Riding a bike through two continents takes quite a bit of preparation, as you can imagine. Add to that an international move and an international wedding, and the to-do list gets long fast. We started planning the trip in the late spring of 2008 and we didn’t finish until 4:40am on April 21, 2009; the same morning that we started riding.
We won’t go into a lot of detail about planning the trip. Suffice to say that it requires a lot of research and a lot of lists. We researched the countries that we would pass through (political stability, topography, climate, etc.) to select a route; the gear that we would need; legal requirements for entering countries and getting married in the Philippines, and many other tedious things.
Up until January, 2009, Sheri was living in Washington, DC and Mario was living in Aachen, Germany. We thought it would be a good idea to live in the same place for at least a little while before taking this journey, so Sheri moved to Aachen at the end of January. She packed up the essentials and sent them on a 3-month voyage across the Atlantic; and with a few overstuffed suitcases she took the familiar flight to Brussels… this time with no return ticket.
Once settled together in Aachen, we immediately launched into a flurry of work for the next couple of months: Sheri continued working remotely for WWF, while studying German four days a week; and Mario continued working full-time for Generali Informatik Services, finishing the last class for his University degree and writing his Thesis. In all of our spare time, we continued planning the trip and the wedding, dealing with all of the bureaucracy required to put “normal life” on hold for a year, and – the fun part – buying the rest of our gear.
We moved out of our apartment on April 15 but, unfortunately, we still had not finished the 4-page long to-do list that we had taped next to our kitchen table. Luckily, our friend Raymond just happened to have a spare apartment, so we squatted there for another several days. On April 20th, completely sick of the to-do list, we decided to leave the next day, whether we had checked every box or not. At 9:00am on April 21st, we rode into the Aachen central square and popped a bottle of champagne with family and friends. At 9:30, we pedaled away, with our lives – 30kg of gear each, packed into 5 Ortlieb panniers – loaded onto our bikes.