to pack for our motorcycle trip.

I won't write too much about items 1-5 except to say that it was a lot to do in a month.

Item 6 therefore fell to the back burner and we only started thinking about it 3 days before our departure. Knowing that we left a lot of gear in Colombia (Megan was smart enough to make a list of what we left behind), we didn't actually have that much to pack up for our return. For clothing we only get 2 pairs of pants, 3 t-shirts, some socks, underwear, and a few warmer clothes. 

I had to think hard about what we would need as far as parts for the motorcycles. I grabbed a couple of oil filters, found the 2 parts that broke when Megan crashed, got a new front chain sprocket because megan's will probably wear out somewhere in Argentina (I replaced mine in Mexico), bought a tool that fits perfectly over the very soft metal of the oil pan bolt (so that I don't strip it again), bought two replacement oil pan bolts (just in case I do), and bought replacement steering head bearings for my bike. The steering head bearing came with a crash course on how to change them from Mister Colin at Ride West BMW. I'm not so sure I can do the job on my own, but as he pointed out and as I know from last year, you can always find a gaggle of people who will help you out once you go and mess everything up. Worst case scenario: put the bike on a bus and go to the nearest town with a motorcycle mechanic.

We picked up maps for each country that we will be going through, and replaced Megan GORE-TEX® Outerwear which were full of small holes after her crash.

We took all these things, along with gifts for our friends in Colombia, threw them all in two large duffles, and hoped for the best.

We'll see what super crucial thing we left in Seattle. Actually… as I am sitting here writing about it, I had a terrible feeling that perhaps we forgot our motorcycle keys. i know we travelled back with a set and we certainly don't have that in our luggage. On the other hand, I know we left a set with Henry (the guy who is watching our bikes), so we have a set, but I don't think we have a backup set. Gulp!

Oh well.

So back to the photographers on the beach. Turns out they weren't taking photos of us. They were snapping photos of Adrian from Entourage (a TV show on HBO). We certainly wouldn't have recognized him (having never seen the show) but Megan asked the Paparazzi and they told us. 

That was our 12 hours in Miami. We board a plane to Colombia in an hour and then catch a bus to Popayan tomorrow (a 3 hour ride) to meet up with "The Girls." Hopefully they start right up and give us no problems.