What this is all about

My name is Jeff Miller, and I'm a health care lawyer practicing in Nashville, TN.  My good friend and law partner is Curtis Capeling.  We're both avid motocyclists; indeed, unless it is monsoon raining, or there is ice or snow on the road I ride a Suzuki GSX-R600 to work everyday (fortunately I only need to go 3 miles each way, and I'm not going to get hypothermia or suffer frostbite in 3 miles, no matter how cold it is).  Curtis, on the other hand rides a much more exotic bike, a KTM SuperDuke, but not to work because his OCD regarding his bike and gear would not allow time for work.

That's me, obviously NOT on the way to work.

Curtis in his Stormtrooper gear.

So how did all of this take a motorcycle to Mexico talk start?

About a year ago this time I came across Ewan McGregor's adventure The Long Way Around.  Those guys chronicled their adventure of taking a pair of motorcycles from London to New York City going East.  Read the book and watch the episodes, they really had the time of their life.  Now they had pretty much unlimited funds, a pair of trailing support vehicles, medical staff, security, and went on $20,000 BMW GS1200 adventure bikes, kitted out with communications, GPS, and recording gear, plus a whole film crew.  We wouldn't have any of that (well, maybe the GPS, and if you count hand signals, we have communications too).

So that got us talking about doing something similar.  Curtis is a Cannuk, and his family retired in Placencia, Belize, so we thought, "Why not ride a pair or bikes down there at Christmas, meet our wives and children there, sell the bikes and fly back?"  Well, a number of reasons why that was a bad idea:

• Import duties are prohibitively expensive.  We discovered that bringing a vehicle into another country is not quick and easy, as you have to basically temporarily import the vehicle for a modest duty, but if you don't export the thing within 6-months you have to pay a duty equivalent to 150% of the value of the bike; and
• Flying 2-wives and 4-children to Belize and back, at Christmas is also prohibitively expensive.

So we had to opt for a trip into and out of Mexico that could coincide with the lull in our profession that sometimes (if you plan correctly) can occur at the end of the year.  In later posts we will detail our choice of bikes, how we went about getting them and kitting them out, and our planned route.  We hope you enjoy sharing in our adventure.