SO!

Big news.  First, this is the first blog post of the NobleQuest trip.  I promise i'll update it as exciting things happen, or once a week, whichever comes first.

This weekend, my brother Rob, his friend Rob Evans and i spent all saturday and sunday getting our bikes ready to ship to Argentina.

Here's the story.  We started this whole journey thing last February, while discussing what kind of epic adventure we could do for my brother's graduation from Engineering at the U of A in Edmonton.

You see, my brothers, father and I have done 'extreme' kinds of trips, almost always a hike of some sort, every summer.  For the past ten years or so.  For example, we've done the Grand Canyon, the West Coast Trail, and the Chilkoot Trail (among others).  Last February, we were planning on hiking  Mt Kilimanjaro, in Africa, for my brother's graduation ceremony.  My father is retiring this year, and this will likely be one of the last times we're all able to go on an extended journey of some sort.

My father had gotten us all into motorcycles in the summer of 2001, when he purchased his first motorcycle as part of a fledgling motorcycle club with some of his co-workers.  I managed to snag that first bike (a 1977 kawasaki KZ-400 that fired on only one cylinder), and we've all become enthusiasts.  Rob bought his DR650 in 2004.  Justin really dived into the motorcycles, and decided that he loved them so much he was going to make them his lifes' profession - in 2005, he took a year off his engineering program to enroll in the Motorcycle Mechanics' Institute in Phoenix, AZ.

Roll forward several years to our discussion of our celebratory graduation trip.  Rob does some digging on the interweb, and decides that it would be incredible awesome of us to do a 'round-the-world motorcycle journey.  My father does some further digging, and realizes that it would take absolutely every penny he had to finance this journey.  He told us that, while possible, if we did this round-the-world journey, all of his sons would have to pay him $3000, each, every month, for the rest of his life.  

Justin suggested a hunting trip the following year.

Barring that, Rob did some further digging, and came up with an epic trip that would take us from Alaska to Argentina, and that perhaps we could clock ourselves against a Guinness World Record.

How exciting!  After some preliminary research, and some input from Justin's friend, Amandha Richter, we decided to go after this record.  Amandha's a childhood cancer survivor, and has been heavily involved with the Kids' Cancer Care Foundation of Alberta ever since her sickness.  She organizes a kids benefit golf tournament, as well as a 'Shave Your Lid for a Kid' benefit.  Based on some suggestions and encouragement from Amandha, we decided that this could be a really great fundraising opportunity for the foundation that had been so much help to Amandha and so many others.

Our trip is 27,000 kilometres long.  Time four riders, gives 108,000 kilometres.  Our fund-raising goal is $1 for every kilometre we ride.  

Anyways, I digress.  This stuff's all on our website.  When we first started planning this trip, we were in discussions with a company called Panalpina that was going to ship our bikes from Alberta to Argentina.  For a whole year.  We were counting on them, and had planned on the ship dates they had provided so that we'd have some time to break the bikes in and get everything set up properly before they shipped.  

Late January 2007, with four months to go before we leave, they kindly inform us that they're no longer doing business with individuals, solely with corporations.  Rob and Sean scramble for the next month, and found us a shipper that came through, but without the time cushion we'd been expecting from Panalpina.

We got the last of the bikes three weeks ago, with components like crash guards and luggage systems arriving last week, and a cut-off ship date of this Tuesday.  Rob, Rob and I worked most of this last weekend getting all our stuff put together.  Unfortunately, I had to be back at work Monday morning, so Sean and Rob finished the bikes up and stuck them back in the crates, and loaded them on the truck.  At 5am Monday morning.

Monday afternoon I take off from work early to help dad and Rob unload the motorcycles at Nippon Express Canada, and say goodbye to them.

We hadn't yet received everything we'd ordered for our bikes, and were anxiously awaiting the packages' arrival.  Fortunately, they showed up on Tuesday, and dad was able to enlist a co-worker to drive them down to Nippon Express and sneak them into our sea crate.