Hello world!  Welcome to my weblog. I hope it holds your interest.  My primary reason for creating this blog is to chronicle, for your reading pleasure, a bicycle journey. Circumstances have provided me with a break in employment starting January first.  The timing is perfect to take that extended trip that I have been planning for years.

The first time I thought of touring Latin America was seven years ago during a low point in my life. I was alone again, it was the dead of winter, and I was surfing the web one evening.   Winters here (Maryland USA) are miserable. I stumbled across a website titled “Rob’s Central America Odyssey”.  Rob had ridden his motorcycle from San Francisco to Panama and had kept a diary with pictures on the net. I was fascinated by the story; I had no idea that such a thing was possible! Within a couple of weeks, I was planning my own trip. My dream trip was to do a Pan-American ride, Deadhorse Alaska to Tierra del Fuego; however I was limited to four weeks vacation every year so I did shorter trips. The first trip was in the Fall of ’00, Delaware to Pachuca Mexico and back. I discovered on that trip that an understanding of the Spanish language would be very helpful for traveling in Latin America. So, I enrolled in Spanish classes at the local community college when I returned. The next trip was to Spain in ’01; I flew into Malaga, rented a Yamaha XT600 and toured Andalucía. ’02 was a five week Mexico & Belize tour. The summer of ’04 found me back at the college studying Spanish again. Armed with a better vocabulary, I rode the gulf coast of Mexico for five weeks. For something completely different, in February of ’05 I flew to Chiang Mai, Thailand and toured the North of the country on a Honda.

In ’05, I discovered bicycle touring.  Bicycling established many advantages. It is a simpler way to travel, less planning is required. No longer would I have to ride the interstate highway for days to reach Mexico, I can just hop on a plane and fly to the interior with my bike. It is a cheaper way to travel and there is a lot less potential for insurmountable breakdowns. But the number one reason bicycle touring beats motorcycle touring is: You get healthier as you travel! Eat all you want and still lose weight! I did a couple of short bicycle tours of the Yucatan that went favorably.

That sums up my travel experience; and brings us to the current trip (known herein forth as “the big one”). I intend to fly to Brownsville Texas on January 7, and ride south from there for months. As always, I will be traveling alone with no fixed itinerary.