Riding the Pan-American Dream: From Chattanooga to Ushuaia

Katherine and her partner Brandon have completed an epic motorcycle journey from Chattanooga, Tennessee to Ushuaia, Argentina and back up through South America. They each ride a BMW 1200 GS Adventure motorcycle, which they chose for its capability and capacity to carry all their gear.

Over the course of 3 years and multiple trips, they rode through Mexico, Central America, and South America, facing challenges like border crossings, poor road conditions, language barriers, and mechanical issues. However, they were embraced by the welcoming motorcycle communities they encountered along the way.

Highlights include seeing the monarch butterfly migration in Mexico, navigating the treacherous mountain roads of Peru, and finally reaching the southernmost point of the Americas in Ushuaia, Argentina. They then continued their journey north through Brazil, Uruguay, and Argentina before shipping their bikes to Africa for the next leg of their around-the-world adventure.

Katherine emphasizes that with determination and an openness to learn, anyone can take on a long-distance motorcycle trip like this, even as a beginner rider. She was inspired to pursue her dream of global motorcycle travel after casually mentioning it to her now-partner Brandon years ago. Their story illustrates the transformative experiences that can come from challenging oneself and embracing the unknown on the open road.

https://www.pandorasmotorsports.com/

Transcript

Welcome to the Throttle Stop Motorcycle Podcast brought to you by Pandora's European Motorsports. Today I have with me Katherine who has traveled a good portion of the western side of the world on her BMW 1200 GS Adventure and today she did a presentation for us that kind of talked about those travels. Do you want to kind of introduce what you did and talk about maybe like a one-minute spiel and what this presentation was about? Sure so my partner and I we both have 1200 GSAs and we left on the Pan American although we spent a lot of time off the Pan American. We rode from Chattanooga Tennessee all the way to Ushuaia Argentina together on two bikes and then we rode all the way back up to the Amazon and then to Buenos Aires where we have now shipped our motorcycles to go to Africa next. So in summary, Chattanooga southern tip of South America and then back up to Brazil and then you shift your bikes off floated down the Amazon River ended up in Buenos Aires and then they're actually going to start again at the southern tip of Africa and make their way up. I guess you're gonna go up like toward Egypt. We're gonna go up towards Kenya and then kind of see where and how we're gonna get to Europe from there through the Middle East or around somehow we'll see. Well so the rest of this podcast is just gonna be the presentation that she just gave for us. So hope you guys listen in and enjoy it. Okay so if you can't hear me in the back just let me know and this is kind of new for me. I used to be an outdoor educator. I'm used to talking in front of people but not about this topic much and I'm now a travel nurse which allows me to have my time to go and I do about a contract a year and then I keep traveling on this trip. So can everybody hear me okay? Yeah dad? Thank you. Alright so I met my partner Brandon 12 years ago in a hot spring in Idaho and in the first five minutes that we started talking I casually said and I had just gotten in a nursing school it was a second degree for me I'm saving my money to go around the world on a motorcycle which pretty much meant I had five dollars in my pocket and I really didn't know what I was talking about but I've wanted to do something like this forever and so Brandon had the same dream and was like who is this woman sitting with me at this hot spring and so we hit it off and we've been together now 12 years and the dream is come true. I didn't even own a motorcycle. I walked into the old Pandora location in 2016 and I said hey my name is Catherine I want to get a 1200 having never ridden a bike before and what I appreciate about it now that I've had more experience at other dealerships is they never balked. They asked me some questions they encouraged me from the beginning and never ever dissuaded me or gave me any kind of negative feedback loop about wanting and I didn't even say I want to do this trip I was just excited about trying a bike so I appreciate Pandora for that and I know a lot of women are you know getting more and more active in this sport there's been many before me who have been amazing and are amazing but in my entire trip Tennessee to U Shwaya I met nine women so I met hundreds of men on bikes and so it's definitely something that's growing but also something that is not as common so um so my experience with this my first year riding the bike I put maybe five thousand miles on it I was just intimidated and scared I was living here on Brainerd Road in Chattanooga in nursing school I was working at Erlanger as a trauma nurse and so I saw a lot there's some nurses in the audience here and so for me riding a motorcycle was intimidating and slowly over time I started to gain more confidence and more experience my boyfriend Brandon said you can look at that pretty bike in your garage or you can actually start riding and he challenged me to meet him he lives in Boise Idaho I was in Chattanooga Tennessee and the halfway point in between was Amarillo Texas and he said I'll meet you there in four days and so I did and that was the beginning of me understanding my motorcycle and spending that time it takes miles to get to know your bike so we rode to Texas and then all the way up to Portland Oregon all the way down Route 1 and I really was still dropping it at any time I pretty much stopped but at least I was having fun and we were camping out and I was learning so much we were gonna do this trip Brandon has always dreamed of going around the world so have I but the reality of something that large is a pretty big endeavor and so we were going to leave in 2020 and the world changed and as a nurse I was let go because I'm a surgical nurse but then I went back to work pretty hardcore for quite a while so we put this on the back burner a lot of people ask me how we can finance this trip Brandon owns our home in Boise and during 2020 we built a apartment in the back garage that we also rent to travel nurses so we rent both of those out while we're on the road which gives us a $3,000 a month budget so that's our budget every month hundred dollars a day for two of us and that's the most common question I get is how can you afford this you must be rich it's actually cheaper living on the road than it is so if on a daily basis with you know working and bills and restaurants and food and all that so that is the number one question we get asked prohibitively we've met lots of people doing this I've met people that are doing it for $25 a day and I've met people who were doing it for no budget so anywhere in between if this is a dream you have just start so we didn't tell anybody we were going to Ushuaia we started going I don't know if this okay this is when I look at this first picture of us and what I looked like in Ushuaia which is the most southern point of South America we look pretty green here and I love it this is in my parents driveway the morning that we left we had Christmas bows we had just taken an off-road motorcycle course with Wendy Nissens and the BMW Academy the week before and that was amazing for us to understand what we didn't want to do on this trip we had the skill set to continue working on deep sand and deep gravel and deep mud and that was going to come with time but for us it was a great beginning to understanding what we were going to get into even though we didn't know what we were going to get into so there's a few tears here mom putting an identification bracelet on my wrist with my call numbers and my parents who are here this is up on signal Mountain and my dad's always said I'm kind of known for doing unusual things I've walked from Mexico to Canada solo I've hitchhiked across Africa at 17 I became a nurse that's kind of crazy but my dad's always said nobody's born with experience and you have to take that into account on anything you undertake so so this is just some scenes of us going across the US and you know people can ask us about gear people can ask us all kinds of questions we're kind of known for being heavily overloaded we're on to 1200s we picked that on purpose for the ability to go fast when we want to the ability to have comfort also carry whatever we wanted and you will see from Brandon's motorcycle he calls it yeti because it carries so much stuff so that's us somewhere in Mississippi and as we were going we were starting to learn people were really curious about what we're doing people would often come over and ask us and what's actually happening here is Brandon has a little box right there that he warms frozen burritos in on his exhaust pipe so this was our official first drop of the trip in Austin Texas we hadn't even gotten out of the country yet we rented an Airbnb from a friend went to the backyard and it just rained and the kickstand went straight into the ground so there'll be a few photos here of us dropping the bikes because we do it all the time so so we were glad to get that one out of the way we left in November of I think it was 22 and what what I do is as a nurse I have to come back and work once a year for three months Brandon is retired so we make it work that I can come home and do a contract and we'll do six to eight months on the road so we've done this trip so far in three sections and we just there's there's so much to see in the United States and I think now that we've done more traveling people always ask does your list get shorter we'll know our list is getting longer because there's so much more to see and the other thing that is Brandon on this trip is he takes naps everywhere so there'll be a few photos of him just napping randomly people are often concerned that there's something wrong with him but it only takes about five minutes and then he's refreshed so so this is our first border crossing in the in the Mexico we didn't take many photos we were scared of border crossings we had both ridden down Baja multiple times together but um you know border crossings for us back then were places you don't take pictures places you see a lot of military and a lot of guns and a lot of questionable activity so we were always you know there's pictures everywhere saying don't take you know pictures with your phone so that is literally the only photo of a half of Mexico when we crossed the border since we crossed around Christmas it took us about eight hours to cross the border normally you can do it in under an hour but there was just a lot of exciting activity with Christmas holidays at that time so right away you cross into Mexico and you learn driving is a little bit different there's obstacles on the road anywhere they they mark holes in the road with things like that and that can be at 70 miles an hour on an interstate highway and you'll see just the manhole covers gone we call these am I allowed to swear we call these shit biscuits because they go across the road everywhere and it's like driving on a jelly-filled donut they're all soft and the tires are too big to go in between them so you have to hit them some way or another there's obstacles on the road that make us uncomfortable and there's a lot of fuel being transported usually nearby at those times things can fall off there's river crossings I mean and this is just pavement right so we ended up once we got a bit more experience I mean almost the whole country of Peru we did on dirt which was great so but yeah so a lot to see a lot to be aware of I have some vision issues and so Brandon's often in the front and we do talk back and forth and he will often warn me about a stray dog or I'll see that he can pass and then he'll go and then tell me when to come and that communication is extremely important something we also learned is that we aren't hardcore riders compared to people here everywhere we went you see multiple people on bikes that just blow your mind with how well they can ride because that is their only form of transportation and it's just amazing if you look closely that other picture has two children in front of him so yeah they use motorcycles for everything you could imagine and it's nice to see that there's such a motorcycle culture as soon as you cross the border in New Mexico and we also learned that they burn a lot of trash in a lot of developing countries through Central America so that was also exciting where you know sometimes you lose visibility we actually had an airplane drop water on us on one of the highways because there was a forest fire on the right side so that was very exciting too of course it's not on camera and you also learned just there's a lot of people tuk-tuk's are everywhere which are what on the far far left photo there lots of people as well and so you know if I didn't know how to ride already I was definitely learning and working on my skill set something else that was starting to develop was our culture of communicating with people we didn't know the culture of motorcycle riders around the world whether it's horizons unlimited or whether it's Pan American world travelers it's pretty amazing so we had never met Marco Marco is president of the long-distance Iron But Association of Mexico and he also builds sidecars and he runs a hostel so we stayed at his house and just the the community started through him I ordered tires that were hand-delivered to me and much further south in Mexico by a man who showed up with amazing Anikie adventure tires just the contacts and the strings that you kind of start to learn and that start protecting you is really important WhatsApp is a community it's a texting forum and for Central America there's a group that is about 500 riders right now currently and for South America there's one with about 700 riders in it and all it is is I'm in Nicaragua I blew my spokes because I went off the road where can I go for help and so through this networking community you start learning how to help each other oh I was there last month this is a mechanic I used or when we went through Bolivia they were having gas shortages and they were not selling fuel to foreigners thankfully we have a bit on the side of the street in Mexico and what we were also starting to learn is you can fix anything and you can find anything you just have to figure out how to ask for it so that has been essential for us keeping our bikes upright and this is the gentleman who did it in front of his house and then he showed us his antique car collection which was great as we were going along we camp about 20% of the time we do stay on Airbnb's with traveling with two people a lot of times we can save money by getting an Airbnb or a hostel a hotel because you also get breakfast but for a single person they're not as efficient to have that cost but for two of us traveling together we can often do that but it's always important to have secure parking with these bikes we always want to make sure that they are safe we've book them all the day before yeah so when we first started on this trip we didn't even have navigation on our head our handlebars we were handwriting directions of where we wanted to go and putting it on our tank bag and as I said that's what's important is anybody can do this we started out thinking we kind of knew what we were doing and then you grow and you learn and you begin to figure out what's best for you we use I overlander every single day that's another app that tells you where you can camp where good restaurants are what there is to see and do and so I slowly over time became the logistics person for our trip Brandon's fluent in Spanish so he was the guard dog and I did all the logistics and kind of the food and then also you know figuring out Airbnb's and hotels and things like that so I started napping because it was really hot so again I think the number one question we often get asked to is weren't you afraid in Mexico no at times there's definitely areas that you're going through that you need to be aware but our rules are don't drive at night don't drink and drive don't go super fast for joy because it ends up not fun I'm a trauma OR nurse all the gear all the time and I'm forgetting my fifth oh listen to your funny belly if either one of you feels funny about something you don't challenge that person to say come on you listen to it and we've had moments where we realized we made the right call because of that so um so we went through Mexico kind of quickly because we knew we would be coming back we know we're living in Idaho I live in Boise Idaho that we'd be able to come back and enjoy Mexico more thoroughly you could spend five years there and not see even scratch the surface for the food and the things you can see but our big experience in in Mexico was we went to the monarch butterfly reservations not a reservation but it's a park and this was also our first time kind of doing some off-road which was really fun on big heavy bikes these are actually the monarch butterflies they're in big clumps to get there it's a protected reserve and they they come back on Day of the Dead Halloween and Mexicans believe that it is their ancestors coming back they stay there for a few months but they go north and migrate and they have one cycle and another cycle they they you know have babies and keep going they don't come back to this exact same spot till one year later five generations later and they always return to this place we happen to go through when they were there like let's go um so to get there we rode way up high we then had to take a horse about three miles we then hiked maybe a half mile and then you're not allowed to speak because they don't want you to disturb the monarchs we got there really early in the morning and when the Sun hits them they start to flap and so we were in this reserve with millions of butterflies and that was the first time I kind of realized this is this is going to be something this whole trip is going to be something that we're really blessed to be seeing so these are all the clumps everywhere so I also learned as a woman girls want to see me ride and they get so excited and so every chance I get even if it's police officers I get them on my bike because I want them to see that they can too and also a woman a riding a motorcycle but be a 1200 is a big deal a lot of times I would take my helmet off and I'd be with six or seven different male riders and they'd say you're a woman and yeah you know one day at a time right Brandon also had a lot of little kids sit on his bike Brandon carries extra tires because he thinks it looks good we have not used them yet they are currently being shipped to Africa and more falls yeah it's just part of it this was our first border crossing for real after Mexico we went into Guatemala what happens at that point is that we lost cell phone reception because our plans for Verizon were only through Mexico and we also you know it was a first time really exchanging money it was our first time trying to get a sim card it was our first you know and it's a pretty interesting border crossings it's literally people at the gate just waiting on you to arrive and it's it was an exciting experience for us we were pretty intimidated we also learned about fumigation they spray your motorcycles with chemicals and I was carrying four apples on my tank bag that day so I did not eat them because I don't know what they're actually spraying you with and things about traveling like this is you want to see where you are but you can't see everything but traveling and experiencing things we started taking a lot of ferries that were really interesting this was part of the BMW community in Guatemala and this gentleman bought his first motorcycle the same year I did it was a scooter and now he's got like four twelve hundreds of Guatemala City but he took us under his wing for three weeks and rode us all over Guatemala and that's where I learned that I needed to up my game they cut handlebars shorter in Guatemala and nobody has side panniers because they are lane splitting all the time and there's so many trucks on the road and so many potholes that you have to be on it I couldn't keep up with Brandon was excited he went he had a great time I was struggling because for me in my back of my mind what I'm always thinking about is the consequences of what could happen especially in a foreign country but I got my master's degree riding pretty much in Guatemala by the time you get to Peru you get your PhD because in Peru they are actively trying to get you off the road sorry mom and dad but they are often pushing the lorries and the trucks are pushing motorcyclists off the road and there's a lot of llamas and alpacas and so things are very different in Peru and also we were in high mountain mud we didn't go down to the ocean at all we were in the mountains the whole time so we had a great time in Peru but with hindsight so a great example this is what we were riding on and we were starting to get a little bit more extreme I don't want to say extreme but just more remote we were starting to get more comfortable with what we wanted to try and the community was growing for us Alejandro the man on the far left introduced us to a bunch of his friends and we rode together for three or four days they are in the top kind of 1% of Guatemala and for us it was really interesting riding with people with a different socio-economic experience this hotel we stayed at I remember getting fish and looking out and they were these kids were out there fishing in fishing boats and I said to Alejandro what are they fishing for and he said bales of coke and I said what and the currents there go perfectly all the way up to the US and so in the overnight they are dropping drugs on airplanes into the water and here I'm like this is beautiful what fish are they cooked you know and and that's when you start to kind of see more of we left town that day and you see young children with larger guns and it's just it's you know we we've gone in a lot of a variety of places and I think we have had amazing experiences and have not had problems and there is a culture in various communities that are there to survive and exist and they do what they can so we came into Costa Rica and Brandon dropped his bike at the border just to say hello and we learned quickly we couldn't get into Costa Rica Brandon before we left had said I don't need my original title and I said you might want to have your original title with you not just a copy and we learned there they were not going to let us in the border at all because we didn't have the original so we had to hire a lawyer at the border five hours later in the dark he showed up with an entire hard drive that he was carrying to get all of our paperwork sorted out and we were actually allowed into Costa Rica but it became about an $800 mistake through then having to contact the embassy in Costa Rica to say we need a title they said that's a state problem not a national problem and it required a lot of logistics for us to be able to get this sorted out knowing that we should probably have the original all the way through so that is not my I told you so smile that is a very supportive smile I was bringing snacks always find on border crossings you want to have snacks and water so I'd carry this all the way from Tennessee from the dollar store so this was the lawyer he worked on our paperwork and this is Brandon getting it stamped through and then it was dark what's our number one rule don't ride in the dark but we were able to actually get to a campground within about five miles of the border that was beautiful so something else about traveling is trying all the food everywhere it's important I think part of the experience is to try things that are weird right and unusual and you discover so much so this is just an example of some of the markets that we've seen all the way down even all the way well not to use why it's pretty cold in Patagonia but all the way down these are crickets we did a language class in Mexico and they sell a lot of crickets there and they mix it with hot sauce and peanuts this is me trying that and just the fruit and the sweets and you know things we didn't even really know what they were but and the meat meat and fries and cooking asados are a big big thing hotel rooms we often would have you know pretty limited I was always carrying some oysters some cheese some peppers and some hot sauce and crackers and we're good to go if we don't want to go out once we get somewhere so this was a classic example luckily we haven't gotten sick a lot on this trip this was in the banana plantations approaching Panama and Brandon had been feeling really poorly he had been sick a few times in the morning and was feeling good enough to keep going and so we're within about four miles of the Panama border from Costa Rica and I was like Brandon we don't have pictures of the banana plantations yet so this is the first photo where he's all happy and then the second photo he's not feeling that good and then the third photo he is and it's about a hundred degrees he is in the plantation getting water poured on the back of his head what was sweet is there was a little boy who was about seven or eight years old who rode by and saw us gringos sitting there with these giant bikes that are worth a lot of money and he offered us his juice box because he was worried about us so yeah Panama City Wow at this point you know the Darien Gap you cannot there are no roads that connect you Panama to Colombia so where it tapers down you either have to take a boat everybody's heard about the stal rot if you motorcycle at all they stopped doing that in 2020 so now the only option is to air freight or ship in a shipping container we chose to air freight at this point also we knew if we were going to spend the amount of money it would cost to go across the Darien Gap that we were going to continue on to Ushuaia for us it was a an evaluation point of are we having fun are we getting along is this what you think the trip is going to be like how can we improve on this next section and do you want to keep going together so we keep choosing yes we used overland embassy they're fantastic there's two companies you can hire to get you air freighted across the gap they send big rigs like Unimog and trucks and all sorts of things too but we sent our bikes what we also learned here is the culture of stickers is really large in Latin America and everybody wants to exchange stickers and so we started getting our first sheet of stickers Marco the man in Mexico designed them for us and I have some here if anybody wants them so we stick them everywhere but I'm also a leave-no-trace person so I always ask permission first so so our bikes are being flown they I've never had my name with a on a sign before it's right there and and it was you know masking up for the flight these are the bikes arriving with DHL it's the classic I mean we were happy you could tell this was a huge moment for us and that day the third GS is a friend of ours we met that day who was lost we got lost the morning of our day shipping and we had to have a police escort get us to overland embassy it's a long story but he was lost too and so we ended up meeting Federico that day and we've motorcycle with him on and off all the way to Ushuaia but yeah lots of pictures of the bike because it looks hardcore and then we spent all day doing paperwork and trying to be goofy because it is a long day so this was us getting through and then boom you're in Colombia has anybody here been to Colombia it is the best and our most favorite country of this entire trip so far I would say 40% of the people on the road are on motorcycles and the culture I mean every time we went by people are fist bumping you and it was just it's just so fun they all want to like buy you tea and coconut water and things so and the riding is amazing that's where it started to get a little bit different for us again you know the signs when it says the road ends and it's just gravel this literally is where we have to go next to this big truck mom don't look at these photos but when you're cruising along and you come around the corner and there's landslides you know you have to be able to anticipate the roads also get really amazing look at this over here and we started really seeking out different terrain because we were starting to improve so and Colombia is just amazing and the fruit stands of course so we this was a landslide we'd been waiting three days for the street protest to open up we were trying to get we were really close to the border in Ecuador and there had been some protests happening in a small village and we heard they were opening up the border the protest area for one hour and so we'd waited three days for that to happen and we got within five miles of that point we driven an hour to get there and there was a landslide that happened ten minutes prior so we had to turn all the way around and go back and then we had to drive six hours around at that same point we were trying to get to and at that point we'd booked a flight home so we were feeling a little bit stressed but we love Colombia Brandon napping so hot springs everywhere too and what we learned in Colombia also is the motorcycle culture like I said is amazing and there are so many good shops everywhere we're getting less and less BMW certified motor add places we had a full detail done by Pandora before we left it was fantastic and we needed some more work done when we got here and these are all just independent mechanics and the labor is amazingly cheap and so I had a full day of work done on my bike for people looking at my bike they found parts for me from all over the city and the whole bill was $400 so yeah Brandon napping cross the equator this is you know Brandon napping yeah so we were starting to choose more and more rural roads we had met up with two two other guys on a bike who were 25 from there were Dutch and they'd never ridden motorcycles before and they bought matching bikes to do four months in the Americas and we had so much fun with them because they didn't know what they were doing and we kind of knew a little bit at that point but they were game for anything and they were so fun so we travel with them for about a week so and things started getting amazing so just stunningly beautiful and exciting you know roads just kind of disappear when they're that steep so we definitely were learning how to communicate well we camp about 20% of the time during the night we woke up to a roaring sound and you can see this is all black this was a forest fire in the canyon where we were and I kept seeing this weird light through the tent and I kept hearing what I thought was a semi coming up the road and finally I was like I'm gonna look what's going on and the whole hillside was on fire so that was exciting we were fine no no no no no no no no no and then this is this is the main road main road in the high mountains of Peru so yes especially with heavy bikes and then there's amazing rides there's something like 60 tunnels on this route it's a single lane so you you honk whenever you go through because there are lorries coming the other way it was never dangerous mom and dad and we started getting into some really high places and it's just stunning to see people living in their the way they've lived for hundreds of years in in stone huts wearing skirts and vibrant colors and hurting yaks and elk not yaks elpacas and it was amazing so and this was my famous drop because it was a one-lane road Brandon was in front all I heard him say was stop and I I stopped and put my foot down but the pavement ended right there and so I put my foot down below and I just toppled over so it was a full drop on the bike and it was because there was a herd of elpacas coming the other way of course they're not in the photo and these two guys were so shocked they were coming the other way behind the elpacas that they insisted on helping me with my bike and we exchanged stickers and we're still in touch with them until today so so typical roads so yes yeah we got along all the time oh no exactly um so and again I love seeing women and young young girls that want to get on my bike lots of dogs I started carrying dog food with me and to us we started learning that the indicative of how a culture treats their animals is what the street dogs look like so I started carrying dog food and that I got bitten by a dog in Peru very weirdly downtown Lima Peru and this lady was walking her dog and she said watch out my dog is vicious and and I went to the side of the road and the dog bit me there and she just walked off so I had no way of asking her did her dog have rabies has she met has the dog been vaccinated etc so I debated about it for like five days and then I decided why am I not getting the rabies series so I went ahead I got it which involved us going to three different clinics over a six-week period and in a lot of rural communities it's hard to find that vaccine so right and you can you can show symptoms up to two years later which I didn't know so but we still love dogs so this was a classic moment for us high mountains I was in the front I'm starting to get more of my front time and Brandon what was unusual about this for me is this concrete was sticking up and and you couldn't tell how deep it was and at that point I was saying why don't we get out and walk it right and see how deep it is and Brandon said if you walk everything we're gonna cross you'll never get to Yishuaia so I just went and I made the wrong call and promptly went off the concrete slab into about knee-deep mud over there and that involved Brandon getting off his bike we'd never been in that situation before we're kind of newer riders again and lifting it up and cranking he was covered in mud and as this was happening on our two big adventure bikes guess who wrote by but family on a scooter with going to church with like white dresses on and you know no problem at all so so this was the first day that we realized we really traveling with your partner has its pros and cons and we were learning that we really needed to work on our communication at times because challenging situations we react differently Brandon tends to think everybody's out to hurt him and so he's very on guard I think everybody's out to love me unless they prove me otherwise and so that works really well at times and other times it creates some some problems Brandon thrives off of downtown traffic in Mexico City with 12 million people I don't Brandon will be riding listening to music with a 35 millimeter camera shooting pictures while he's talking to me about pointing out something up there on a sky rise a high big building and I'm you know everything I can do to make sure that we're not getting separated and so we we've learned and we are still learning how to ride together even after this time yes so very good question I definitely think folks that are on lighter bikes at times are having more fun because they are able to go places that maybe our skill set with a loaded bike can't do I'm a bit more than Brandon is game for getting out into rural areas I think possibly because he feels more responsibility for me if something goes wrong and I understand that I'm in a perfect role that have a quiver of motorcycles taking a bike like this to Africa in deep sand it's a different challenge than a 300 CC rally bike so yeah but this is the only motorcycle I've ever owned and we are doing the same bike because it's easy to fix them they have the same parts so but it's a beautiful bike and we have not had a flat tire we have not had a problem the entire way Brandon's bike has a hundred thousand miles on it it's a 2015 minds a 2016 with 55,000 miles on it and we have had regular maintenance so yeah I started napping more and we started having more exciting kind of high mountains experiences also camping out where they come in like watch you set up your tents and things started getting amazing they've already been amazing all the way down but to get to Patagonia and Torres del Pana and you know it's amazing so and pictures don't do it justice we went through Bolivia and had a hard time finding fuel that was it yeah and I mean again we have eight gallon gas tanks on this so everybody else has half that and so for us we would meet a lot of riders who are carrying extra fuel although Brandon ran out of gas once but we won't want to talk about that we actually had to buy fuel on the side of the road from some truckers but yeah we're really blessed with the bigger tanks and that's another reason you know we picked that bike so yeah the wind in Patagonia everybody talks about it it is serious so we had a windy app is it 15 till I have Brazilian time okay okay um so what we did is we went all the way down the west side we went to Bolivia and did not go into northern Chile where the hand is that everybody talks about we had a choice of either during the salt flax salt flats in Bolivia or doing the Atacama desert and we chose Bolivia we were pushing at that point to get to Ushuaia so to get that far south you only have about a three and a half month window that you are able to physically get there because it's snow so we were about halfway down the continent at that point and we knew that there were certain things we're not going to be able to see you know Machu Picchu yes the salt flats yes sorry we missed the Atacama desert we will hopefully come back again the list gets longer but we had a windy app and we started learning that you have to look at that app every day to gauge how the speed of the wind is down there it is pretty treacherous especially for us our heavier bikes are weighed better so they are more grounded like an anchor but the consequence is also when it's that strong that it can definitely still take you off the road I've seen videos of a group of 10 1200s on the side of the road hiding in the ditch and they can't even like for two days I mean you just can't ride your motorcycle so we paid a lot of attention to the winds and we actually happened to hit it really well when you get an Airbnb and you come out and your bike's on its side because it's so windy we started actually tying our motorcycles two things at night just to make sure that they would not blow over even though you're inside a gated compound and we would also tie them together with opposing kickstands so that if they were pushed in one direction or the other there they were okay we went all the way down on the Chilean side to Ushuaia and then we and the Carretera Austral which is a really well known gravel road it was amazing and then we we crossed over into Argentina to get to Ushuaia and we came back up Ruta 40 which is the other classic route there's an area called Maldido 73 which is a 73 kilometer section that if you watch anything on YouTube it is the place that people it's very deep gravel it's very windy and exposed and people tend to if you hit it on the wrong day get into some pretty high consequence there so we we did it on a great day we were really really thankful so you can see how deep the gravel is it's your riding entire truck marks from lorries that are on this road and and it's just really exciting we were we had a really great day we were super thankful that's how big the rocks are so it's not like oh it's just a gravel road what are you guys afraid of they're big roly-polys and we we didn't nap but we were celebrating that we'd we'd finished that section without injury and we also felt really accomplished about it so and then you see down in Patagonia this is a sylvan a french motorcyclist we hadn't seen in about a month and we were so excited to see him we hadn't you know we we had celebrated Christmas with him in Peru and then you meet these crazy people that are riding bicycles the entire length that we just did and i've threw hike the Appalachian Trail and there's a thing called a trail angel where you you carry food for other people and i learned that these people are the true um they are tough here i'm on my gas you know my fuel powered bike and they are literally pedal powering on these same winds and same roads as us and so i started carrying oranges and chocolates and caramels and you know whatever i could fit and they were always so excited so um this is uh literally our last fuel station before Ushua'a um all the you never fill up your own fuel in central or south america it's always done for you and so we always were encouraging the guys that fill up our tanks to get on our bikes because they don't often get to so um and then this was us at the very end so we got to the famous sign in Ushua'a um i had a bottle of champagne the day before it had been about 75 degrees and sunny uh and then when we were there it was 45 degrees and howling wind and rain so we had a little bit of grumpy panties happening that day um we went into town and had a hot pizza and then came back and actually took better photographs because this is this is our moment you know this is the end of the road we've done about 23,000 miles at this point um i like to glue things on my bike again i like to make it look a bit unusual um this is a white jaguar i got in mexico and i glued it to the front of the bike and every country we go through i i add something else to the bike so um she had to get some champagne too so um we decided at that point let's keep going uh so we went all the way up oh sorry let me talk about this um like i said there were eight eight or nine women i met the entire ride uh more women are riding two up but women on their own motorcycles whether they're riding by themselves or riding in a partnership like Brandon and i um we all got to Ushua'a eight of us within a three-day period of each other and so i organized a ladies ride Ushua'a is the town uh there is a gravel road that goes two more hours to the lighthouse which is considered the official end of the continent and then there's another one that goes over here that goes into a national park Brandon napped and i thoroughly went to both places to be able to say i'd ridden to the end of the road um and i organized a women's ride and so it was really cool Kathleen Perry um she's on a on a uh Royal Enfield and she is currently just across china she's doing a full round the world in two years um yeah her husband passed away and she said i'm hitting the road um Tracy Charles i don't know if anybody here knows Tracy Charles there's a couple nods um Tracy Charles was a Canadian uh she bought her motorcycle a while ago but um she left Canada five and a half years ago and just got to Ushua'a she picked up a dog in Colombia named Rue who rides with a pink jacket and goggles um this was a German woman uh and it was just the four of us the other the other women didn't want to come so but that is the very very end and to be able to like i said walk into pandora years ago as a woman and be like i want to buy the biggest bike you have and i don't even know like where's the start button um to then be able to to finish with other women who all have different stories was pretty pretty fantastic so the next step Brandon and i decided let's keep going um from Ushua'a we went all the way north up to Brazil so um we uh want to continue experiencing roads like this we want to continue meeting people and adding more stickers to the countries i have been to on my bike um we want to have more fairies because they're kind of sketchy and uh it makes for good photos and it's fun um we want to try more food uh this was in Brazil and we happened to show up at a campground and there were 200 people there having a barbecue on uh eucalyptus sticks they'd been cooking for 14 hours and it was wild boar and um goats and they included us i mean you know nobody spoke english except Brandon spoke Spanish and one guy spoke English and came over and said come on get a beer join us let's let's have some have a meal so there's Brandon on the far side um and they walk around and just carve off meat and if it's undercooked in the middle they put it back on the on the cook cooker so um we want to have more campsites like this that are just dreams and yes we have starlink internet here so i could call my parents um we want to see more churches and so we decided let's go to Africa so we went all the way up to Brazil and then back down through Uruguay, and got to Buenos Aires we did a lot of research to figure out most people's trip ends there most people either go back to Europe there and we decided let's go to Africa we want to we want to go that direction um we looked into shipping containers we did probably two and a half months worth of research to see if we could do it cheaper than air freighting with the car motos when it's all said and done we went ahead and went with the car motos air freighting a bike takes 90 days and you don't really know what the cost is going to be and you have to do it yourself we've never worked for shipping containers before um to car motos we hired them the fee for each of us to ship a motorcycle if you paid cash in Argentina and crisp 100 blue note u.s bills um was 2700 per bike so um to go across the darian gap is about 1200 uh if it's on sale it's 900 depends when you get there so to do that we have to wash the bikes we had to funnel out fuel uh we traded these kids that were washing um cars free fuel for premium fuel for use of their area and then we drove we realized what was funny is we drove and realized we'd siphoned out too much and i only had 12 miles on my tank and i had to go 45 miles to Buenos Aires so we had to buy fuel at the next gas stations um and we showed up in Buenos Aires this is the car motos this is a husband and wife team that have been doing this for 30 years um dialed and so he was siphoning fuel out again for us at the airport um and we ride them in the pallets here and then we have to take windshields off side mirrors we have to take everything out of the panniers we couldn't fly with batteries any liquid sunscreen um it's it's very different from going across the darian uh so we learned a lot um it took all day they bring drug sniffing dogs and they go through all of your stuff um and so we we kind of thought we were knew what we were doing but again you kind of learn as you go and to have someone like the car be able to walk us through it was really amazing so that's my bike and that's us they bid with different airlines and they got us a good flight with united arab emirates and so we watched our bikes fly to Qatar and then they went to Africa and they're x-rayed in every country they go through so that's why we couldn't include a lot of items on our bikes we decided once we got rid of the motorcycles and they were on their way we were going to go float the amazon river um it's a lot easier to do that without a motorcycle um so we floated the amazon and we've come back down now and spent a week in Rio de Janeiro and I flew in yesterday and Brandon will meet me in Cape Town January 5th so um number one I'm thankful for riding with this man um we definitely have our moments like any good coupling does um at the same time the things we've been able to discover and experience and encourage for each other has been a real life lesson so we have agreed we're going to go to Africa we're going to go Cape Town to Kenya and then we will see right now um there's a lot of countries in Africa you can't get through so we're kind of landlocked in Kenya we may have to fly to Oman we may have to fly to Turkey uh we really don't know yet we were looking at going over the west coast um but getting right now through Nigeria is a bit questionable so people are doing it but I think we aren't looking for that much adventure um so I in some regards you know our last photo is from compared to when I was in my parents driveway we look like we kind of know what we're doing one day at a time um and then when we get to Africa it's going to be completely different again uh different cultures different foods big overlanding community not as much of a motorcycle community once you leave South Africa um there is no WhatsApp group for South for for um Africa at all so I've started one and I have about 50 people in it now of just motorcyclists and we're just starting to kind of connect and network and learn from each other so yeah we're excited but we will six to eight months in Africa and then get to Europe and leave the bikes we may leave the motorcycles in Africa and come home and work for a while it just kind of depends how it plays out so here you go (Applause) yes yeah phone numbers in case one of us goes down and yeah contact numbers so any questions for anybody (Laughter) we have definitely learned we both navigate now with dummy phones Brandon had his phone stolen in Bolivia and that was an also interesting experience for us to try to work with a cell phone company in the US to get you reprogrammed from afar it doesn't work and yeah we again you know you just learn as you go right I mean I haven't had a flat tire yet uh when that happens I will learn I know he hasn't either so but anybody can do this it's time and money and courage right I mean and we're very lucky that we set up our home to be able to facilitate a trip like this and that I have support from family and friends that say go do it and at any point that we decide this isn't fun anymore or you know Brandon wants to keep going or I want to keep going that'll be a discussion you know if if I need to come home for any reason then that'll be a discussion and we'll just keep figuring it out you meet people that do round the world trips in one calendar year you meet people that take 30 years to do it so we're just picking it off as we go along this was in Rio de Janeiro last week yeah up on Sugarloaf Mountain no I mean it's what we've learned is there's three kind of distinct cultures you've got the motorcycle culture you have the bicycling road biking culture and they use I mean their distances are so different from ours and then you have the overlanding community which a Unimog or a giant Mercedes van is going to be able to do roads differently than what we are able to do and so we've learned over time that you can learn from other people that have gone through different areas but ultimately being able to communicate with other motorcyclists is pretty important because even if it's Suzuki Yamaha BMW you know everybody you still are like hey I need to find a hostel or somewhere I can park my bike and Lima Peru that has secure parking where do I go you know so I think on these groups there's always a debate on tires and there's always a debate on oil and there's always a debate on whose bike is the best but we're all doing it right I'm having fun yeah yeah so it depends um we in a perfect world we'd ride well and again it depends the kind of road you know in Mexico sometimes we would go a hundred miles and it would take us nine or ten hours uh you know there's 500 topes speed bumps on the road uh in Peru if there was a rock fall I mean you you know you saw some of that but we we feel differently now because our only push was to get to Ushuaia and so we had to cover some ground in certain areas where we didn't want to go that fast but we knew our window was closing um I would say for me and for Brandon a perfect day would be about a hundred 150 miles and then you get to go to this next cool town and you know see whatever it is there is to see um our shortest day was point seven um because we moved to a different camp site and we liked it there and then our longest day we had a 400 plus mile day in northern Mexico and that was hard but it was because we were trying to get somewhere you know those reasons so but we're tired you know you're tired if it's hot or cold so how does it keep up with the cash cash um so Brandon is learning to online bank right now um he likes to carry cash uh so that um no and we tended to pay like gas pumps we aren't using credit cards now we are like uh Argentina Brazil very very modern um very secure so but but in other countries we were using cash only and we were trading out with hawkers on the street a lot because you can get a better rate than you can go into an ATM um and again it's different by country a lot of times but you know we were really lucky to be carrying a lot of cash which allowed us to pay to car motos in cash and get a 10 discount which was 600 dollars so you know we wouldn't have been able to get that cash in Argentina to be able to save that money but that you know we don't have much more cash so why i'm home what's that no and different countries are are different you know argentina has changed so much in the last six months they've doubled in cost compared to when we were there six months ago because of various political climates that are changing so yeah yeah yes absolutely i mean you know i've i've dropped my brennan's dropped his bike more than me um but i remember being in mexico i took a right hand turn and i dropped my bike in a town that we were not feeling comfortable in and before i could even stand up and turn my bike off i had four men who were trying to lift my bike for me um and were just you know brushing me off and are you you know and there's a there's a level of kind of generosity and culture that exists whether you can or cannot speak the language it's it's easier if you can communicate but i mean brandon so brandon spends a couple months every year in baja mexico as a viqueiro as a cowboy and um we were riding along one day and he saw a group of about 500 sheep being herded in the andes in argentina and he pulled over because he really wanted to ride horses with these guys and you know he's pulling over on a motorcycle that they could buy their whole farm with um and they invited him to camp i wasn't with him at the time i come home to work they invited him to stay for four days and they cooked they they killed a sheep for him and celebrated him and that generosity exists everywhere whether you're poor or not and i mean you know we saw venezuelans all over walking north and we were shared with by them and we shared with them and it is humbling so yeah how'd you not look online? yeah it's it's allowed me to be i mean i've traveled a lot before but i think it's rejuvenating every time because it is so humbling i mean to see you know we're in high mountains of peru and they want to bring their children over with their their you know lama herd to share milk with us because we're camping out and they've never seen a tent before you know and then they want to have us all sit on the bike and we got these pictures with you know all these you know and i think that humbleness when i have so much and other people are rich in experience and rich in joy and so that has been really good for us to experience and what i understand also is when we go to africa it's going to be kind of next level too so just humble yeah well okay well one day at a time so but yeah that's that's it so um if anybody wants a sticker or to follow us on instagram uh that would be great and on with the adventure that's kind of our philosophy so and it all started here at pandora i literally walked in and said i want to i couldn't even pick it out in the store i didn't know which one was a 1200 and they encouraged me so great shop yeah yeah thanks for coming

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