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Published: August 18th 2015
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This will be the final blog post from my 2015 PanAmerican Highway riding adventure. Today Tuesday I am meeting with a shipping agent here in Buenos Aires to discuss timeline and logistics for shipping back the motorcycle to Seattle. Once all documents are in order, I will really be looking forward to taking a flight back to the US to meet my family and to return to work. However, as of today, I don’t know exactly when I will be able to fly out. I am kinda hopeful that I should be able to fly back to the US by the end of this week (fingers crossed).
Before I end this journey and blog post, I want to take the opportunity and recognize all the people and organizations that have, implicitly and explicitly made this motorcycle adventure possible. At the end, I also want to seize the opportunity to advertise the next motorcycle adventure ride that I have already started to plan. So here go the acknowledgements, in no particular order:
My management chain: Thank you Sean and Brian for making it possible for me to take 3 months off work and pursue this dual adventure in increasing digital literacy in the Americas and riding the world’s longest motorable road. I hope that you took good care of the research team while I was gone!
Garmin: For making what is probably the best, most robust, vibration resistant and easy to use motorcycle GPS unit, i.e. the Zumo 660. The usability praise here should definitely not be taken easily, coming from somebody that has professionally worked with software usability for 15 years. The GPS unit and the accompanied digital maps I used were absolutely essential. Without the GPS unit and the digital maps, I would probably still be somewhere in northern Mexico being totally lost at a suburb of an intermediate city.
My research team at Amazon Kindle: Carolyn, Veronica, Dawn and Jade; you ladies are the very best - period. Thanks for allowing me to leave you without a manager over the summer (ok, you didn’t exactly have a choice, but still!). I miss you and look forward to getting back to the team again.
Openstreetmap: This non-profit project run out the Netherlands provides generic digital routable maps that can be downloaded and used in GPS units for free. The community generated maps are not only reliable, accurate and filled with excellent details, but are in many cases actually of a better resolution and quality than any commercially available routable GPS maps. In some cases, as that of Bolivia, commercial routabe GPS maps do simply not appear to exist. Without these Openstreet digital maps, my PanAmerican Highway adventure ride would simply not have been possible!
BMW: For designing and building a fantastic adventure motorcycle. The BMW 1200 GS Adventure is a true joy to ride, and probably one the very few motorcycles capable of such a long a challenging adventure ride.
Amazon Kindle: My day-to-day workplace at Amazon in Seattle has been a great supporter of my dual project to help increase digital literacy in the Americas and at the same time ride the PanAmerican Highway.
My family: I want to thank my wife Kick and youngest daughter Irene, who both agreed to let me pursue my riding dream since many years. Without your wholehearted support, the 2015 PanAmerican Highway riding adventure would simply not have been possible. I look forward to meeting you very soon.
The Riecken foundation: This Guatemala and Honduras based non-profit organization has been a great partner in piloting Kindle e-readers in Honduras community libraries together with us. Zoe and I have learned a lot by working with the foundation and by visiting their offices in Tegucigalpa and one of the libraries that we have donated Kindle e-readers to.
Touratech: This aftermarket motorcycle parts company has some of the best and necessary extra parts to make such a long motorcycle ride possible. The Touratech parts are an essential ingredient to making the world’s longest motorcycle ride both possible and bearable.
Next riding adventure: Yes, the next riding adventure is already in the planning phase, though I will need a few years to process the PanAmerican Highway experience first. I will be riding
">the Silk Road , from Istanbul in Turkey to Beijing in China. This is the ancient route that connects the West with the East, and has been a trade route of thousands of years between Asia and Europe. Significantly shorter than the PanAmerican Highway, with 8,000 miles / 13,000 km, the Silk road is however much more technically and geopolitically challenging for sure. It involves some very difficult border crossings (like that from Kyrgyzstan into Tibet, China), a fair amount of tough dirt road, and quite a dose of culture shock. However, I think that by now I should be fairly well prepared after the past 3 months of riding the PanAmerican Highway. Due to the technical, logistical and geopolitical challenging nature involved in riding the Silk road by motorcycle, my choice will be to ride with one of the veterans in the motorcycle adventure riding scene (which by the way is pretty small), and who happens to be based in my own home town Seattle. In 3-5 years I plan to ride the Silk Road with Helge Pedersen’s GlobeRiders in an expedition of 10-12 riders. Stay tuned until then!
Thank you all for following along and for your support.