Me and Santiago

Since I left New York, my home has been my bike and the stuff on it. This has been evolving over time, most recently when Cathy joined me in San Fransisco, and I realized I had way too much junk that I wasn´t really using. On any trip like this, you can´t ever really have a perfect setup - it continues to evolve as you get into new environments, and as you gain experience you acquire new parts and gear and discard others.

Some lessons that I learned 4 years ago when I did my cross country bicycle trip have come back to me in the last 4 months. One is, if you´re depending on a vehicle for a long trip, make it the best one you can afford. The bicycle I had, which I was riding for sentimental reasons but was not really ready for the trip, broke down repeatedly. This made for some great stories, but I´d just as soon have an uneventful trip. I haven´t had any problems with this motorcycle yet. Part of the BMW rep for engineering is hype, but I am pretty happy with the engine of the bike.

Another lesson is you can always mail stuff home. In starting a trip, especially if you´ve never done one like it before, you get the best advice you can off the web and from friends, but in the end a lot of it conflicts and you´re never really sure what you´ll need and what you can get by without. I ended up mailing a third of my gear home from the bicycle trip, and I´ve gotten rid of a lot of weight on this trip also.

It´s a good idea to have a test run before you really get out into the middle of nowhere. I started this trip going through Canada and Alaska, figuring that I would learn things on the way before I got into much more difficult territory, and this turned out to be a good idea. I ended up getting to a pretty much final set of gear, modifications and spare parts by the time I was going to head into Mexico. A better idea would have been a 1000 mile trip, a year before I left, because then I could have bargain shopped for all of my gear.

Finally, it is possible to overprepare. Before I left, I had all sorts of worries, from how often I´d get a flat, or bad weather, to my Spanish. In general so far it seems like most of the problems I´ve had have been much more minor than I would have thought back in New York. The best strategy is to prepare as best you can, and then don´t worry about it and enjoy the trip.