Latest News: The Infinite Road

for our families and friends, this website will serve as a means of communication as we circumnavigate the world.         
for others, this will possibly serve as a travel guide, or maybe an anti-travel guide, what or what not to do in foriegn countries.
for us, it will become a journal of our lives now, throughout, and after our journey.

THE CHILE - BOLIVIA BORDER CONTINUED... there are exceptions to every rule, some of which are achieved by stuffing a fifty dollar bill into your passport. in any other south american country, this would work. chile, on the other hand, has a firm belief in procedure, and bribery is not in their books. this was unfortunate, because we still had the issue of not having the paperwork to import the dog into their country. when begging, bribing, and whining didn't work, the thought of sneaking back into chile when the sun went down crossed our minds, but that was if all else failed. the guard ...   more COPACABANA - LAGO TITICACA eight kilometers into bolivia, we lucked into beautiful copacabana. it was a small city, but it was filled with stuff. we hadn't had access to stuff in days, things like food, gas, housing. my aunties will be happy to know that i bought them some little rugs, they've been requesting items from the photos we post on the website, but by the time we post the photos, we're miles away from where they were taken. the town square and the market had a lot of what peru was lacking, and we truly hoped the rest of bolivia would be the same. a fine lunch at a restaurant that ...   more THE COAST OF PERU the past few days have been a blur... we traded the andes mountains for the coastal desert and the panam-uno. sixty miles west is the difference between lush forested mountains, and arid desert plains. the panam flows like a dream, a glass smooth highway that rolls along the coast through mammoth dunes, the only thing disrupting the serenity are the towns that are about every fifty to one hundred miles apart. most smell like rancid fish and diesel, and are congested to the point of only being able to drive through at ten miles per hour, which is unfortunate for anyone who ...   more april 12, 2007 KUELEP, PERU today we found out why we needed the winch. we were driving through the andes, on a very secondary backroad. there was a turn off that lead to some ruins, so we decided to add some distraction to our distraction. after an hour of ascending up the mountainside on the usual steep and narrow donkey roads, we decided it was too much effort to see some of peru's less notable ruins. we turned around, and on the way down, we stopped to use the bano, which is basically the nearest tree. the tree that dremel favored was a little off to the side of the road, and i don't ...   more QUITO - RIOBAMBA, ECUADOR we were starting to feel a little anxious the last couple of days in quito. it was a good thing that another guest arrived at the casa de rocco, rosie the maid was probably tired of us chasing her around the house. the new guest was an australian by the name of ilya. he had just bought a motorcycle from a friend of ricardo, and was getting set to do a little traveling of his own. only problem was, the rear shock on his newly acquired motorcycle was damaged beyond all repair. ecuador is kind of funny in the sense that if you are looking to buy tires, there's a tire ...   more MORE ON QUITO... the casa of ricardo rocco is a very nice casa indeed... we were told to make ourselves at home, and we have done just that, all week long. no telling when the invisible man will be home, i only hope we'll be on our best behavior the moment he walks in the door. ricardo has a maid named rosie, who comes by every morning to clean. rosie has been educating me on the subject of ecuador, all in spanish. as far as the language is concerned, i'm improving every day. all the movies on tv are in english, with spanish subtitles, which has been helpful. thanks to cinemax latin america, ...   more every now and then, i get a little worried about where we will end up having to stay for the night. most of the little villages are too small to offer accommodation, and some of the big cities are a little too crazy for our liking. we even had a group of police escort us through one town, they lead us to about four different hotels. the only problem was, one of the policia kept blabbing to the hotel keepers about the dog, unaware that there is a more tactful method about easing the hotel into the whole dog situation. it was a nice surprise to meet some friendly, helpful police for once, the ...   more march 23, 2007 GUAYAQUIL, ECUADOR it's true, the water in the toilet does spin in the opposite direction when flushed... it was the first thing that brian did when we walked into our new hotel. you can now move on with the rest of your life now that you have been enlightened with that little tidbit of knowledge. the city of guayaquil is an oasis of capitalism and beautiful post socialist era architecture surrounded by untamed shanty towns that are nearly falling into the rivers. our truck was still on the boat, so we were holed up in the illustrious hotel sol de oriente for a week. the ...   more Update from Checkpoint Racing; Its been a few days since Brian and Erica have updated on the site because they are unable to get online from what we've been told. Everything is going well. Currently they are in Cotopaxi, Ecuador. They told us in brief they will be running sweep in Rally Ecuador (rallyecuador.com) this coming weekend. We can think of anything more fitting for them to do on their trip. We will keep you updated as we hear from them, and hopefully get some photos as soon as they are able to use the Internet again. -Brian McGuire Checkpoint Racing DOMINICAL, COSTA RICA having buried the investment scheme in the back of our minds, we made our way down to dominical. about seven or eight months ago, we met a guy at a supermoto exhibition in denver who said he was going to tow an old caravan down to costa rica and open up a diner on the beach. he said he'd be open by the time we arrived, and gave us his business card. neither of us thought much about it at the time, but brian kept the card anyway. this being our only solid connection in costa rica, we decided to find the makeshift beach diner in hopes of a good meal and an easy conversation ...   more hey all, we{re still alive despite the lack of posts. we have been totally consumed by our efforts to ship our truck to ecuador. the good thing is, we have been kindly taken in by a wonderful panamanian family in la chorerra. they have been more than helpful as we try to plan our transport to south america. we will have a couple of days off in ecuador, so our hope is to get a little caught up with all of our posts and photos. thanks for keeping up with us, we{ll try to make it worth you while. love, brian and erika. p.s. this being the fourteenth of march, doesn{t seem like jer will make ...   more our residence for the night overlooked lake nicaragua, a massive body of fresh water with volcanoes rising up from the middle. the lake extends all the way down through costa rica, and the border was much close than we thought. we weren't quite mentally ready to deal with a border crossing, but we were already there, so we took in a deep breath and jumped in. the usual crowd of border mongers came running up to the truck, completely surrounding us until we could drive no further. brian cracked the window to choose the pick of the litter, which happened to be an english speaking guy and his ...   more march 3, 2007 CHINANDEGA, NICARAGUA in search of a beach, any beach, we followed the first set of signs we saw that might possibly lead us there. the entire afternoon was spent on the backroads of nicaragua, where we passed from one shanty town to the next. some of the houses were constructed from scraps of wood with highway signs and other miscellaneous items that were likely salvaged from the roadside. the road itself in such disrepair that it took us an hour to drive twenty miles. the dust from the road covered the emaciated children, who stood on the side with their arms extended ...   more as that we were on the move through honduras and nicaragua, we did not have much of a chance to write about it. we are now in costa rica at a nice, but over priced hotel. we are heading to the coast looking for a little cheaper accommodation for a break from driving for a few days. stopping for a while is the only way to tend to anything domestic, such as laundry, car maintenance, i-pod maintenance, website maintenance, and so on. we're all doing well, but we haven't had a sunday in a long time, so we're in search of a place to have a day off. hopefully the rest of costa rica is not as expensive ...   more i have found this on jer's my space. it was posted on feb 24th. we have good faith in jer and hope to see him in panama.

Friday, February 23, 2007 part of what's up

So if you've been keeping up with the infinite road sight you know that I am now traveling solo for a while. I messed up and after a simply amazing day of watching howler monkeys, that night I had some beers with our guide Jake and his cousin who's name I forget but I found very cute. The part that makes this extra stupid of me was that I wasn't trying to get drunk but instead caved to an imagined pressure of ...   more