Day 136: The End?

“The enormity of our endeavor escaped us in those moments: all we could see was the dust on the road ahead and ourselves on the bike, devouring kilometers in our flight northward” Che Guevara "The Motorcycle Diaries"

Wow…..we can put our toilet paper right into the toilet! What a concept! And we keep accidentally saying “si” and “gracias” to people. But we are home!

We can’t thank everyone enough for all your encouragement!...the emails, texts, facebook posts and travelogue posts. It was inspiring for us and especially helpful in both our moments of agony and in our moments of ecstasy. We don’t say this lightly. It literally kept us going at times.

We found a fun welcome home from our St George friends when we pulled into the driveway. We also found a surprise on our bed....a beautiful flamingo quilt made by our good friend Carol while we were gone!

MB’s final thoughts about the trip: It was an amazing adventure. As my best friend Kathleen said so perfectly, it was “adventure, challenge, beauty, frustration, diversity, compromise, education, fascination, exhaustion, satisfaction, fear, patience, humor! We had it all going on.” A motorcycle is a great way to experience new places. Now that we are back in the US, I definitely appreciate all of the comforts and quality that a developed world offers……but I already miss the adventure. Most importantly, I can’t wait to go see my daughter and grandboys!

Bruce’s final thoughts about the trip: Everything MB said plus……my final conclusion is that as amazing as an adventure as this was, I have yet to be anyplace in this world that I’d rather be than in North America. And this is coming from a globalist.

Our final travels home weren’t without incident. We couldn't quite shake the “no funciona” (it doesn’t function) Latin American environment. MB’s moto made it on schedule by plane to LAX. Bruce’s moto was nowhere to be seen. It got stuck in Houston for an extra 3 days and so we were hung up in LA. The good news is that our friends Chris and Tom live there and we were able to hang out with them. We spent four days having many serious discussions about which setting on your kitchen sink is better for cleaning dishes…. the spray or the normal flow setting! This is a hotly contested issue in their house and of course we took every opportunity to flame the heat on the discussion. (If you have an opinion on this matter, please reply with your vote. I am doing an informal study.)

Here is what we were most surprised about in our travels:
- How much we loved the country of Columbia (oh sorry, Tom! It’s “ColOmbia”
- Our Spanish didn’t get much better
-That we made it to El Calafate and met Cory and fam. It seemed like such a distant, hard to imagine goal when we left Cory over 4 months ago in Arizona and MB dropped her bike in his driveway as we were leaving.
- How unattractive 80% of Argentinian Patagonia is
- What little down time we had on the trip.
-That MB never memorized her passport # regardless of the fact that she had to write it almost every day for either a hotel or border crossing.
-Argentina meat is not that impressive.
-How healthy we stayed on our travels despite our advanced age. Came back with almost a full bottle of motrin.
- How well the bikes held up in so many varied conditions.

TRIP STATS
-19 border crossings
-12 countries
-about 21,500 bike miles
-136 days
-Number of times Bruce fell while riding his bike: 1 (a sand snake got him)
-Number of times MB fell while riding her bike: 6
-Number of times Bruce dropped his bike: 2 (including once when he thought he had put his kickstand down and got off his bike)
-Number of times MB dropped her bike: We’ve lost count

Is this the end?........ Nope…..Alaska this summer.

We love you all!!!