How it All Started in 2008

On one very hot summer afternoon sitting in my favorite spot on the stoep at Dennehof (our guest house in Prince Albert, Great Karoo). Looking at the BMW web page at bikes for sale, I noticed an ad from  a young winemaker in Paarl look for a riding partner to go up the West Coast of Africa ending in Europe. Well I said to Ria (the wife alias The Boss) wow would love to do something like that, she  said well why don't you, wrong answer, sent e-mail to Jannie (wine maker) meet and started ball rolling.

Planning took 3 months, getting 10 visas for the countries which we had to travel through, in total 19 counties were visited of which we needed 10 visas for. Bikes were fitted out with panniers, GPS, tank bags and a major service carried out by BMW agent in Cape Town.

The day of departure started off very badly, bike would not start, had to be pushed down the road to get going, not a very good start to my Africa Adventure.

Took 48 days of rough riding taking in Namibia, Angola, DRC, Cabinda Congo, Gabon, Cameroon, Nigeria, Benin, Togo, Ghana, Burkina, Mali, Senegal, Mauritania, Western Sahara, Morocco and arriving in Tangiers top of Africa where we boarded a ferry across to Spain and then continued up through Portugal into France to Le Havre crossing the English channel to Portsmouth and ending my trip at our kids house in Tilbury, England.

Well  it did not end there, got roped into doing a ride for charity called The Longest Day Ride from John O’Groats to Lands End in one day all 1600km's

Well that's how my love of long distance biking started, when back home sitting on my favorite spot on the stoep, started thinking of the next big bdventure to do. The American Trip started. Put an ad up on the BMW web, got first inquiry more than a year ago Tony Heath from Cape Town also a guest house owner with spare time to travel, got an ad place in the Bike SA mag by a friend & owner of the mag Simon, were we got Stan & Marco to join us on the trip to South & North America.