I haven't written a post in a while, but that's because we're back home in Chicago for a break before heading off to Africa, and life here has been pretty normal. 

The regular American grind used to be our daily reality: waking up to the sound of the alarm, getting the coffee machine brewing before our eyes were properly opened, running from an air-conditioned building to an air-conditioned car, then coming home to turn on Wheel of Fortune or some other brain mush show until falling asleep. It's not a terrible existence, in fact, there's something very comforting and lovely about it. It's predictable, controlled, and best of all, here in Chicago, our friends and family are always close by, and weekends are spent visiting one another with good food and laughter.

Two years on the road are now in the books (and soon to be in physical books). From Chicago to Ushuaia, and back up to Iguazu Falls, the questions are now: what worked and what did not?

We've made it to the end of the world: the most southern point that you can get to by road on the planet, which is quite an accomplishment, but it has not been without its obstacles. We've had one bike problem after the next, so much so that we are now stuck in Punta Arenas, Chile until we can get the proper parts flown in to this section of the world.

More than a month ago in northern Chile, the engine started overheating on crisp and cold days. So we took it in to the KTM workshop in Santiago where they fixed the water pump, changed out the coolant, and we figured our bike issues were behind us.

With the bike not starting from our ride through Bolivia's salt flats, we were in a bit of a predicament. Our dear and wonderful friends who'd stayed by our sides throughout it all, Brendon and Kira Hak, were on the verge of overextending their visa in Bolivia, and needed to go. Unlike us, their bike was fully functional, and their plan was to take a difficult, but gorgeous route south and out of Bolivia: the Lagunas Route.

But as Tim and I found ourselves immobile in the town of Uyuni, we knew that if we didn't get our bike running before they had to leave, we would not want to do such a challenging road by ourselves with a questionable motorcycle. Our plans and dreams of riding the Lagunas Route were now falling apart.

So the pressure was on for Tim to fix the bike, and he needed to do it by 11:00 AM the next day, which was checkout time for the Haks and the latest possible moment before they had to leave.

Yes, it looks awesome: the mirror effect of the largest salt flats in the world during the wet season. But don't let the surreal image of us riding through the Salar de Uyuni in Bolivia fool you, because it has rendered our motorcycle immobile.

The amazing photographers who took this shot are our friends Kira and Brendon Hak, the fellow KTM-riding duo called the Adventure Haks. We met up with them for Christmas in Sucre, Bolivia, and then headed south together a few days before this epic failure-of-a-ride.

As many of you know, we were on the road to Peru two weeks ago when our monoshock broke and we were forced to haul the bike back to Cuenca, Ecuador, to get it fixed. What we didn't realize at the time was that the particular stretch of road between Cuenca, Ecuador and Jaén, Peru is cursed.

The worst has happened. Well, getting into an accident and injuring ourselves or rendering the bike permanently useless would be the worst. So then I guess I should say the second to worst has happened: our rear shock has broken and now we are stuck in Ecuador without a motorcycle until it can be fixed.

But let me start at the beginning.

After our brief venture into the Amazon, we took a route through southern Ecuador to get to Peru, a route that would pass through some recommended towns. And the first of which was Baños.

Marisa and I have had a lovely time traveling through Missouri, Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, Colorado, and New Mexico. In our short time on the road we have experienced near tornado-like conditions, rain and hail while riding down a mountain road that had more wet clay to it than gravel, and fire ants and roly-polies continuously getting into our helmets which meant Marisa freaking out... the stuff adventures are made of.

We worked as a team in all of the above scenarios, except for the roly-polies in Marisa's helmet, that was her battle. But on only the third day did we hit our first  “oh-no" moment.

We were in Meade, Kansas on a Sunday afternoon for a lunch stop, and I was doing my standard walk around of the bike to be sure nothing was blatantly wrong. But something was blatantly wrong.

“We have a problem,” I told Marisa. She jumped off the phone and came running over.

Hit me. Our grand adventure is about to begin. In preparation, I gave us five weeks to get the final arrangements in order. We needed to accomplish a small list before we could hit the open road.

• Marisa and I needed to transfer the title of our bike from Arkansas and get licenses and state IDs to reflect Illinois as our “legal residence” even though we were technically homeless. 
• I needed to take my bike to the dealership. There were 25k miles on its current chain and sprockets, and something weird was happening around 4500rpm in third, forth, and fifth gear. The bike seemed to choke up and struggle to accelerate, not very awesome when merging from an on-ramp into fast moving traffic.  I also noticed what seemed to be oil gathering around a gasket on the engine.
• We had to transfer our money to debit accounts that would be accepted world-wide. 

Then the flood gates of problems opened

It only took two weeks on the bike around Lake Michigan to figure out that we need to lose a lot of gear. It's one thing to go through your belongings and think about what you'll need on a three-year trip around the world, and it's another thing to actually pack it all on and ride around. The bike becomes heavy and unmanageable, especially on rough roads, and the gas mileage drastically worsens. But that was why we took this test-run trip, to figure out what we need to add or lose (more like lose) for our real journey.