Los Angeles, USA

With just five days before we were due to fly out, we found a buyer for our bike in San Francisco. We were getting a little nervous about cutting it so fine, but we found a good home for the bike and that did something to ease the pain for Alex. I can't say I shed too many tears, as my patience with the pillion life had worn thin some time ago. A near miss on a San Francisco highway didn't help things. After crumbling into a nervous wreck on the highway, poor Alex heard me screaming on the back of the bike and knew something was wrong!, I insisted on sticking to cabs and trains as much as I could. At the same time, the bike was the most amazing part of our trip, and in the four wheel drive I often longed for, it truly would not have been the same. We caught the starlight express coastal train down to California from San Francisco. The train ride was beautiful and it was comfortable for us to be both be driven and not have to follow maps and work it out ourselves for once.

Coming into Union Square train station we were greeted warmly by Alex's family friends, who kindly put us up for the final days of our journey. We were surrounded by so much warmth and care in the midst of these new friends of ours, that suddenly being in the west didn't seem so cold and alienating any more. It felt like there was just as much warmth and love here as there had been south of the border, it just showed itself in different ways. We spent our time meeting with the family friends we had met with before we left and we are so grateful to Anja, Harro, Heinz, Erika and Thomas for welcoming us with open arms, cooking us homemade meals, playing bumper pool with us and generally making us feel at home.

On the day we were flying out, we even managed to meet up with Marco and Paulo (friends of Lillo, who had originally sold us the bike) at La Piazza, the restaurant where we met Lillo and bought the bike. They had headed down to Panama as well on motorcycles, but they got it down in around 3 1/2 weeks! We even went to the mechanic who serviced the bike for us before we left, we had some spare parts to donate. Now we had come full circle, our last meal in California was in La Piazza with Heinz and Erika.

This trip was incredible, full of highs and lows, comforts and aches, awe and wonder and at times despair. We saw and experienced things we fail to accurately describe, the stories live between us. We have tried to share some of what our lives have been like in these last five months, but we have lived a dozen lives worth of adventure. Each week felt like a month and it seemed there was always so much to tell. You know that the journey changes you in ways you cannot fathom, your life back home will never be the same. So many friends have said to us that they could never do what we did, I would have said the same just a year ago. Life can surprise you, and you can surprise yourself when you learn how much you really can deal with and how you really can proceed despite your doubts and fears. For anyone out there who reads this and thinks, maybe?, could I?, would it be possible? is it worth it? We have one thing to say ............GO FOR IT!