riding south along route 11

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One year of non-stop working
months of planning
days of sweat and tears
all amounts to frustration.

Sitting on a completely deserted beach in La Pesca, Gulf Coast Mexico; the sun blazing, sea roaring breeze calming: Bliss. Arrived here yesterday after six weeks of stinking bad egg luck and a series of Kafka-esque nightmares and money draining and emotional breakdowns that has seen us nearly abondon the whole trip. But we have made it thus far and now life is grand and the sun is shining and the motorbike is running well. Back to the beginning.

Arriving at JFK on 5th September into the humidor of exhaust fumes and cacophony of noise that is New York City, we stayed at Rodney and Juliet´s place in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. The first night was spent eating great and cheap Thai food as the restaurant kept on spinning in our jet lagged minds. All was going to be fine. We´d seen our motorbike in a nearby garage and it would be ready when we were.
Monday morning. Ida and her Hungarian friend Gabi had gone to Manhattan Beach to eat Russian food and laze around in the sun while my task was to get the bike insured and therefore ready for registration according to US law. After contacting a few insurance companies I realised this was going to be harder than I´d expected; a US driver´s license was needed and that I certainly didn´t have. After a lot of fruitless phoning, Motorcycle-express came to the rescue with their foreigner in The USA package, designed exactly for my needs. It took a day to insure and I thought a congratulatory drink was in order.

The next day Ida and myself went off to one of the myriad Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) offices to get the bike registered.

Doing any kind of official paperwork has always been a time consuming and boring chore yet one that would always have a definite outcome. In this case, the USA takes on a dictatorial role: Papers, paper and yet more papers are required and these are papers which as a foreigner, one just doesn´t have. THE MAN had us backed into a corner and this is where frustratoin begat incredulousness which begat fear of the trip ending before it had begun which brought on a contained rage at the system which couldn´t give us a straight answer, or an answer which made sense. Depending on which official was dealing with us, what they´d had for breakfast what side of the bed thay had got out of and just what time it was: this was their criteria for granting our dream the metallic reality it required.
So we got married. In order to register a vehicle in the USA, everyone, foreign and national alike, require six point of identification which cab be in the form of a local driving license (6 points) passport (3 or 4 or 6) depending on state of mind of petty official, a US marriage license (2) bank account, US only although again depending on state of mind of official as my European card was sometimes recognised and sometimes not, same as my passport. Suffice to say, three weeks of dealing with these morons and we finally had our coveted metallic dream catcher in the form of a license plate. We set off the next day, 3 hours late because the bike still hadn´t been finished.

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