I wonder what Alaska looks like ?

Well I have been home for almost 6 months and I have to say, once the initial excitement of seeing my family and friends, I was feeling down in the dumps and missing riding my bike everyday.

So about a month or so I manage to find a Suzuki Vstrom DL650 out in America and with great help from my friend Doug I managed to buy it.
Though there was lots of hassle with the bank transfer it was eventually all sorted and Doug picked it up the bike and  brought it back to Florida.

It still needs registering which fingers crossed I should have that all sorted out in the next few weeks. Mind you if I wanted it easy, I would have booked to go with Ewan and Charley on their next adventure lol

My 2007 ABS wee strom with 15,000 miles on it.... wonder how many miles will be on it when I have finished

My original plan was to head out in July, then I found out that Doug was away and I didn't have a working bike to go to Finland, so I had to cancel a few things and ask my future Tenants if they were happy with an early move in and they were.

So I took the plunge and booked to fly out on Tuesday the 14th of May.

Then it hit me that the last time I left on a packed bike, this time I would be flying out with all my kit. The trouble is my riding and camping gear came to well over 30kg  so I sent a box out to Doug's with all my camping gear. 

Though I have been unpacking and repacking and re-weighing my bag quite a lot!!

My rough plan is to get to Florida, sort out the bike and make my way North to Alaska for June/July.

Then head South to Sturgis, then back along the West coast to the Californian HuBB meet, where I will give a presentation on my Gambia Scooter trip in 2012.

By then my 6 months visa will be up and I will head through Mexico towards South America for the Winter months.

Return to USA in 2014 and end up back at Doug's, where I will probably leave the bike for him to sell for me (unless I get a crazy idea and decide to ride back via Russia!).

So that's it so far, tomorrow morning I will hand my house over and take a train to Manchester, right now though I am still busy packing storage boxes.

oh and I also thought I would just keep adding to this blog rather than start a new one :-)