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CHAPTER 1: Leaving Home 3rd & 4th November 2003 – Shipping the Bikes Well the time has finally come to pack the bikes & ship them off to Valparaiso and to the start of our big adventure. We’d anticipated doing this in mid-late November but a discussion with Kuehne & Nagel (K&N - our shippers) suggested it would be wise to bring the bikes down early for packing & shipping. This threw us into a frenzy as we suddenly realised that time was running out and the bikes were nowhere near ready to go. In fact on the previous weekend, both bikes where propped up in our garage with no wheels & no seats! The wheels weren’t a problem, as they were only away locally to Bob’s Tyres in Stevenage to have knobbly tyres fitted, but the seats had been posted up north to Saddlecraft in South Shields to have silicon gel pads inserted. They’d been gone for over a week and a postal strike in London was threatening to spread nationwide so a mild panic was beginning to set in! The panic was short-lived as the seats duly arrived on the Monday morning, by which time the wheels were back in the bikes resplendent with their new tyres. Both bikes had been serviced and had new brake pads fitted, so we were starting out with everything as new as it could be. I rode the first bike down to the Kuehne & Nagel Packing depot at Dartford on Monday 3rd November, to be measured up so the packing crates could be prepared for both bikes. There we finally met Paul Fox, who we’d arranged the shipping details with. He was a smashing bloke – he rides a GS 500 Suzuki to work every day and one of his hobbies is restoring old Vespa scooters. He really knew all the ropes about how to pack & ship our bikes and was quick to set our minds at ease with a steady stream of ready answers to all our niggling worries & questions. As to protecting the bikes in transit, John Brown in the K&N packing department offered to vacuum pack the bikes inside their crates. This turned out to be an excellent idea as the bikes were at sea for around 2 months and when the crates were later opened in Chile they were fairly wet inside. Fortunately the plastic vacuum bagging kept our bikes & kit 100% dry. On Tuesday 4th Mags rode her bike down in glorious sunshine to K&N to meet some local press and to see the bikes put into their crates. First up, a lovely drink of petrol as we siphoned off their fuel tanks! With batteries disconnected, the bikes were ready to load onto the pallet bases of their crates. Each bike has it own crate and they sat on the ground sheet of the vacuum bag, where all sharp corners were bubble-wrapped by John’s packing team to prevent puncturing the bag. Our riding & camping kit was stowed around the bikes and we left for home very happy that the bikes were in expert hands. 11th November 2003 – CRUK Conference We had a day off work today to attend a Cancer Research UK fundraisers conference down at South Mimms, not far from home. It was a bit nerve wracking as we had been asked to put on a 30-minute talk on our trip. Clare Hall Laboratories was a beautiful setting and the morning consisted of each of the regional fundraisers giving an overview on what they’d been up to in the past year. At the end of the morning when the formalities & annual reports were all submitted & applauded, we had our guest speaker, Dr Timothy Hunt, who in 2001, won a Nobel prize for his research into cell division, a crucial element in understanding how Cancer works. He reminded us of Michael Palin both in his appearance & mannerisms. Up until now, celebrity has never really awed us – but Dr Hunt was different. We can now claim to have stood in the presence of a true hero! What really impressed us was the foresight, knowledge & depth of mind he must possess to have delved into this topic in such detail, unravelling these fabulous mysteries of how cells divide and how it sometimes goes wrong with such horrific consequences. We sat in the room afterwards and pondered what a normal day must be like for a man like this. He lead us through his Nobel Prize work on studying cell division mechanisms in sea urchins and held every one of us in the room totally enthralled throughout. The other main stream of research concerns looking at DNA Repair mechanisms. They are currently studying some tiny worms (about 1mm long), which possess a simple DNA code of some 927 elements, compared to the human code consisting of billions. By breaking the DNA & examining how it can be repaired, they are compiling a tool kit of repair strands for fixing damaged DNA, which could be useful to fight Cancer. After lunch, it was our turn to talk. Where the other fundraisers had been organising coffee mornings, antique shows and ‘roots & shoots’ sales, we were definitely something a bit different with our talk describing our journey around the shows over the past glorious summer. The conference finished shortly afterwards and we were inundated with well-wishers from the other fundraising groups, several of whom passed on donations, which we hadn’t expected. We left the conference on a real high – it totally vindicated (as if it needed it!) everything we had been doing this year and the information we learned today about where the money will go and how it is spent made it even more worthwhile. Driving home up the A1 we both felt 10 feet tall, as today really was the first measure of success and accomplishment in what we are doing on this whole Pan-American thing. 28th November 2003 – Leaving Work! We left work today and the sense of relief to know that we’d finally done it was incredible! It will be sad to leave all of our friends & colleagues for sure. We both had farewell drinks at lunchtime with Astrium presenting us with a little Garmin E-Trek hand held GPS. It was sad to leave but there were no regrets as we turned in our badges of office to become travellers! 30th November – Last Day in London We drove down to London on this sunny Sunday morning for a last visit to the Ace Café and then a walk around the West End for a last look at our favourite city. The National Gallery in Trafalgar Square had a mural outside describing a Van Gogh painting of a wicker chair. The display was titled ‘An Adventure in Yellow’ and according to the writing on the wall, yellow is the colour of the sun, the colour of happiness & the colour of madness! Van Gogh loved it, especially when he lived in the sunny South of France, and he used it a lot in his work typically in all those lovely sunflower paintings he did. He also killed himself ‘in yellow’, putting shotgun to his head in a field of wheat. It all struck us as a wonderful header for our trip! Adventures in Yellow! Sunshine, happiness, a bit of madness but we’ll skip on the death bit! Thinking on, yellow is also the colour of cowardice (are we running away?) and fever & disease (oh-oh!). But it is also the colour of springtime flowers, submarines and our 2 bikes! I think we’ll stick with the happy, sunny definitions! 8th December 2003 – Leaving England Today I took our old 1200 Gold Wing back to Belfast, where it will spend a year in storage as we departed England having rented our house in Stevenage. The previous week since leaving work had been chaotic as we packed our personal belongings into a Transit Van and moved it too to Belfast for storage with our family there. As with leaving work, there was no sense of loss or regret at leaving our house. It will still be there when we return! The run on the Wing was a chance to try out some of our cold weather kit as it was 0ºC leaving home. The BMW heated vest was a winner, pumping heat into my body system, but the Klan heated socks unfortunately disconnected themselves when I put my leathers on (I thought they were broken and couldn’t be bothered messing around with them in the depths of all my layers of swaddling clothes). A combination of Hein Gericke Pathan gloves and heated grips on the Wing kept the worst of the cold off my hands during the run up the A1, A66 & A75 to Cairnryan in what turned out to be a glorious sunny winter day. Xmas 2003 It was great to spend some time with our folks over the Xmas holiday period but we were still busy too, finalising the last details of the trip. We had almost 4 weeks in Belfast but it flew in really fast and before we knew it we were packing up to leave. Santa was kind and last minute additions to our expedition gear included a load of motocross kit from Norman Watt Motorcycles – Ireland’s leading off-road specialists. We decided this would be comfier in the really hot climates but were initially unsure whether to bother, as it was yet more kit to carry. In the end our folks were at a loss as to what to get us for Xmas so we decided to go for it. Buying the kit from Norman was a real experience on it’s own. The ‘shop’ at Temple just outside Belfast was an old house crammed from floor to ceiling with motocross, enduro & trials bikes with all the associated kit stashed away in various boxes, racks and shelves. It was an Aladdin’s cave and needed the expertise of Norman himself to dig in all the dark nooks & crannies to find what we needed. Still, the personal service was first class and he went to great lengths to make sure we had the right gear and that it all fitted properly. When it came to paying it was even better as he had a tendency to round prices down & offered us massive discounts on ‘old’ stock! We came away as 2 very happy customers. Christmas was a delight as we completely put the trip out of our mind (well at least for a few days over the festive period). We operated on the camel principle and ‘stored up’ with a plentiful intake of food & drink (well that was Norman’s excuse anyway). For New Years Eve we had a rousing send off at the Castlereagh Glentoran Supporters Club (storing up this time on the alcohol intake) and then departed Belfast on 2nd January, fully rested and primed for the start of our great adventure! |
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