In the previous blog I forgot to add some of the pictures from our flight. Flight map, Wombat and the Diddles in Dubai Airport, here they are.

We arrived in New York and went through immigration without any problems; even though we only had a one way ticket.

Stephen – Val’s Cousin – picked us up from the airport and brought us to his house, where we celebrated our arrival with some cold beer.

Spring just started here and the weather was perfect. After 42 hours of traveling, 31 hours of flights, 3 breakfasts, 3 dinners and multiple other small feasts, our body clock was out of whack, and everything felt a bit like a dream. Slowly reality settled in “We are in New York“, after 3 years of planning our journey has started.

Leaving on a jet plane

On Sunday morning we rode back to Adelaide, and got lucky again with the weather. I got used to Simons bike and I started to enjoy riding a cruiser (don’t tell Simon!) [edit: too late, he’s editing your blog]
We took our travel laptop with us to the AGM and we noticed that there were still some files and tools missing. So as soon we arrived at home, I started to move the desktop and monitors out of the shed back into Ft. Knox. For some reason Sigrid wasn’t happy ……

And our new SD Video camera was there, I ordered it on the weekend before we left to the AGM, and was hoping that it would arrive before Monday morning. Luckily it arrived on Friday, and we could take it along!

In the evening we met with the family and went out for dinner. Sigrid enjoyed holding Silas for a while; I gave her most of my holding time share J


Back from dinner, we started to pack the last bag with riding gear and my suit. Gabi, our friend from Berlin, will meet us in New York and we’ll spend Easter together. She organized a possible visit at the New York stock exchange, so we had to bring some semi-formal outfit. Apparently motorbike boots and bike jackets don’t cut it. We were thinking of renting the formal clothes for a day in New York, since we wouldn’t have the space in the our motorbike luggage for the formal wear. Gabi came up with a better solution, she would take the formal wear back to Berlin and we pick it up in June next year and take it home from there. So we repacked everything until 3AM. When we moved the last parts into the sched we discovered 2 soft toys that we brought from Berlin, a male and female Diddle. We thought they should us accompany during our travel. Brian and Val had a similar idea; Val organized a wombat to travel with them




Next morning as we were getting ready to go to the airport, I got a surprise when I tried to finalize some account setup with our banks. I know, that /probably/ should have been done earlier – but …….. We needed to call the banks to solve the problem, which gave us just enough time get to the airport, check the luggage in and then jump onto the plane. Our whole family brought us to the airport – I guess they just wanted to make sure that we were really leaving J.

The flight went without problems, Adelaide – Melbourne – Singapore – Dubai- New York. We couldn’t use the spot to update our blog, since the layover was too short to leave the airport and get outside – which would have been needed for acquiring the GPS position. Placing the spot on a window wasn’t enough, so our map will only show Adelaide and then New York. Short note about Emirates Airline: the seating, entertainment and food was excellent, so we hardly noticed the 28 hours sitting in airplanes.

 

We organized with Simon that we can use his bike for the ride to the AGM before we put our bikes into consignment. On Tuesday we had the last few frantic preparation before we left to the Ulysses club AGM in Mildura. We have to clean out the last bits from our study (somebody must put more stuff in all the drawers, I can’t have accumulated so much rubbish!!) and bed room. As usual, it took longer than anticipated.
We left late, so we arrived at night.

The house Wombat and Val organized is great, enough space for all of us and most important free wireless internet access, so we could test our blog (it worked if you can read this 😀 ). Below are some pictures of our hard life in Mildura.


Oh, and Sigrid used the free time to make her hair easier to maintain, she got her hair cut short.


Ok this is drawing out like a chewing gum, we have soo much stuff to still remove out of the house. But this afternoon we will be gone to Mildura!

Here’s a few snaps of Silas to shorten the wait. With his grand-parents, and great-grandparents

 

 

We bought 2 tanks, one white on black. First the white one was not available, but with the manufacturers help – Safari– one was shipped from Australia. Then the US shop sold our black tank to someone else….another Tank was shipped from Safari, this time they paid for the shipping cost.

Now the next thing…the black tank is on its way back to Australia because no one was home to take delivery of it!
They were all at a funeral for a week, and the international transport only holds it for 5 business days after a failed delivery attempt -Darn!

Harder than it should be! :/

So we thought everything was done with our Safary tanks…
We finally got the white one sorted – then the black one was already sold…

Wait, What!? We’d already paid for it!!
Communication went back and forth a few times, but no black tank in america. One will by manufactured in australia by the end of the week and then sent to America.

And no! we are not paying shipping cost again… Time to wait and see how this pans out…

We have bought the bikes!

Bjoern has organised new springs for them as well.
The tanks are on their way.. well, mine  – the black one- is.  Some minor issue with the white one for Bjoern 😉

Simon has moved in.

We have almost all of our injections.
.. just currently you cant find anything in our house… ok it’s not THAT different from normal 😉

And my contract will finish automatically on the 23 March,no need to resign 😀

To get Simon ready to look after our house he needs to be able to rent out his. To achieve a good rental price and attract the right kind of tennant we did some renovations with him. It was a massive weekend starting on Thursday – Australia day – and going on until Sunday night.

But the result was quite good! Still some more work required, but this time it will be outside.

It appears to be quite difficult to register a bike in the US.

New York and New Jersey want at least 6 points of ID. That’s where we failed due to our documents obviously being Australian and not from the US .  Of course that’s not mentioned on any of the DVM Websites…  Grrrr…