There is a sudden change in our plans! We temporarily interrupted our bike trip due to Helen’s mother health problems.
May 4th everything changed. Within two days we re-planed the trip, bought plane tickets, and boxed our bikes and our entire luggage. The next three days have been a tiring sequence of bus, plane, train, car and waiting, over 4 countries and 3 languages! We finally arrived in Helen’s family in Franche-Comté (eastern France, near Switzerland) the evening of May 9th, exhausted.
These five days have been totally crazy and full of mishaps: the fluctuating plane tickets prices, the hand-made packaging of our luggage, the corruption at the Guatemala border, Francis being sick in the bus, the unusual night spent at Guatemala Ciudad airport, the run in Newark airport to catch the plane to Paris following the delay caused by a storm, the missing luggage when we got to Paris... you will soon get all the details in the Journal section of our web site...
This sudden change of plans has been nonetheless an interesting exercise. We finally decided to stay in France until about November. This will give us time to be with Helen’s mother during her convalescence and to let the rain season pass its way over Central America. When we left Mexico the rain was already starting to pick up seriously, since we were late according to our original plan. To compensate this, we thought about getting to South America faster to avoid biking on muddy roads for too long. This would have left us only 2 months to cross the 6 little countries of the region... which means very little detours and visits!
To start back in late fall will allow us to spend 4 months in the region instead of 2! It is thus likely that we will add the Yucatan peninsula (to the south-east of Mexico) to our itinerary, which would be our second starting point. From there we would cross Belize before rejoining the original route into Guatemala...
Of course, until November we are here to support Helen’s mother first. But we will also make the most of this time to prepare a strong second start! We will work a bit (hoping to leave this time with a balanced budget!), fix and improve our equipment, develop our new ideas for the web site, look for new sponsors, promote the project, continue to learn Spanish... in short, we have plenty of ideas and things to do!
And obviously we don’t intend to leave our bikes aside... we are already planning a tour of Helen’s family and friends in the region, in order not to get out of shape too much. It seems an impossible mission to us not to gain some weight with all this good cheese, bread and dried sausage around! We even plan to get to Francis’ sister living near Saint-Etienne, about 400 km from here, to spend time with little Juliette, his goddaughter.
Whatever happens, we keep rolling for green! What about you?
Helen & Francis