Work party video

The beginning

All great adventures start the same way. Someone makes a dumb suggestion; say “lets and climb Kilimanjaro” or something to that affect. They one of us says "sure why can’t we climb Kilimanjaro". Next thing you know you are looking at trekking holidays on line and you have just booked your airline tickets.

Well it happened in the late summer of 2006 when we met our good friends Dale and Rossi for dinner one night. I had just bought another old Honda Goldwing and Dale, during dinner, asked a few suspicious questions. They were like: “ so if you were going to ride to Central America when would you go, what type/size/style of bike would you take, what route, etc”. Very suspicious questions. For Dale at least.

What it turned out to be was a friend of his was building a new house in Panama and Dale had, unbenounced to me, had a life long desire to ride a motorcycle on a great adventure. In the 20+ year I have know Dale I did not ever know he had any inclination to ride a motorcycle, let alone one 10,000 kms through Central America.

So what started out as idle dinner conversation between friends ended up into a year long session of planning, purchases, multiple trips between Dale’s house in Penticton and our house in Nanaimo. Something to remember is back in August 2006 when we had dinner and hatched this plan Dale did not even have a motorcycle license or had ridden a motorcycle for 20 years !!

We talked on the phone and emailed back and forth numerous times. We took our spouses and went to the big Vancouver Motorcycle Show to look at bike and buy new riding gear. Dale signed up and took the motorcycle training course to get his license. Things are looking up !!

We decided one of the best inexpensive and durable bikes for this type of adventure would be an old early 1980’s Honda Silverwing. Ugly, overweight, with about as much power as a Singer sewing machine the Silerwing was best known for it’s durability, ease of maintenance and ease of riding. Besides you can buy them cheap.


Cheap is good in our books when we were looking for motorcycles to take to Central America. See there is no insurance down there and the laws are base on Napoleonic statues where you are guilty until proven innocent. This means that if we get into an accident of any great magnitude we can just leave. If the bike breaks down and cannot be repaired in a reasonably short period of time then we can just abandon them wherever they might be. Also they are not a target to thieves as who the hell would be caught dead steeling a Silverwing.

NOTE: This is not one of our bikes. Our bikes are nowhere as nice :)

We picked the fist of the bikes for Dale in mid January and I rode it home in a snow storm from Sidney. We it back to my place so that I could have a chance to go over it mechanically to make sure it was ok. Think we paid $1400 for this one.

Dale’s bike was name Flurry as is seamed every time I rode it, it would snow. Even when Karen I took it over to Penticton in April for Dale so he could start riding it snowed on the Crownest Highway on the way to his place !

Since then I picked up nice bike and recently so did Brad. We had a great Saturday here last weekend working on Brad’s bike and then having a great salmon dinner prepared by my wife. The rest of the night was spent poring over maps and travel books trying to make travel and route plans

We now have four of us going. Myself, Dale, his step son Brad Marchant and Dales bro-in-law Steve Debouski. Steve is the only in the group not riding a 25 year old Honda. The bum went out and bought an new Kawasaki KLR 650 for the trip (one of my favorite mid size adventure touring bikes)

The bid challenge right now is how to ship the bikes from here to Phoenix. Dale’s dad live in Phoenix during the winter and it makes sense for us to make that our starting off point. The challenge we are having is the cost and the logistics. Apparently it is not that easy to ship a bike across the USA border when it is privately owned. So we are looking at options of driving them across the border and then shipping them from Bellingham or Seattle. Or maybe Dale driving them down to his dad’s place in a rental van, etc.

Stay tuned we will let you know