9/5/2006

We were all so busy, that the website didn't get checked for 3 weeks after we got back.  When I finally logged on, I was surprised to see that we got 194 unique visitors, just the day before.  Seeing that there was still a lot of interest in the site, I thought I would take a few minutes to give a current update and talk a little bit about plans for the future. 

Current

Rodger is hard at work, for what seems like 24 hours a day.  He is waiting tables for The Noisy Oyster in downtown Charleston and working in a warehouse in Mt. Pleasant.  I’m glad to see that he has stuck to his game plan and did not run back to an engineering desk job.  His first order of business is to get out of the debt that he accrued over the course of the trip.  Andrew is looking for an architecture internship in the Charleston area, and has an interview lined up this week.  It looks like we will all be hanging around Charleston for a while.  On the last day of our trip, we rode in to Charleston around 8:00 at night and were up until about 2:30.  I woke up at 6:30 the next day, hopped on the bike, and rode to my first day of medical school at MUSC.  Yeah, I got back the night before school started.  In other news, we had an interview on 96 Wave (a local radio station).  We have it digitally recorded and will be making it available for download on our website as soon as we get clearance from 96 Wave. 

Future

Rodger and I seem to spend a lot of time talking about next summer.  We keep tacking on new things to our list, “to do before I die”.  The question is, which one of them to do next.  We have talked about motorcycling Africa or South America, but are also considering a sailing trip.  If your goal is to ride across every continent on a motorcycle, then I guess the sailing equivalent is to sail the seven seas.  We could get started on that.  The problem with sailing is that it goes against our biggest rule for traveling...don’t spend money.  A sailboat is expensive.  We have considered the possibility of building one during the year.  But the time conflicts between work and school would make this almost impossible.  We are currently doing our research on areas of the world that are known for having cheap, junked sailboats.  We could fly there, buy one, and then fix it up while we sailed it.  We could end this trip in an area that has a high demand for sailboats, and then ideally, the end result would be selling it to pay for the trip.  

However, with all of the interest generated in our around the world bike trip, it may also be possible to obtain sponsorship for another bike adventure.  The main problem that we had in obtaining sponsorship before was that they questioned if we would (or could) do it.  With that question answered, our options look much better.  In addition, a short DVD and a book are in the works.  The book will contain lots of pictures, along with stories and will read a lot like the journal entries.  Initially, it will only be available to download from our site in pdf format.  Depending on the interest, we may produce hard copies.  We wanted to say thanks to friends and familiy and all of the people that kept up with us along the way.  It was a crazy journey, and hopefully we will have many more to come.

-J.