Well, to call it great is a bit of an overstatement.. but this is certainly an update. Why haven’t I been updating the blog? Did I give up? No. Truthfully, I’ve been a little lazy, but it is really because I’ve been having so much fun these last couple of months traveling around the USA, meeting good people, eating excellent food, and catching up with family and old friends. One cannot ask for a better trip and I haven’t even left the US!
So.. what’s been up? Here’s the summary. I’m going to back-fill some details as the weeks progress.
Petrolia -> Eugene -> Portland -> Seattle driving through some of the most beautiful coastline followed by the worst weather of the trip (cold + rainy). I hung out in Seattle for a few weeks with some old friends.
After several conversations to people at the HU Petrolia meeting, I concluded that I don’t really have the budget for Australia. While I *REALLY* wanted to go, I just didn’t have the money. The way I knew this was when the guy from the Bay Area was saying that Australia was too expensive
So Unfortunately, Australia is going to be another trip.
I then started rearranging my trip to go straight to Thailand from Seattle.
I called around to several shipping and logistics companies around the USA and ended up using http://www.frontierforwarder.com/worldwide_agents.htm . They helped me ship a motor out of an africa twin to Singapore last year. I priced sea (normal cargo) and air shipments, but ended up going RoRo.
RoRo is short for Roll-On-Roll-Off, a method of shipping where the cargo rolls itself onto the ship. This is typically used with cars, excavators, and farm equipment that is too large to fit in a container. They also take motorcycles . This ended up being super expensive, but I was happy to not have to deal with crating anything up.
The New Plan: Drop bike off at the Port of Tacoma near Seattle for shipment to Laem Chabang near Bangkok. The bike will be there around November 10th… I’m going to get on November 3rd.
Until then, I’m spending time with the family in Kansas City, Missouri.
Every update must have a picture… here I am all dressed up at the port in Bellingham, Washington: