Bastille Day or our first month in the trip

Yesterday was France's national holiday, “la fete du 14 juillet” as we call it. In the previous years, when we lived in Washington DC, we were fortunate enough to celebrate the occasion at the Embassy, sipping Champagne, eating French cheese, charcuterie and patisserie. No such thing this year in the wild in Canada but this day was special to us in another way: we left DC for our trip exactly one month ago.

Time for us to reflect
If we could summarize the trip in a few numbers, here is where we are today:
- 31 days into the trip
- 4,000 miles ridden on our bikes
- 12 states crossed (not counting DC)
- 2 countries visited
But numbers is hardly what matters here. I think this quote form Andre Gide, sent to us by a friend, summarizes very well where we are today: “Man can not discover new oceans unless he has the courage to lose sight of the sure.”. The first couple of weeks, we somehow felt we were on vacation and I don't think we had fully realized what we were doing. Now we have let go of the sure and just ride day after day to discover all the wonders this continent has to offer.

Traveling as a couple
One of the big questions we had was also how this trip would affect our relationship since we were going to be 24/7 together for quite a while. We had our best and less best moments but overall, I has been a great learning experience so far. Caroline has worked on her patience and Chad on getting ready a little faster. It looks like we travel at a different pace, especially in the morning when it is about getting ready. So we both adjusted and are still working on it daily.
The other great thing about this trip is that we have met more people on the way than we initially thought. We were lucky to stay and meet with quite a few friends on the road and our story (or should I say our Washington DC license plates) have made it easy to meet and converse with strangers. We ended up spending less time just the two of us, which has also been a lot of fun so far.

And the motorcycles?
We have been enjoying our bikes a lot as they revealed to be perfectly suited for our trip. The only change we had to do was to buy a taller windshield for Chad since he was getting a lot of wind on the highway and handlebar raisers to correct the posture on the bike since the Corbin seat is higher than the stock seat. In terms of unexpected issues, we changed both our rear tires before leaving the USA as they both had a plug in it and that Caroline's ended up being almost flat after we left Yellowstone. Better safe than sorry since Alaska has pretty rough roads: we put new tires on both bikes. In addition, Chad took care of the 7,500 miles tune up for his bike and the 11,500 one for Caroline's: sparkplugs were changed, oil and oil filter as well and the radiator fluid on Caroline's. All nuts and bolts were checked and tighten. This was about a full day of work: bikes are now running great and we feel ready for the long roads in North Canada and Alaska.

We hope the rest of the trip will be as fun as our first month. Thank you to all of you who are reading our adventures: your emails and comments on the blog have been a tremendous support and it helps us going on with this adventure. We have not quite figured out how to respond to each individual comment on the blog as it does not seem to work that way but we sure have been reading each of them:) Thanks again and keep on writing them, we love it!