Life in Popayan

We arrived safely in Popayan after a classic adventurous bus ride with cowboy-like drivers who stop everytime they see a person hoping to pick said person up. Needless to say it took a while to get to Popayan, but we weren't in a hurry.

[Mariana squirting the shaving cream stuff] We called Henry (the guy whose house our bikes were at) and he met us at the bus station. Our initial plan was to stay a couple of days and then get on the road heading south, but we quickly found out that this wasn't going to happen owning to a festival that goes on for days in the region. There must be some significance in the festival, but as far as we could tell, the reason for this thing is for everyone to

1. Throw water on each other if water is handy.
2. Throw flour (like the kind used to make bread) all over this wet or dry person.
3. Spray high powered shaving cream like stuff on person
4. Cover this person with colored facial cream
5. Drink

[megan getting into the groove] It seemed like a bad idea to ride for 200 miles through small villages with countless people throwing water balloons and 1 kilo bags of flour at you.
So rather than ride our bikes, we went out with the Muñoz-Gomez family to indulge in some good old fashioned fun.

[dancing the night away in Henry's house] I will say that it takes quite some time to wash the flour/ water combo out of your hair and clothes but it was well worth it. We drank, played, and danced to salsa.
During this time, we managed to get the bikes in working order: replaced Megan's rear brake, replaced her rear tube which has had a slow leak since Costa Rica, reshaped her boxes after her crash and did some general lube stuff.

We also went out to a waterfall with Henry and the family (Mariana and Enilce) and rappelled off of it, and then went to some hot springs and soaked for a few hours.

[changing the tire by the nativity scene- the only shade we could find] One thing that kept surprising us during our time in Popayan was the absolute generosity of this amazing family. They bent over backwards to make us feel welcome and part of their family. They insisted we sleep in their room while the three of them slept together in Mariana's room. Enilce would cook delicious Colombian meals for us whenever possible. Mariana spent a lot of time talking very slow spanish with us and keeping us entertained. Henry managed to create time between his busy schedule at the Fire Station to get us the tools we needed to work on the bikes and to give us a proper Colombian experience. We now have another family in Colombia and absolutely expect to come back and be part of this amazing culture.

[using the fire fighter's hydraulic press to reform megan's boxes] For anyone afraid to travel to Colombia, I can not stress enough how warm the people in Colombia are. I am sure that anyone who has travelled here will back me up in saying that Colombian culture takes the deed of looking after travelers to the extreme. The people have a mix of curiosity and generosity that makes being here an absolute delight.

You can't fix a bathroom in Jamaica, apparently

Just a quick post saying we made it safely to Colombia last night. We are staying at a super cute colonial hotel in the old part of Cali. It is around 75 degrees and overcast here.

But the real story has to do with bathrooms.

We get on our flight from Miami to Cali, Colombia at 5:30 pm and take off without incident. The movie comes on, I pop in my headphones and watch the thing in a sleepy daze. About 1 hour into the flight, the flight crew comes on and says "You may have noticed, but all of the bathrooms on this plane appear to not be working. We are trying to fix them, but we may have to divert."
About 15 minutes later: "Looks like we can't fix them so we are going to land in Jamaica and see what can be done."
5 Minutes later: " Jamaica doesn't have the crew to work on these bathroom so we are turning around and heading back to Miami."
Megan instantly pointed out that we were about 1.5 hours into a 3.5 hour flight and that turning around really made no sense because we were pretty much at the half way point.
But turn around we did and back to Miami we went.

After unloading from the plane, finding a new plane, getting back on, and reflying to Cali, we arrived in Cali about 5 hours late- at around 2am.

The good news: I accidentally left my ipod touch on our original Miami/Cali plane. Once I realized my error, the captain actually went over to the old plane, looked around and brought me back my ipod. What a nice Captain.

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.

My god, what have we done?

It has now been a few weeks since taking over an online Montessori Materials business (Montessori123.com) and as we have become more familiar with what we have purchased, the amount of potential work that we could do becomes absolutely mind boggling. And with less than a month before we depart for Colombia (where they are having record rainfall) we have a lot to do.

Just yesterday as we decided to try to inventory all the preprinted and precut inventory that we inherited in the purchase I pulled the classic "walk around in circles, unable to get anything done under the weight of so much to do" for which the only cure for me is to go for a run. This helped to calm me, but after returning to our cluttered condo, with stacks of materials and replicas strewn all about the place, I fell back into the craziness again.
Fortunately, while I was away Megan came up with a plan on how to deal with craziness. This involves putting most of what we have back into boxes and dealing with it later. I like this plan.

Allow me to explain a bit of what we got ourselves into.

When we purchased Montessori 123, we mostly purchased a) an existing website with a good strong history b) a bunch of satisfied customers that we can (and will) begin to communicate with and create a relationship and c) (most importantly) over 350 digital files of Montessori materials.
Sounds simple enough, but the complexity begins to come when you realize that these materials are from the brain of a very creative person but that only that brain actually knows what they all are. She did a good job of organizing them to the best she could, but there still is 5 years of a messy hard drive (think about your own hard drive) with different iterations of various projects. On top of this, these projects are on the website for people to buy but various naming and pricing schemes, all of which I'm sure make sense to the original creator. However, as of yet, they don't make a lot of sense to us.
Then there are the bonus materials. Some 25 boxes of preprinted, laminated, and/or cut materials. Many of these are unlabeled.
So yesterday we started going through these boxes and attempted to inventory what we have. When you have over 300 materials of which you aren't too familiar with, all boxed up in various stages of being finished and you are supposed to catalog and inventory them all, the most tempting thing in the world is just to take them to the dump and start all over again.
"What is this material with the top card being a picture of a fox and some matching cards that start with kite?" How are we supposed to inventory something like that? However, this "thing" is worth around 30 dollars at retail so it sort of worth figuring out what it is and then figuring out how to connect it with a consumer. This leaves me walking in circles around the room... and then going for a run.

In 4 days we begin a 10 day intensive First Aid course (WFR) which means we won't be able to work at all, that brings us to Dec 20. Then there is the xmas craziness, which leaves a week before we leave on Jan 2. Whoooaaa. The good news is that we have to get it all done... and we will.
Oh yeah, and did I mention that we have to have around 600 sets of materials printed, laminated, cut, and boxed in order to send to Chicago for the March montessori conference?

One month until action

Warning: this might be kind of a boring blog. Sort of a house keeping piece to catch up so I can do more interesting blogs in the future. Hopefully the pictures are pretty.

[mountain biking in Lyons, Colorado] You know, it feels like I have been blogging for the past year, but then when I look at the blog, I realize that I haven't done a darn thing since returning to Seattle in June. Whooooa. I'm not going to try to catch up on the last six months, but I feel like I should at least give a little information on what are plans are and how we prepared for it.
After returning from  Colombia, I promptly forgot all of the spanish that I had spent so much time trying to learn. It must be in there, but I don't know where.

I fell right back into my business (luxurious productions) by creating a series of training events for GORE-TEX® Products around the country. The contract this year was for a similar amount of work as last year, but I wanted to execute with a much higher quality. We made the decision to have her not take another job and help out with Luxurious Productions. We needed her considerable expertise in experiential curriculum development.

[teaching about motorcycle safety] Megan taught several classes to 3-6 year olds about motorcycling to South America and some of the cultures we visited. It was fun to see her in her element. I still have no idea how she can manage a room of 30 preschoolers all by herself for hours on end.



 We took a trip back east to visit Gore and to visit Megan's family and friends. While there, we took the mandatory trip to Shelbourne Farms in Vermont and held Henrietta the chicken. We also visited one of Megan's best friend, Erika who is a very talented artist and has two adorable kids and a fantastic husband. Her blog is here.

We climbed a little bit in Utah while by going to the Uintas for 2 days with our friends Kasi, Andreas, Jenna, and Dylan. We also went to Maple for a few days with the same crew but added Roger, Merridy, Maya, and our good friend Dan Morris who lives in Salt Lake. As usual, I am never in the physical shape that I would like to be in when arriving at Maple, but it was fun and Dan shot some good photos (psswd: maple).


We planned and developed curriculum in August and then in September we began executing our events starting with Anchorage, then REI Corporate in Kent, WA, then Minneapolis, Denver, Salt Lake, Las Vegas. Southern California, San Francisco Bay area, Bend, and Seattle. The events went fantastically well with the new curriculum this year and we received amazing feedback.

[mailing our first order] Upon arriving in Seattle, we went and bought a business. Over the past couple of years, Megan has become disconnected from the Montessori world and has been playing with ideas to get back into it. However, given our lifestyle (of not being in one place for very long), teaching is out of the question.

[we found this little fellow on the beach in Southern California- turned out he is very invasive] An opportunity presented itself in the name of montessori123.com. This is an online retailer that sells montessori materials for teachers, parents, and home schoolers. We have hundreds and hundreds of nicely crafted nomenclature, or 3 part, cards. When someone wants some, we print them up, laminate them, and mail them out. It sounds simple and mostly is, but the magic comes come from the fact that the cards we have are very nice, that Megan will be able to make lots of new cards from our travels, and that the business has been around for quite a while and has a good reputation. The prior owner hasn't leveraged her past customers in a while, so with a little bit of marketing (which is what we essentially do now) we will be able to create a community around the brand and grow it... right?
We'll see, but in the meantime we are trying to figure out how to
a) actually buy a business. It is more technical than we thought and there is a lot to learn
b) run the day to day of the business
c) develop a system to have it keep going while we are back in South America
d) prepare for a conference in Chicago in March (we will probably fly back from Chile for it)
e) not kill each other from working together so intensely over the past 6 months.

[teaching our nephew Lucas about Gore] So there we are. With a return ticket to Colombia on January 2, we have just over a month to start planning and thinking about being on motorcycles again. Vroom Vroom.