December 5, 2009,
We made it back home to Ohio, it was pretty cold at times on the ride home, but the weather wasn't too bad. We got held up for a day in Memphis, TN because of a bad rain storm, but we beat the really cold weather and the snow, which should be here soon. Rick and I have been busy trying to get our lives back in order now that we are back home.
Unfortunately we didn't raise as much money for Akron Children's Hospital as we had hoped for, we only raise about $100 in donations. Everything that people donated is going to Akron Children's Hospital. Rick and I funded the trip with our own money, which we raised by selling most of our stuff before we left. So now that we are home we are both on the job hunt and trying to rebuild.
Even though we didn't reach our goal of raising $30,000 for Children's Hospital and we didn't reach our goal of making it to Brazil, we still feel that this trip was a great success. We did something that most people would never consider doing and we did it with the intentions of helping sick children. 100 dollars isn't much, but every little bit helps, we weren't able to help as much as we wanted to, but we worked hard and gave it all we had.
When we started the trip, my odometer said 865 miles and when I pulled into my driveway when the trip was finished, my odometer read 7,865. So we road exactly 7,000 miles. We learned so much about traveling, culture, ourselves, and so much more! Thank you to everyone for following our trip. Now that I am home and have better Internet access, I will be adding more pictures to the website, so please check back and we are still accepting donations for Akron Children's Hospital, so Please make a donation that will help Akron Children and families in the greatest need this Christmas.
November 23, 2009
Rick and I have been having a blast in Mexico, but unfortunately we have some bad news. We made a budget and checked our funds and unfortunately we do not have the funds to continue forward, so we have decided to return to Ohio. We didn't make our goal of reaching Brazil, but we have had a great time and this has been an amazing life changing experience for both of us. We are still in Mexico and we should be back in Texas some time tomorrow. Our adventure is far from over and we will enjoy our trip home, but like all good things, it has to end some time and unfortunately that time has come. Thank you for following our trip and please continue to check the website and donate to Akron Children's Hospital. We will be uploading a lot of pictures and videos when we get home and have better Internet access.
November 16, 2009
We woke up around 8 am and Felix was at our place around 8:30 to show us a map and tell us about a cool little mountain city that was not far from our Cabana. "It is very steep road, good for the motos, it is only 50 meters away to road. You go maybe cinco meters. It is nice restaurant there in volcano." It sounded like a great little adventure, so we brushed our teeth and hit the road. Felix was right, it was steep and it good for the motos! What he didn't tell us was that the whole road was lava rock, but I kind of expected that since it is a road that goes up a volcano.
There were small villages all along the road and people were walking with machetes and hand tools, leading cattle, and caring wood. It is amazing how people live in small villages like that all over the world. We continued up the road and reached the clouds that we stuck in the mountains. After close to an hour of riding I was considering turning around because we were planning to ride to Vilhermosa which is about a 5 hour ride. Rick encouraged me to keep going and before long we were in a little town at the top of the volcano called Ruiz Cortinez in the Municipio de San Andres Tuxtla.
We stopped at "El Restaurant De La Selva," which means "the Restaurant in the Jungle," for breakfast. We had Huevos de Mexivana, which is scrambled eggs and mixed peppers severed with tortillas. Then we returned down the same road to our cabana and packed up all of our gear and headed into town to use the Internet before traveling to Velhermosa.
We crossed into the Mexican state of Tabasco, yes it is were Tobasco sauce comes from, and there was also some really bad flooding here and it slowed us down a lot in some areas. There were a lot of shanty houses that were under about 3 feet of water and it made the mosquitoes unbearable. We stopped for gas and they were swarming us by the hundreds! We quickly got back on the road and we weren't getting bitten any more, but it looked like it was snowing because there were so many mosquitoes. Any time that we had to stop for construction they began to attack us again. It was unbelievable!
We made it to Velhermosa and had dinner at a sports bar. Rick made arrangements to stay with a girl and her family here, but we had no way to call her and the pay phones take calling cards that you have to purchase from telmex and we didn't have one. So we asked a guy in a parking garage if we could use his phone. He called Celia and there was no answer, but he told us that he would lead us to a hotel that costs about $25 USD per night. As he was backing his car out of the parking spot, Celia called him back and he took the phone to Rick. He talked to her and she said she would be there in 5 minutes. I was a bit hesitant to call her at 8:30 at night and tell her that we are in town and need a place to say, just because we have never talked to her before and didn't really give her much notice that we were coming, but it was not a problem.
She picked us up with her aunt and her friend Joe. Rick lost his parking ticket for the garage, so it cost him 90 Pasos instead of 20 to get out, but Joe paid for it, which was really nice of him. We went to dinner with them and even though we already ate we still ate again. We had this drink that is made of rice, milk, and cinnamon and it was delicious. We got to know Joe and Celia over dinner. Joe is an American from West Texas who is down here for work with an oil company. Celia used to work for the same company, but got laid off two weeks ago. I thought that they were dating, but she said that she is engaged and is getting married in six months. She also has a 12 year old daughter, I tried to talk to her a little, but she is pretty shy, probably because she doesn't speak English.
Celia lives with her mom, aunt, daughter, niece, and two nephews. There may be more people, but that is all that I have met so far. They are a very traditional Mexican family and they are very religious from what I can tell. They have several shrines all over their house for Jesus and Mary with candles burning. It is pretty cool. Tomorrow Celias niece, Julia is going to be our tour guide for the city. I love couchsurfing because people always want to take you to the best places in their town and show you everything. If you were to stay in hotels and eat at restaurants and pay a tour guide it would be very pricey, but this is completely free. Plus we get to learn a lot about their culture and make new friends. I am having a great time on this trip and learning so much about life.
November 15, 2009
Rick and I are in Catemaco and we are staying and a cabana in the mountains surrounded by the jungle. We met the owner/operator Felix while we were sitting in a small cafe in town surfing the Internet and making phone calls home using Skype. Felix speaks English, not great English, but it is better than our Spanish. He approached us and told us about his cabanas and said that he runs tours in the jungle to waterfalls and on the lake, which is absolutely beautiful. He said that he charges 400 Paso for a cabin for the night, the price was right and it sounded adventurous, so we decided to stay there for a night, which ended up being two nights.
The cabins are rustic, but nice. There is electricity and hot water in the shower house, so it's not bad. Last night we at dinner at the home of a Swedish man who moved here 13 years ago. He and his Peruvian wife run a restaurant out of their house and they cooked us an amazing pizza and a salad that they prepared from vegetables that they grew in their garden. We sat and talked with them for a couple of hours and practiced our Spanish, which is getting much better every day.
This morning Felix woke us up around 8am and said that he is running a tour starting at 9am and it would be 350 Pasos per person if we wanted to go. We decided to make our own tour and we found the waterfall that he was going to take us to. It was kind of difficult to find because it was out in the middle of no where. We missed the turn and ended up on a Mexican military base. The soldiers gave us directions and we had to drive down a dirt road that lead us to a huge swimming pool. We parked our bikes and paid 20 pasos for admittance to the pool and waterfall.
The guy at the pool took us back to the waterfall and jumped into the river and showed us where we could swim, then he returned to the pool and Rick and I swam around took video of the waterfall for awhile before returning to the pool. It was so beautiful, except for all of the garbage that was washed up all around on the shore. After swimming for about 45 minutes we returned to the pool and jumped off of the diving board a few times, which was just a cement platform about 15 feet high. They also had a high dive which was just a rickety medal post with a 3 foot platform about 30 feet in the air. There were a bunch of Mexican kids there that were jumping off of the smaller one, until they worked up the nerve to hit the big one. Well, some of them did, some tried, but got scared and climbed down before they made it to the top. They were all pretending like they were going to dive, but then they would just jump in. So I decided to show off a little bit and I dove off of it 3 times in a row. They were all clapping and taking pictures of me, it was really funny. I had a good time, but Rick and I were both getting tired, so we left and got some food before returning to the cabanas for the night. I was a really fun day.
November 13, 2009
We are in Veracruz, Mexico now staying with our new friend Juan Pablo and his mom. They are extent hosts and we have been having a great time here! They took us to breakfast this morning and took us for a tour around town. We went to the San Juan De Ulua, which is an old military fort in Veracruz. I also found out that Veracruz is the oldest port in the Americas. It is over 500 years old and it is were Cortez landed. The city is so beautiful! There are buildings here that are over 500 years old and are still in great shape. They also build all of the new buildings in the same architecture as the old ones, so all of the buildings in the city match. Sorry to everyone that we have not been updating the website everyday, but it is sometime hard to find the Internet, plus we have already ridden about 4,000 miles and we are taking time to take in all of the sites and culture. We have some good photos to upload, but it takes a lot of time to upload them to our website. We need to leave soon so that we can make it to our next destination before it gets dark. We will be redoing the website soon.
November 8, 2009: Viva la Mexico! We made it to Tampico, Mexico and against all odds from those who have been so worried about our safety in Mexico, we are alive and well! It is really nice down here, not the same kind of nice that most U.S. cities offer. It's not as clean, but it is an amazing place! The people here are very friendly, even though no one that we have met so far speaks any English, we have been getting by just fine with our spanglish.
It took us about 12 hours to get here from Brownsville, Texas. About 8 or 9 hours was spent riding and the rest was spent at the boarder and trying to find our hostel. We booked a room for two nights and when we got here we found Mango St pretty easily, but the hostel was no where to be found. So at 9 o'clock at night in a strange city where no one speaks English, we had to find our way.
We found an International University and assumed that someone there would speak English. The security guard told us that during the day there are all kinds of people that speak English, but not on a Saturday night. He was very friendly and I practiced my espanol with him while Rick went across the street to a medical facility to find someone that speaks English. Rick was successful at finding an English speaker and found out that there is another Tampico about 12 hours away on the Pacific Coast and there is a hostel there located on Mango St. It turns out that the hostel that we made reservations at was in the wrong Tampico, who knew! HAHA!
So at 10 o'clock at night we found a hotel and posted up for some well deserved sleep! It's been awhile since either of us have slept in an actual bed with sheets and blankets. We are sometimes lucky enough to score a matrass on the floor or a couch at someone's house, but more often than not, it's a sleeping bag on the ground which is good enough for me.
We are having a great adventure and loving life!
November 6, 2009: Rick and I are now only a couple of blocks from Mexico now. We are in Brownsville, TX staying with a dude named Shawn, and his nine-year-old son Keshawn. They are both really cool. We went on a bike ride last night around town and went to a party to support adoption. I was a cool little event and they had free food, so I was happy :)
Brownsville is a really nice city. It's funny because everyone has been saying, you better be careful in the boarder towns even on the U.S. side. I'm sure that some of the boarder towns are worse, but Brownsville is awesome and everyone is very friendly.
We have to do some maintenance to do on our bikes today before we cross the boarder. Rick is getting a new tire put on right now, and we are both about to change our oil. We are going to do the oil ourselves because the dealership wants like $63 per bike to change it and it is really easy to do.
Tomorrow we are going to get up early and hit the road. We will be staying in a Hostel in Tampico, Mexico for the next couple of days. We are really excited to get south of the boarder!
November 4, 2009: We are now in Corpus Cristi, TX. Last night Rick and I slept on the beach, it was beautiful! We saw the sun set behind the sand dunes and watched the moon come up in the East over the ocean. We drove down the Padre Island National Seashore, the only undeveloped stretch of coral barrier reef islands in the world according to the park ranger. We were the only people in sight on the beach, which stretches 60 miles down the coast of North Parde Island.
It is really beautiful here and we are having a great time, but we are mostly just doing last minute preparations before we head into Mexico. We just found out that there has been some flooding in Mexico and it might slow up our trip. We will get it all figured out though.
We spent Halloween weekend in Galveston, TX. We all had such a great time! The city of Galveston is pretty, but it doesn't look much different than most of the island towns that I have been to. Actually to be honest, because of Hurricane Ike, parts of the island are pretty badly damaged. Galveston is such an awesome city because of the people.
We stayed with Sepp, Ben, Travis, and Dirk, they are some cool dudes that we met on couchserfing.org. They were so nice and welcoming and all of their friends were the same way. Everyone that we met was very interested in our trip and so friendly. The guys had a huge Halloween party at their house and most of the island was there. Within a couple of hours we met hundreds of people and felt like we fit right in. It was kind of tricky to recognize people the next day because we met everyone in their costumes and they looked totally different.
Dirk took us for a motorcycle tour around the island and we got to see all of the cool spots in a matter of hours, I think it would have taken us days to see all of that on our own because we wouldn't have had any idea where we were going.
Since going to New Orleans and Galveston, I now have a new appreciation for hurricanes and the lives of the people they effect. I also learned a lot about off shore oil work. Most of the people in Galveston do some kind of work off shore and it was interesting to learn about their way of life.
We said goodbye to Paul Singer, our third riding buddy. He had to go back to Ohio for real life and it was hard to say goodbye. He is going to Grad School in New Zealand, so it's hard to say when we will see him again. Maybe my next adventure will be to New Zealand via Australia... but I think maybe I should focus on this trip before planning the next one, I don't know if I really have anything left to sell to fund that trip after selling most of the stuff I own to make this trip lol!
October 29, 2009
We left New Orleans two days ago, I wanted to stay longer and check out the city, but we have a time frame so we had to see everything that we could see in about 36 hours. We went to Bourbon Street and saw some of the city, but I'm sure that I will have an opportunity to get to New Orleans sometime again in my life. Central and South America on the other hand will probably be a once in a life time opportunity though, so I would rather push though the United States and spend most of our time in Central and South America.
We have already ridden over 1,900 miles and It seems like we have some type of adjustments and or repairs to make every night, but we have been making great time and we are in San Antonio now and we will be here for two days. I am excited to see the city tomorrow! We are planning to go to the Alamo and the River Walk, I'll let you know how it turns out. Sorry that we haven't put a lot of stuff up on the website yet, we have just been really busy with traveling and getting our gear straightened out and wifi is sometimes hard to find, so updating the website can be difficult sometimes, but please be patient with us and we will keep it updated every chance we get.
Last night we stayed at Sam Houston Jones State Park in Western Louisiana, it was a really pretty park, but we just camped for the night and we were back on the road early in the morning. Today was the hardest riding day just because of the weather. It was very windy and we hit rain several times and it was pretty hot. The weirdest thing happened when we were riding down the expressway, it was about 90 degrees and the wind had died down. We thought that we were in the clear after all of the rain and the wind, but all of the sudden we hit a wall of strong wind and the temperature dropped about 20 degrees. It is amazing how much I have noticed the different weather patterns that I don't notice when I am driving in a car. When you are on a bike though, you can't help but notice a 20 degree drop in temperature and strong winds.
On the bright side though, after 9 hours of ridding today, we made it to San Antonio and we are safe and having a great time. We have some video footage that we will have up soon, but we still need to edit it and post it, so please be patient, as we are leaning all of this as we go, it is a constant work in progress.
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