About Norman Magowan

From Belfast, Northern Ireland, Norman worked in the aerospace industry for 10 years before moving to Stevenage in England in 1989. For the next 15 years he was gainfully employed in the UK Space industry. He took a voluntary redundancy package, swapping his role as Quality Manager on a leading space programme to take up the challenge of the Pan American Adventure.
Author Archive | Norman Magowan

Comodoro Rivadavia to El Calafate

News of our mishap travelled fast around Rio Mayo and next thing a guy called Lito called into the hotel asking about the crazy gringo’s who’d had the accident. Lito is a bank courier and every day he drives from Comodoro Rivadavia on the coast (where we can get a hire car) to Rio Mayo […]

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San Carlos de Bariloche to Rio Mayo

Argentina was a country we had low expectations of before this trip. We initially viewed it as just a transit place to get through to visit the southern jewels of the Moreno Glacier, Torres del Paine & Ushuaia. And as to the people, the only Argentineans we’d ever set eyes on were on TV back […]

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San Carlos de Bariloche

We have now been in South America for 2 weeks and it just gets better and better. From Viña we rode south to Chillan, picking up the Pan American Highway for the first time. It has the appearance of a motorway – dual carriageway in very good condition, with toll sections in places. However unlike […]

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Viña Del Mar

Well, here we are all safe and sound and ready for the start of our grand trip in sunny Chile. The journey started on Sunday 4th when we left London to miss our connecting flight in Paris to Santiago. We had an unexpected delightful day of rest in Paris at the expense of Air France, […]

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Christmas 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 […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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Cancer Research UK 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 […]

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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 […]

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