I still believe in the good things coming….

“I believe in the good things coming” is a line taken from a song from Nahko and Medicine for the People and has been our motto for this trip and the good things are still coming in spite of our recent misfortunes. On Friday, we got good news and were able to recover all three motorcycles. Two of them are in good condition with only minor parts removed but the third, has major damage. This is an incredible stroke of luck and due to the hard work of many people. We want to thank all the local people who have helped us, stopped to talk to us on the street with suggestions and encouragement, the police who recovered the bikes, all the motorcycle riders and groups in Mexico who helped by spreading the word and providing encouragement when we were getting discouraged, all our Facebook friends (old and new) who kept posting and sharing.  So many people played a part in this and made such a huge impact by letting the thieves know they would not be able to use our bikes without being noticed. We also want to thank the US Consulate for making calls on our behalf, to Mike in San Miguel for using his contacts to help us, Luis who helped interpret and get things moving faster at the Ministerio Publico and Juan Pablo and his friend who helped get Kathy’s bike out of impound, since it was not rideable, fed us at his restaurant and wouldn’t take any money for it.  Without ALL of your help we would not have gotten any of our bikes back or been able to stay as positive through the process.

So now its time for us to take a deep breath and regroup.  We have two bikes in good shape and one that is basically destroyed but fixable.  At this point we are thinking of taking the bikes back to Guadalajara where there are Kawasaki dealers and a better likelihood of finding used parts as well.  We did end up getting a lot of our riding gear back and some of the camping gear, but we are still missing a lot of important items and since we only packed what we needed we will have to gear up again as well.

As you can see from the pictures below, Kathy’s bike is in need of major work and the money friends and family have donated will be a huge help in having it rebuilt as well as replacing the necessary camping items and riding gear.  These are some hard lessons learned that we will not repeat. My business coach would ask my to “re-engineer the whole situation” and find out what we could have done differently to prevent the situation and boy have I re-engineered this situation many times. These have been many hard lessons learned for me and the rest of us.

From the bottom of our hearts, thank you.  Our spirits have not been broken and our love and respect for this country and the wonderful people that we’ve met along our journey has not diminished but only grown. Kindness and good people win again.

Much love to all

P.S. Jackie Dawg is a happy, happy camper since her sleeping bag bed was one of the recovered items.

Got most of the plastic parts back but many have been cut through or were just broke off the bike so are they are now unusable.

Front view of the bike, you can see the broken plastic pieces there that are still attached.

All controls on the bars were destroyed, and they removed the grip on the left, no idea why other than to do as much damage as possible.

Other view

Full view of bike, only plastic piece they didn’t remove was the front fender, probably just didn’t have time yet.