Getting the respective families on board….well, what can we say…..we asked and they responded in very supportive terms. Someone has since asked me how I got “permission” for this trip, I answered with a simple “I asked!”. It was just a matter of discussing the reasoning for the trip and building a picture of what we wanted to achieve and why we wanted to do it.
The dream of an adventure like this needs the support of those around you and Elke and Susan have been open to listening and supporting our dream. We have been open throughout to having our families involved in this adventure in whatever way we can make it work. It’s by no means a “boys trip”, but the girls aren’t that keen to get their own bikes and put the kids on the back!!
There were some discussions around the safety of us taking on Queenstown to Capetown without any previous experience in adventure motorcycling. A one week jaunt around the South Island apparently wasn’t enough to eliminate these concerns so some compromise discussions went down.
The compromise…..an 8 week trip around Europe in 2017……..Queenstown to Capetown 20..!
To be clear, the big adventure is still on; we’re just going to have an extra adventure in the interim to build our skills and experience.
Given Steve and family will be in Germany for the majority of 2017 there is some sense to this plan anyway. So, we’re now looking at starting in Germany/Austria in late August 2017. Steve has permission from his “work” and I’m still in discussions with my work to get the leave required.
Austria you might ask, well my brother Sam lives just outside of Graz. And by chance he had a KTM 950 Adventure he was upgrading from (to another KTM 950 Adventure). Discussions led to more discussions and some exchange of money so I now own a bike that’s sitting in Austria. Oh yeah!!
Sam is also hoping to get some time to joining us for a couple of weeks of the trip at least too.
The wheels are turning quite nicely now, so we just continue to chat and plan and get excited. It’s well under a year until we get on the road and we already have one bike ready to go!
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Thanks for your comment, it’s great you’re finding our site interesting and useful. Please continue to follow our adventures. The GAS team