1000 days ago today…

…I left Johannesburg in South Africa, to ride my bike around the world…

After 997 days of traveling, visiting 102 countries on 6 continents; reaching the most northern and southern tip of 5 of those continents; and covering over 200 000 km by bike, boat and air, I have arrived back in my old haunts…

I have spent the last three days trying to acclimatize to not only the hot and sticky weather conditions, but also to being back in an industry that I once thought I might have left forever…

There is much of my journey that I have not been able to share with all those who faithfully logged on to my website on a daily basis, to check up on my whereabouts, and to see what mischief I had gotten up to, or what bits of misfortune had befallen me…

I will spend the next few months completing my journals and am still trying to wrap my head around the fact that I am no longer on a bike, but still driving a BMW, this time, one with four wheels…

I am back to undertake a project that will keep me from sitting on my hands for a good few months, and it is a good thing that I will be a very busy boy for a while, as it will keep my mind off the fact that I have left my wife on an island over 12 000 km away… Not a great situation for either of us !!

And of course, there is my other “significant other”, the Big Fella, who is in Port Carbon, Pennsylvania… He is learning to speak Italian and Japanese to Doug McIllwain’s Moto Guzzi’s and Kawasaki’s… Not something he had in mind when we last discussed our return to South Africa !!

In a few hopefully brief months, I will return to collect the bike and try to take in as much of the eastern seaboard of the USA as I can, before making a final decision on whether or not to fly the Big Fella back to South Africa and officially bring HIS journey to an end. I have always wanted to do this, but things did not turn out quite as I planned over the last year and a half, and I now have more than just myself and the Big Fella to think about…

So when people ask if my journey is finally over, all I am able to say to them is, “Time will tell… Even though I covered much of it over the last three years, there is still a whole lot of world out there that I still want to see, and parts of it I want to see again !! But this time, I will have more than just the Big Fella for company… There will be a special passenger on board, hopefully with her arms wrapped around me…

Still the GB

Johannesburg, South Africa.