{"id":106,"date":"2022-10-08T14:11:00","date_gmt":"2022-10-08T18:11:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ebbsbay.ca\/?p=106"},"modified":"2022-10-09T11:24:40","modified_gmt":"2022-10-09T15:24:40","slug":"a-fifty-year-old-dream","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ebbsbay.ca\/index.php\/2022\/10\/08\/a-fifty-year-old-dream\/","title":{"rendered":"A Fifty Year Dream"},"content":{"rendered":"
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The Pan-American Highway<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n
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I don\u2019t remember exactly how it began. It was the mid-seventies. If you lived through that time, you\u2019ll know what I mean when I say things are a little foggy. Somehow the image of the Pan-American Highway appeared in our teenaged minds, glistening like Botticelli\u2019s Venus. Granted it was a road rather than a voluptuous woman – a 30,000 km ribbon of asphalt and gravel running along the spine of the Americas, from Dead Horse, on the north slope of Alaska, to Ushuaia at the southern tip of Argentina \u2013 but it was no less alluring.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n

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Dave may remember it differently. He wasn’t as heavily into mind bending excess as I was. I first met David Bowden in Scouts, over 50 years ago. Through the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, we have remained close friends ever since. For all those years, the dream of riding our motorcycles through the Andes danced in our imaginations. But life kept getting in the way: work, marriage and kids for Dave; drinking and divorce for me. I managed to get my life back on track, but the dream seemed no closer. Oh well, there was lots of time, right? We\u2019ll do it when we\u2019re 40\u2026 We\u2019ll do it when we\u2019re 50\u2026<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n

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2015 – Denali Hwy, Alaska<\/strong><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

Not that we weren\u2019t riding. Over the years we had ridden the Blue Ridge Parkway, the Alaska Highway, the Cabot Trail, the Labrador Highway, and thousands more kilometres crisscrossing North America. All the while, the dream of riding through the land of the Gauchos, dodging llamas and skirting narrow mountain roads shimmered on the horizon.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n

It dawned on us, a couple of years ago, that we were several orbits of the Sun past 60. With retirement approaching, there would never be a better time. We were both still in good health, but if we waited much longer\u2026 well, who knows? It was now or never. As it turned out, the simple decision to go was the most critical event. The rest was simply working out the details.<\/p>\n\n\n

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2015 – L to R – John, Liz, Anne, Dave<\/strong><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

One key detail was how to include Dave\u2019s wife Anne, and my wife Liz. In the interests of time, efficiency and marital harmony we decided to skip Central America and ship the bikes directly to Chile. There, Anne and Liz could rent a car and share the adventure with us. If Dave and I wanted to spend a day or two exploring some remote mountain back-road, the ladies could visit the local museums or relax by the hotel pool. We’d done this before with the ladies flying in to join us on part of the Alaska trip.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The purist might say it\u2019s a cop-out shipping the bikes to South America. In a sense that\u2019s right. On the other hand, I had already ridden most of the route between Alaska and Mexico, and Dave had covered most of that with me. It\u2019s also actually impossible to ride directly from North America to South American. The Darien Gap, in southern Panama, is the missing link in the 30,000 km network of roads between Anchorage and Ushuaia. The road was never completed here, among other reasons, to stop the flow of drugs from South America coming north. I wonder how that worked out?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So, anyone attempting this journey must ship their motorcycle, jeep, skateboard or whatever at some point. In the end, Dave and I are not trying to prove, overcome or pit ourselves against anything. Our aim is not to run a marathon. We simply want the adventure of exploring a continent, which although the closest to us, is so little understood. And we want to do it on two wheels. If you ride a motorcycle, you\u2019ll understand why. If you don\u2019t, I\u2019m not sure I could ever fully explain it.<\/p>\n\n\n

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Sept. 2022 – John’s bike being crated<\/strong><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

As I write this, our departure is only weeks away. The bikes have been crated, packed in a container and loaded on a ship bound for Chile. It may have taken almost 50 years, but dreams can come true. The key is to never give up on them.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Somehow the image of the Pan-American Highway appeared in our beer-soaked, drug-infused minds, glistening like Botticelli\u2019s Venus. Granted it was a road rather than a voluptuous woman – a 30,000 km ribbon of asphalt running along the spine of the Americas, from Anchorage, Alaska to Ushuaia at the southern tip of Argentina \u2013 but it was no less alluring.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":138,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"post_folder":[27],"class_list":["post-106","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-south-america"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/ebbsbay.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/10\/GeorgeJohnDave-Mattice-1976.jpg","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ebbsbay.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/106","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ebbsbay.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ebbsbay.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ebbsbay.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ebbsbay.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=106"}],"version-history":[{"count":27,"href":"https:\/\/ebbsbay.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/106\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":508,"href":"https:\/\/ebbsbay.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/106\/revisions\/508"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ebbsbay.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/138"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ebbsbay.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=106"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ebbsbay.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=106"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ebbsbay.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=106"},{"taxonomy":"post_folder","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ebbsbay.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/post_folder?post=106"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}