It’s hard to know where to start for a first blog post. But it makes most sense to start from the beginning - for me, that was Queenstown, New Zealand two and a bit years ago.
I remember exactly where I was when I first met Tom, who’d flown to NZ for its world renowned downhill mountain bike trails. But it wasn’t your typical love at first sight story - he became part of our group of friends and, for the first few weeks we were very much just companions. I felt increasingly drawn to Tom as time went on, but I think the syncher for me was being driven around in his old Lada Niva and rattling around the beautiful Otago countryside - there’s something pretty sexy about a man driving an old school Russian 4x4 (no?!). That and his incredible talent for mountain biking had me admitting that being friends wasn’t going to cut it for me.
Tom still stands by the fact that at first it was all for convenience as he had nowhere else to live at the time (he’s a hopeless romantic...).
Within a few weeks of knowing Tom I knew about his big dream to ride through the Americas on a motorbike. This all sounded very exciting but not something I particularly felt the urge to do. It was his next step after New Zealand so I tried not to get too attached over the first few weeks.
But weeks turned into months and Tom soon broke his promise to himself - not to get a girlfriend until the end of his travels! And when my Kiwi visa expired, with me thinking that was the end of it all, he said he would come with me to Australia. And now here we are planning his dream trip, together. And it has gone from being something I never thought would interest me to the most exciting thing I have done in my entire life.
We’ve owned four motorbikes in the year and a half we’ve lived In Melbourne, of varying ages and speeds. So I am more than used to riding pillion (on one particular occasion we rode two up for 6 hours on our Honda CBR600R, with me balancing on the tiny pillion seat with a full 90 lite backpack on - it was quite an ab workout to stop myself falling backwards).
However I am more than aware that no number of day trips can really prepare me for the long ride to come, through fifteen countries over four months. But that’s half the fun!