Merry Christmas everyone (or Hannukah, and all the other incredible celebrations out there)! We just wanted to make a fun post to celebrate the holiday season by showing you a recap of all the cool places we've been for Christmas over that past four years.

That's right, this is our first Christmas that we'll be celebrating back in the States, at home with friends and family (and that is a great feeling). For the past four winters we've been in faraway lands, and have been welcomed into other peoples' traditions and customs.

Here's a quick glance at the past four Christmases going back in time -

Last year we were celebrating in our rental home in Kenya. I made comfort food - a roasted chicken, mashed potatoes, and mac and cheese. A little strange, but it worked. We also had a little tree decorated. And even though we were somewhat locked down due to the pandemic, we had great company (Marco and Dora, the kittens).

Our Sunday Scoop

It had been a tough choice, but Tim and I finally decided that it was time to go home. We hadn't had a winter in Chicago in four years, and the truth was, we hadn't had a winter at all during that time. We'd been chasing summer throughout our travels, first wintering in Mexico, then in Peru and Bolivia, and finally we spent two winters in Africa - in Tanzania and Kenya. But now that our travel funds were coming to an end, and our bike was in desperate need of repair, plus it was getting a bit too cold for traveling in the northern US, we knew it was time to start heading home.

Now we just had to hope that we could get there without too much mishap.

The previous day had been rough. It was so bad, that we figured there was no way things could get any worse. We'd been having the time of our lives riding the Northeast BDR backroad through the Catskill Mountains of New York state, when we hit a particularly nasty section of loose rocks hidden under fallen leaves. And we fell.

Our Sunday Scoop

In our last blog post, we were stuck near the top of a mountain in New York state, and the bike was dead. The road had gotten pretty rough, and after a few too many falls, the motorcycle would simply not start again. It was the old gremlins resurfacing once more, but this time we were in a particularly bad spot.

To make matters worse, the skies were getting darker and darker, not just with the approaching evening, but the deep rumblings of a thunderstorm could be heard brewing not too faraway.

"This is bad," I just kept repeating over and over again to Tim as he tried repeatedly to get the bike going again. I didn't know what to do, as my brain was fresh out of ideas. I felt helpless, and a part of me just wanted to plop down on the ground and wallow in misery for our situation, but that wouldn't have done any good.

"We'll get through this," Tim reassured me. "We always do."

Our Sunday Scoop

The previous day, things couldn't have gone better for us. We'd been riding along the Northeast Backcountry Discovery Route in New York state, and had zigzagged across the Delaware River, and were now headed towards the Catskill Mountains. We were enjoying ourselves so much, I even told Tim, "I think we should do the whole thing - the whole Northeast BDR."

And he agreed. "And if anything, we should try to get to the top of Mount Washington in New Hampshire. Hopefully it won't be too cold by then," he said.

But the weather was already changing on us. Plenty of leaves had fallen off the trees, and autumn had set in with full force. We passed lovely orange pumpkin patches while the skies sometimes clouded over into a gray haze. Exposed bare branches of trees turned the world around us from green to brown.

Our Sunday Scoop

We had just finished our final Overland Expo with a bang, and were simply loving our time on the East Coast. Having never been there before on the motorcycle, we figured this was our chance to explore and ride through a region of the country that was new to us - the Northeast.

We kept hearing about the new BDR out there, which stands for Backcountry Discover Route. It's a road that has been carefully mapped and plotted out, and, as you guessed, it goes through the backcountry of the state. It hits up a lot of off-road, but mostly weaves its way along the most pleasant and scenic roads through the rural areas, places which people normally would never get to see.

Our Sunday... oops, Tuesday Tuneup!

After our soul-nurturing ride on the Blue Ridge Parkway for three days, we arrived at Overland Expo East in Virginia, not really knowing what to expect. Well, we knew what the other two Expos had been like. The one in Colorado, and the big one in Arizona had been full of adventure motorcyclists and 4-wheel drive enthusiasts who loved going off-road, hitting the high-altitude mountain trails, and roughing it out in the middle of nowhere.

But somehow I just couldn't imagine the east coast vibe being quite the same. We'd already heard that the East event was significantly smaller than West. Plus, horror stories of mud, mud, and more mud kept surfacing in conversations. It had been hard, and sometimes stressful getting all the way out to the east coast from Arizona in only ten days... and I wondered, was this going to be worth it?

Our Sunday Scoop

We had just spent the past week rushing across the country, from Arizona to Georgia, in order to get from Overland Expo West in Flagstaff to the upcoming expo in the east. It was hectic, it was uncomfortable, and I was miserable.

The days had been long and exhausting, with my ears ringing at night from hours of my helmet being battered by highway-speed winds. Plus, the weather had been terrible. Starting with the hailstorm that hit us in New Mexico, to the high winds in Oklahoma, and then topped off with the torrential rains of Arkansas and Tennessee, by the time we arrived at Tim's uncle's cabin in northern Georgia, I was ready for a rest.

But with only a few days left to get to the expo in northern Virginia, we had to now make a choice - stay an extra day in Georgia and then take some grueling highways up to Virginia, or leave the next morning and ride a more leisurely road up north called the Blue Ridge Parkway.

As we wrapped up our wonderful weekend at Overland Expo West, we now faced the daunting  prospect of what was next - traveling from Arizona to Virginia for the next expo in just ten days. Since these were overland expos, most people attending were in vehicles with four wheels, and if they were going to both of these, they'd be driving. That's still not a lot of time, but for us on a motorcycle, it was an even tighter schedule.

I find that motorcycle travel, though exponentially more exciting, is also more exhausting than traveling by car. The wind, the weather, the heavy gear, the sitting on a rattling machine in one position for so long... it all adds up to be more strenuous than going in a luxurious padded seat with armrests, drink holders, and windows to block out the rest of the world as it rushes by. 

​This is also one of the things we love most about motorcycle travel - the vulnerability of it. The way we're exposed to the elements, the way we're immersed in our surroundings as opposed to being in a bubble. But in this particular instance, I was not looking forward to the ride out the Virginia. And this was not only because we'd be taking highways, skipping all the sights, and having long days, but because the motorcycle hadn't always been working properly for us this summer. And we felt that at any moment something else could go wrong.

I look back on the days when we were living in our house in Kenya, and how I would excitedly write up my Sunday Scoop blog post each week. I would have time to think about it, to write it just the way I wanted it, and to choose the right pictures... Those were the days.

Because ever since we've been back on the road in the US, things have been different. Our days are filled with getting miles under our belt, bracing the winds, or cold, or heat, or hail. Sometimes the bike would function, sometimes it wouldn't start at all. And all the while we were nervous about keeping to our strict schedule of Overland events. And we were nervous that we might never reach our destinations.

Even now that we're back in Chicago (we're settling here for the winter), I barely have a moment to write a blog post. So I apologize for the lateness of my stories, but this one I think you'll like. Especially if you know our origin story of Maiden Voyage, and how we took our motorcycle on its first trip out West to Colorado and Utah, you'll understand the significance of us revisiting some of those places.

Once again we had broken down, and once again, a dear friend was there to rescue us. This time we had a non-starting motorcycle in Boise, Idaho, and our savior was Brandon Lever. As I paced around fretting over our latest mishap, Brandon told me that everything was going to be all right, and that he had a good feeling about it. But I didn't believe him.

Since the mechanics in Idaho were all fully booked, Brandon offered to trailer us and the motorcycle down to Salt Lake City to the dealership there. And hopefully, if all the stars aligned correctly, they would be able to diagnose the problem, and the solution wouldn't require any parts to be ordered, because we had just a few days before we had to be down in Flagstaff, Arizona for the Overland Expo West. There was simply not enough time to get anything done besides a simple fix, and once again, we were alerting the heads of the Expo that it was possible we might have to cancel all our plans.