10 October 2016 

(written by Dave)

Time is not on our side.  As we age, things that we used to think were great become a bit less enjoyable – like sleeping in a tent.  And things we used think of as cute and fuzzy somehow become downright scary – like bears.  The measurement of these two matters are both elements of the little-known Logarithmic Time Perception With Aging scale (LTPWA scale).

What? You’ve never heard of the LTPWA scale?  That makes some sense, as I just made it up.  And it’s hard to make things up and get noticed when presidential candidates are making things up at a rate of knots.  Maybe I should get a twitter account after all.  Anyway, back to us, hear me out on the camping and bears theories…

LOSIT Curve – Measures the Love Of Sleeping In a Tent

When you are young, sleeping in a tent is a grand adventure.  For weeks in advance of a camping trip, you can barely contain your excitement.  Often during this time you’d find yourself practice camping in your tent in the backyard, just to be sure that you really know how it works – and your parents humour you.  As you get older and travel a bit, hostels kind of take on the same aura and the tent gets put in a closet.  Eventually, especially if you’ve travelled on business as much as we have, you start thinking that 5 star hotels are really the only way to go and that wherever you stay, you really do need a pillow menu (who invented the pillow menu anyway?).

At some point in life, the LOSIT curve passes over your age in an irreversible way – you sell your tent(s).  We are not at that point yet, but we can see it coming.

FOB Curve – Measures the Fear Of Bears/Bandits

When you are young, bears are stuffed, soft and given to you by your grandparents.  And bandits are cute cartoon characters that sell corn chips on TV commercials.  Over time you graduate from cartoons to the Sunday night TV.  You see your first episode of Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom and watch “Jim” dive into the truck while something really mean with real teeth makes a play for his legs – who would have thought?  Around the same time 60 Minutes airs the first ever “live from Columbia” special – wow the FARC talk fast and have real guns.  Later, David Attenborough comes on the scene – who knew that grizzly bears could run so fast?  And by now CNN is now streaming live feeds from Tijuana – are those really gunshots you keep hearing in the background?

Eventually in life, the FOB curve passes over your age curve and many otherwise wonderful travel destinations simply become “no-go” zones.  We’re not there yet but I’m currently screening Nancy’s choice of videos that she downloads from iTunes. For now, we watch a lot UK detective shows – certainly no episodes of Narcos…..

The FOB and LOSIT curves are plotted on the graph below.  You can see, we are getting dangerously close to several crossover points, which would rule out a lot of really cool countries to visit.

The point of all of this technical, scientific analysis is to explain how we have come to the decision that now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their country… oops, wrong speech, that always happens when I start typing.  What I meant to say, now is the time to head off on another adventure!

So, the plan is to start riding in May 2017, somewhere in Alaska (just as the bears wake up from their hibernation!) and to keep peddling until we run out of road in southern Argentina.  We figure that this trip will cover something like 25,000Ks and take us a couple years.  Naturally, we’ll keep a close eye on the respected FOB and LOSIT scales as we progress.

We plan to make a few blog posts about getting ready between now and May.  And as we’ve done in the past, we’ll see if we can manage daily blogs once the trip commences – depending on how much time we spend on guard duty with the bear spray…

Okay, it’s out there now – no turning back!