ADV Cannonball
Interviewing adventure riders, overland creators, and authors is a key feature of the Adventure Cannonball Podcast. Aaron and Taylor speak with adventure travelers from various backgrounds, aiming to inspire listeners to embark on their journeys. The duo often discusses a wide range of motorsports, including motorcycle rallies, TSD rallies, checkpoint events, overlanding, and anything related to adrenaline and horsepower!
ADV Cannonball
Danny McGee from "SOUTHBOUND" & ADV Cannonball Rally News
Danny McGee is the filmmaker behind the YouTube ADV series Southbound. We talk about the journey and making of Episodes 1 and 2. Their adventure motorcycle trip starts in LA, and they travel off-road through the Baja, mainland Mexico, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Panama. We also discuss setting up their DR650s, camping, and filming along the way.
Southbound Episode One
Southbound Episode Two
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Welcome to the ADV cannonball podcast, where we discuss all things on two wheels, the adventure bike cannonball and other motorcycle related nonsense.
SPEAKER_03:Season three, episode 12. Welcome to Adventure Cannonball Podcast. I'm your host, Taylor Lawson, and today I am joined by once handmade boat craftsman, Aaron Poufault. Hey, bud. How are you? I'm doing great, man. I'm sitting down here in the south of France and having a bit of vacation time. It was a bit crazy. I had to go south to escape the heat in the in Sweden. It was crazy. I came south to get some cooler temperatures, but you know, that's over now. Now it's, it's like, you know, 95 and the same percentage of humidity.
SPEAKER_04:Yeah. But you're next to the Mediterranean. So where are you exactly? The picture I see on my screen is this gorgeous view of the Mediterranean. Maybe you can share some information with our listeners.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah. So I am, I'm right between Nice and Cannes. So Cannes is over one hill, Antibes is over the other, and a little bit further down the beach is Nice. So about a half an hour train ride to Nice and about a 15-20 minute train ride to the west. to Cannes. And yeah, a little bit further to the east past Nice is Monaco. So I'm down there in the thick of it. And as I look out the balcony, there's 101 meter. So what's that? 310, 12 feet, I guess, of, maybe it's more, 320 feet of motor yacht that was just launched by FedShip. And it's the It's for any of you who have WhatsApp on your phone, you are the reason, me included, that that dude has a boat, and it's sitting out there right now. He just took delivery of it, and I watched him just get delivered to the boat by helicopter.
SPEAKER_04:Wow. It just gets worse every day. We could start a whole other podcast, and I'm going to call it Eat the Rich.
SPEAKER_03:Eat the Rich. Now, what made me, and I looked at my phone, I was like, WhatsApp is, I've never paid a dime for WhatsApp. Who pays for WhatsApp? I guess businesses do, or I've never paid for WhatsApp. Or maybe they're just selling my data, and that's how he's making the money to buy that yacht.
SPEAKER_04:Oh, for sure. Whenever you're sending that picture you shouldn't be sending, they're taking it and then they're selling it on OnlyFans. Oh, great. Yeah, great. No, I think that WhatsApp got sold to the Book of Faces. So I think there was a huge, huge cash buyout there.
SPEAKER_03:Ah, that could be it then. Up until then, he was probably, you know, riding the jet ski.
SPEAKER_04:Well, listen, I'm in the Pacific Northwest. It is hot as can be. And I'm going to open this fantastic IPA. So here's to you. You enjoy your vacation. Cheers.
SPEAKER_03:Thank you very much. And, you know, I've been in the south of France. This is wine region, blush wine, actually, rosé. And not the rosé of the 80s, you know, the more refined, a very, very light pink. And I've been drinking that. But in honor of this podcast, I swung by the liquor store, which is also the grocery store here. And I got a BrewDog IPA. That is a tall one, too. It's a tall boy, baby. I got a half a liter in my hand. Nice.
SPEAKER_04:Stop showing off now.
SPEAKER_03:Don't call me beer can for nothing. That's it. Showing off.
SPEAKER_04:I got some news. So I got some samples in from our new swag shop partner. It is wildly expensive. It is slow to ship, but the quality is, is amazing so uh they're the same people that do our livery stickers so uh i will take some pictures because you know i got my summer bod my uh my swimsuit bod Nice, you've been working on that. Yeah, so I'm going to have my wife take some pictures on the motorcycle with some of the samples that I got, and I will post those to the website. We're not going to make any money on it, but because of the nightmare with that other company, I'm going to just sell them at cost because they are wildly expensive, but the quality is really fantastic. So I'll actually print some samples for you when we're offline and bring them to you when I meet you in India. So I'll bring you some samples as well. Sweet. I'll pack
SPEAKER_03:lightly.
SPEAKER_04:Also, I had some interesting news. So I've been fighting with Garmin with getting waypoints and GPX tracks from my Mac into my Garmin. And I solved some of the problem. There are some hardware issues. And this is a tip for anyone who has a Garmin GPS. I had to buy a third party GPS. USB-C to micro USB cable, and it started working again. So the cable that came with it was a USB-A to micro USB. It just wouldn't work with my new Mac Studio computer. I went out and bought a thing on Amazon, a high-quality USB-C cable, and it just started working. So tragedy averted. We can continue to do the Cannonball Rally, and that's the solution. So anyone who's having a problem loading GPX tracks onto a garment from a Mac, try a USB-C cable.
SPEAKER_03:Good tip. Good tip. It's amazing. Yeah. These things seem like big problems, and then when you get Tim Cook on the line, things get... Oh
SPEAKER_04:yeah. I've got him. I've got him a speed dial. So I just fired him a message. Yeah. And I messaged, of
SPEAKER_03:course. Good. I think I was, he was actually, his yacht was out here. I think I saw him take your call.
SPEAKER_04:That's right. Had to stop the boat, you know? Oh, it's Aaron. Everyone stop. Aaron's calling. Yeah, sure. I also wanted to let you know that on the motorcycle book club, I put a new book. It's Mark Richardson's fiction novel. It's called running on empty. It's a really good book. And it's, I'm not going to talk about it because we have a whole interview with Mark, one or two episodes down the road. It's in the can. I just got to edit it. And yeah, I just want to let people know if you're looking for a gift or some fiction to read, it's very rare we get a novel about motorcycle riding based in America. So it's a good read. I enjoyed it and I've put it on the club.
SPEAKER_03:Nice. I'll have to get my hands on that one.
SPEAKER_04:Yeah,
SPEAKER_03:it's worth it. So talk to me about... CNC. Now, before sort of our preamble, before we jumped into this, you said, everybody knows what CNC is. And I said, look, I work for a company that made CNC, which was a rock tools mining and construction company. And it wasn't until I started working there that I truly knew what CNC meant. So before you jump in here, please just educate us.
SPEAKER_04:I think, you know, all geeky guys know it's the it's the computer controlled milling machine. Right.
SPEAKER_03:So CNC computer is a computerized numeric cutting. Right. CNC.
SPEAKER_04:most of us would know by seeing it but many of us wouldn't know what the actual definition which is an interesting study i think someone smarter than me could explain how that happens in the world but uh so the people at nice cnc it's a it's a chinese company i have been using their two finger controls on my all my gsas forever i didn't have any brand loyalty i just went and found them. And so I've done about 50,000 miles on my two finger controls. And then recently I added two little bags on my crash bars and I keep a tool bag on one side to get some of the weight forward because I was having some issues at higher speeds. And I moved some weight forward with my tool bag. And then I always like to carry a half cover. And like, where do you put it? Right? Like it's this bulky thing. So I shoved it in one of these bags. Anyways, both these products are from Nice CNC. And they saw my motorcycle at the Tour Tech Rally. And so they've given us a couple of gift cards. So maybe you can explain how the gift card giveaway works, Taylor.
SPEAKER_03:All right. So first of all, it's pretty generous. So it's a$100 gift card for NiceCNC.com. Thank you. And it's the first person who sends a message via the link in the show notes, but it's, it's a limited time, right? So this is so that Aaron, so this is so you don't get phone calls or messages like, you know, a year later going, I got it. I'm the winner, right? So we're going to, so it gets, it's, it's just for a limited time. So if you're listening on the 15th of August, so for the duration of the 15th of August, so when it, when the, when the clock strikes 16th of August, this offer has turned into a pumpkin.
SPEAKER_04:Yeah. And it's the first person to text me. So like if it's noon and you're like on Pacific Northwest time. probably not message me. It's already been one. So, you know, I, we know we may be the number two podcast, but people actually do download in the morning, uh, on that Friday. So anyways, just scroll down to the show notes. It says, send us a message. And that literally beeps on my phone. And if you're the first person to do that, I will, uh, I will send you the, the, uh, the code or the offer code for the a hundred bucks. And then maybe on the next episode or a few more, we'll, we'll give some more away. So thanks everyone for listening. And that's a, that's a giveaway.
SPEAKER_03:Nice.
SPEAKER_04:Nice. Probably
SPEAKER_00:We'll be right back.
SPEAKER_04:Danny McGee, welcome to the podcast. Thanks for having me on. I'm stoked to chat. Yeah, and I think you're in a way cooler place than I am. Where are you right now?
SPEAKER_02:I'm in Hawaii right now. Yeah, just spending the month out here and working and doing a lot of free diving and stuff. So yeah, I'm definitely lucky to be out here.
SPEAKER_04:Yeah, the last time we saw each other was in... Aspen, Colorado, you were flying a drone through an art gallery and an$80 million home. So I suppose you're doing something awesome like that there also?
SPEAKER_02:It's not quite as expensive as that, but up in the mountains and stuff. And yeah, just filming a lot of cool aerial, big mountains, ridgeline, stuff like that. But yeah, that was maybe almost two years ago, last time we saw each other. Yeah, we'll have to have a beer
SPEAKER_04:sometime and... tell you the fallout of all that one day when we're off the air. I'm under a non-disclosure agreement. Sounds good. Today, we're talking about your series called Southbound. And we'll start off with episode one, LA to Guatemala covers 4,000 miles. Can you tell me a little about the travel concept that you have a really cool concept about doing a month and then flying home and, you know, doing reality? Maybe you could just give us a brief overview of that concept.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah. Yeah, so the whole idea for Southbound came, I have two friends, my friend Jonah and Jesse, and we were actually at a concert and we were like, we want to do something cool and it should involve motorcycles and it should involve part of the world that we haven't really been. So we kind of just made this grand plan to do a motorcycle trip through South America. And we looked into everything and like, this was literally like a month before the trip. We'd already set all this time aside. side we had flights and everything and we realized because there's not much information online about it but we realized basically half of the month we were going to just be doing paperwork so we got together and just started talking about doing something a little bit different and we were like why don't we just buy motorcycles in the states and just start riding south like eventually we will get to south america at some point um and at that point me and jonah started talking too um about making a series from the whole trip um because we both do filmmaking and content creation and stuff as a job. And we've always wanted to make, you know, like the things that inspired both of us in the beginning was these long form travel series. And, you know, it's really, it's so time consuming, it's hard to do. And we were both just kind of feeling like we hadn't been doing that. It was something we really wanted to do, but we weren't doing it. And so we're like, all right, this is the moment to do it. So what we decided to do was basically do the trip in legs we all have you know jobs we got to make money and it's not like something we could take off an entire year to do this whole trip in so yeah we did the first leg from LA down to the border of Guatemala the second leg was Central America and then just a few months ago we got back from the third leg which was Colombia Ecuador and Peru and yeah we're just we're not actually sure how many more legs it's going to take to get to the bottom I think maybe to. And yeah, we're just going to keep going. Keep going south.
SPEAKER_04:So in episode one, it starts off in L.A. The three of you bought bikes and lots of parts and camping gear and you and you get together like the A-team and you're in you're building these bikes. Have you ever done anything like that before?
SPEAKER_02:So all of us have done like a lot of backpacking, a lot of camping, stuff like that. And Jesse probably had the most motorcycle experience out of all of us. He'd done several cross-country trips before that. He had an old Honda motorcycle that he took across the country several times. Jonah had done a bit of street riding. And then I grew up in Colorado. So it was just all dirt bikes throughout high school. Just me and my buddies going up camping and doing single track and stuff like that. And so we all had a little bit of experience, but nothing, nothing like this. I think there's a yeah, there was definitely a lot of reasons that we that people might say, like, you guys definitely aren't prepared enough to go you don't know enough about it but at the end of the day we were like we'll figure it out we had a couple days of writing that we were actually in the states so we could get any last minute stuff and yeah just kind of work out some kinks and yeah just kind of learned most of it on the fly the first episode Jesse and Jonah it was literally their first time ever writing dirt and it was on this trip and it was a super gnarly muddy day and yeah and and I mean, we have like 100 pounds of gear on the back of the bikes. So I was like I was decent. But yeah, they really had to learn on the fly as far as dirt is concerned.
SPEAKER_04:And as soon as you cross the Mexican border, you were in the dirt and you guys bought it looked like DR 650s. Is that right?
SPEAKER_02:Yeah. Yeah. So we all got the same bike so we can carry similar tools, similar spare parts. And yeah, when when we're in these places that are just like really hard to reach and like getting parts might be impossible. We figured all having the same bike would just be the way to go
SPEAKER_04:right after the dirt. And right after you cross the Mexican border, you immediately went south of San Felipe. I was down there last winter and I was struck by there are no power lines. There are no cell phone towers. There is nothing. You are out there on your own. Were you surprised that it was so desolate so quickly?
SPEAKER_02:Yeah. Yeah. I mean, like right when you get south of the border, there's almost nothing. It's it's so interesting. And yeah, just barren. desert it's so beautiful so amazing but like finding gas is always an issue and you really have to plot that out like cell phone service again you don't have that in most of the places and just such a sudden change because like I mean when you're across the border you're in like San Diego so you're in like a proper city and then it's just nothing I
SPEAKER_04:think as how do you put it as Americans and Canadians when you're in that part of Mexico and you have to ask like you guys did with a fisherman for some gas or you need to buy gas from some guy in the side of the street out of a plastic bottle that can sometimes be a little difficult but you seem to really take that in stride did you feel at all awkward about buying gas from a guy on the side of the road or anything like that
SPEAKER_02:um honestly not not too much because all of us have done a lot of traveling um in other countries like southeast asia you're ripping around on mopeds and like when you get gas you just pull over to some dude who's filled up a bunch of absolute vodka bottles full of gas and you're filling that up so That wasn't that was luckily with our past travel experience. That wasn't too much of a shock. It's pretty cool, though. Yeah, just like. It's so different. And I think that's like one of the really cool parts about is like you get gas back home. It's not this like event that you're going to tell anyone about, but you find some random dude on the side of the road with like a barrel and you spill in your, your tank up. It's just, um, yeah, it's, it's cool. And it's interesting. And it's, uh, it's just really fun.
SPEAKER_04:Yeah. You mentioned before that you may be criticized for not having so much experience, but we constantly talk to people that are accidental adventurers or accidental expert ADV riders and the fact that you had those uh those past experiences to parlay into an adv adventure really uh really speaks volumes but as soon as you got into the baja you immediately threw up your drones uh did you find it hard to stop and take those breathtaking videos while you're riding bikes
SPEAKER_02:yeah that's it's it's probably the biggest challenge of the trip is figuring out like because anyone who's done a trip on a motorcycle knows how hard it is to film um like you have to get off the bike go back to your gear open your duffel bag open your backpack that's inside of the duffel bag take the drone out have two people ride here ride back and it's just a balance between like there's certain places that you go and you're like I like there's no way I can't Like, I have to fly the drone here. This is so cool. But there's a lot of in-between time where it's like, I don't really want to fly the drone, but it'd be better for the video. So, yeah, it's just a constant, like, every situation. We just kind of talk and we're like, hey, what does everyone feel about doing some drone shots? And it's interesting, too, because me and Jonah are filmmakers, so we're obviously a lot more into the filming side of it, whereas Jesse... I mean, he thinks it's cool, but he really honestly couldn't really give a shit about it. So he's always wanting to just like riffing dirt and writing as much as we can. Me and Jonah are trying to film. But yeah, it's it's it's challenging every single
SPEAKER_04:time trying to decide. And notice the even in episode one, the sound design and the editing is not what you would expect in a, you know, modal vloggers YouTube video. You have any formal education or, you know, who did all the editing and sound design? So
SPEAKER_02:how it's just me and Jonah editing and basically how we do it is I as we're writing kind of write like I write down everything that happens in the day, like just make a little journal. And basically, when we go into the edit process, I go through all the footage and do all the like, like, like storytelling stuff, put the voiceover in kind of craft the story. And then Jonah, he actually enjoys the moment. more like detailed stuff, better the color grading, cutting clips exactly to the music, the sound design, all the stuff like that. He's really an amazing editor and it works out because I enjoy the other stuff more. He enjoys that more. So it's yeah, it's I mean, it's just a two man team. It's very tedious. And these projects take hundreds and hundreds of hours to do. But we really love making them. Like I said earlier, it's like we do a lot of video work throughout the year. And this is like the one project like this is for us. So it's, yeah, it's we really, ideally, for something like this, we'd have like a team of editors and make it so much easier. But this is like a completely self funded trip. So we just don't have the money for that. And like, honestly, it'd be kind of hard giving away a lot of that control because it's, you know, it's kind of our baby. So we do enjoy doing editing, too.
SPEAKER_04:It really shows in the work. And speaking of color grading and all that, it must be difficult when you took the ferry to Mazatlan and you started to ride south on the mainland, the terrain drastically changes. You go into the mountains, you're into the pine tree forest. Were you expecting that type of dramatic change?
SPEAKER_02:No, honestly, like we did a little bit of research about different spots along the way, but there's so many places where, yeah, we were just blown away. Like we, I had seen photos of Mazatlan before, but I had no clue that it was really close to these huge epic mountains with pine trees and like baja was just complete desert and then the second we get to mainland it's like really big city and then big uh like alpine forests and then we go a little bit further and there's these huge 17 000 foot mountains and that was kind of the theme of the trip was just like we we almost purposely we make sure all the areas we're going to are safe but we kind of purposely don't like look at a bunch of google photos and stuff like that Just so it is a surprise, it kind of makes it a little more fun and just exciting. Yeah, no, we did not expect that at all. Yeah, it was great
SPEAKER_04:to experience that journey with you. One of the things that struck me during that part of the video was, you know, I've experienced the Topaz of Mexico and I've destroyed many a suspension system down there, but I you guys saw a cattle guard that was installed the wrong direction. If you were going too fast, you would have hit that. You know, it could be really serious. You guys kind of laughed about it. But were you were you shocked by that?
SPEAKER_02:Yeah. Yeah. No, that was that was pretty gnarly. And that was actually a time where Jonah and Jesse were riding on their own. They were I was going up to the next city. I think I can't remember exactly why, but they took this little dirt side road. And so I wasn't there for that specific one. But you like totally if you were going fast enough, you would like you could potentially like die from that. But it's in these really remote areas that probably no one except for the people that live there ever ride on. So they probably just see it as like, oh, yeah, like the boards are only this long. Let's put them this direction, like not a big deal, because a lot of the roads that we end up on are, you know, pretty rural and just like, yeah, they're not expecting random motorcyclists from America to ride through there.
SPEAKER_04:Yeah, there's a YouTuber called Riot The Bean and he had a terrible accident. Same thing. It was a small bridge got washed out and he was ripping and he had a terrible eye. It involved a life flight and everything. I just once I saw the cattle guy, I'm like, oh, my God, thank God you guys weren't, you know, going overly fast. Some of the towns really surprised me. I've done a lot of traveling in Mexico, but by water, I used to be a yacht captain. And were you surprised by some of the, you know, Spanish era towns that you saw in which town maybe struck you the most?
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, no, it was it was amazing. And those those towns, again, were like almost complete surprise like we would be you know a couple hundred miles away and then someone would say like yo if you guys are in this area like you should check out this town and then we'd just end up there so it was all like yeah it was all a surprise and the two towns well honestly the biggest town that comes to mind is called Zacatecas which is in central Mexico a little bit north of Mexico City and that town was just incredible like it actually felt like you were in Spain just amazing cathedrals And yeah, the there's a lot of Spanish architecture and stuff down in Mexico because, you know, the Spanish kind of really took over the place. But yeah, it was a just a amazing town. We ended up spending spending three days because there was all these cool little cafes and we had been just like ripping for like, I think, 12 or 13 days at that point. There was also another town called San Miguel de Alende, Alendre. And that was another like similar town. It was a little bit more touristy. So Zacatecas is a little bit more preferred just because we like like there was no tourists at all. We saw one other dude that was, I think, from Europe or something the whole time we were there for three days. And just finding those like unique experiences like that where you're just surrounded by locals and stuff is is is really fun and really rewarding.
SPEAKER_04:Speaking of the locals, you were in the middle of a protest for violence against women. You were immediately thrown into the the local culture did that strike you as uh being a little odd uh being in this town and immediately surrounded by a protest
SPEAKER_02:yeah it was really interesting like we were just walking around um we didn't really know what was going on and the people like we were just standing outside of our hotel and like the people at the hotel were like you guys need to come inside right now and we're like what like what's going on then they said there was some sort of a protest and we were kind of like uh i mean it's probably fine like we're like i don't know we're like three good sized dudes were like, we're going to be fine. But we're really glad that we ended up going inside because it got super intense really quickly. And there's a couple of clips of it in the film because we ended up on like a second story balcony. So I got a few clips with my camera and then right below us, they busted in the door of our hotel and then they saw me with the camera and they all started like 15 women just started yelling at me. So I ended up putting the camera away. So we didn't we didn't get too many shots but it was really interesting and um yeah we had a lot of time to think about that and it's just like i mean the protest was huge there was probably like 20 10 to 20 000 people marching um and yeah and i guess our overall thoughts were just sort of like it must be pretty bad if there's this much of a showing for um a march like this um but yeah completely unexpected and yeah it was honestly a little bit scary when they started like busting down the door of the hotel. Wow.
SPEAKER_04:I've, I've had a lot of women that have scared me, but 20,000 of them, I think I will leave the locals to their own, their own politics and wish them, wish them well. And hopefully they get a good, good results out of that, bringing, bringing awareness to that important cause. But you mentioned earlier about meeting some local people. Did you meet any local riders? Did you experience any, you know, they call it trail magic for hikers. Did you, did you experience anything like that from local riders?
SPEAKER_02:Yeah. So actually on the ferry back from, on the ferry back from, or from Baja over to Mazatlan we it was funny we like we we had some tire problems and anyways we we we showed up to the ferry super late and there was a police blockade and they were blocking off because there was a bike race and it was the only road to get up to the ferry and so we go up to the front and they were like yeah you're not getting through so we tried some dirt path like off this other direction and this actually isn't in the film but Jesse was going like 20 miles an hour and hit a fence that was across the road that was We didn't know and flew off the bike. He was fine. And then we turned around, went back to the police blockade. And we were just we saw another group of riders that was that was also there. And we were just walking up to them to try to ask them what was going on. And they just like kind of motioned for us to follow. And somehow they had like convinced the police to let us in through the blockade. And so we were like in this blockade. super professional bike race just riding our motorcycles through it made it onto the ferry and then we got to know this guy his name is Miguel pretty well on the ferry we were just kind of talking he spoke really good English and our Spanish was getting a little bit better at that point and he was such a big help for the rest of the trip like we once we got to mainland we actually stayed with him for a few days when we were in Carataro and then he ended up like posting about our Cause we, we still throughout the trip, we weren't a hundred percent sure where we were going to store the bikes. And he put a bunch of posts out on these Mexican groups about like bike storage and ended up hooking up us up with this other guy who ended up like helping us store our bikes. And, um, yeah, it was, it was really cool. I wish we could have done a little bit more riding with him, but he was just such a big help to us. And it was really cool. Cause it was just completely random.
SPEAKER_04:Yeah. And it makes the trip through someone else's country a little more special that you're not just an observer. You're obviously part of the community rather than just a tourist. You had mentioned that your buddy had a bit of a dirt nap there. Did you have any serious, serious spills?
SPEAKER_02:We didn't have anything too serious. We have little stuff here and there. We have pretty good riding gear. One of the companies that like kind of took a risk on us in the first episode was Revit. So they sent us like actual good riding gear, which was awesome. And like we would be way more injured if we didn't have that gear. So we had little stuff and then like i think the biggest thing that we had was jonah low side of the bike near the end of the trip and he hurt his wrist pretty bad but it wasn't anything too crazy like after a little bit of a pause we taped it up with duct tape and he ended up being okay um so yeah we've we ride pretty cautiously and we also like mainly do slower like back roads so if we do fall it's usually on dirt and you can kind of like for the most part roll out of it But yeah, we've been lucky so far.
SPEAKER_04:I noticed that you had to do a little bit of a repair to one of the gear shifters. Do you guys at least carry spare levers now?
SPEAKER_02:Yeah. Yeah. Spare sprockets. We there's a lot of things we've learned since that first trip.
SPEAKER_04:Yeah. But you guys went and it worked and everything worked out. There are too many people, especially men that are like, I need to have this and I need to have that. I'm not going because I'm not prepared. You really showed everyone that you can just go online and buy a bunch of gear and hit the road and everything's just going to work out, man. It's it's it's going to be fine. Speaking about those bikes, you had a lot of gear on those little bikes and, you know, you broke some of the some of the racking systems. Did you face any other gear challenges during the first or second episode?
SPEAKER_02:Yeah. So the I think the biggest change to our gear from the first to the second one was new pannier bags in addition to racks. So we had, yeah, basically all of our racks just destroy themselves on the first one. And the funny part is we all end up getting the exact same gear whether it's like stuff that's on our bikes or like a certain jacket or a certain chair because there's such few items in in the world that like we need the most durable item in any category of things so we all end up with like the exact same stuff um so yeah the racks were a big one jonah's side he had like this soft sided luggage for the first trip was just a huge mistake because it just completely destroyed itself so we got better rack um better Moscow bags and then on the second trip which was actually a huge help for the filming part of it I was going to mention this earlier um but for the filming workflow something that has helped a ton is we got bigger tank bags and Jonah has his main camera right in front of him at all times and then I have a DJI mini drone um so at all times pretty much we can pull off the side of the road we can have a main camera and a drone and that has just helped a ton and um and then for other upgrades to the bikes between the first and the second one we also did brand new suspensions which was a huge upgrade because the stock dr suspension just it honestly it's not very good at all we were bottoming out constantly um so we got new suspensions from cogent and that has made like a it's made it feel like a completely different bike
SPEAKER_04:yeah you're definitely over the gross vehicle weight with all your all your camera equipment and you know your food and your spare parts and such and you know riding these these bikes through Mexico wasn't hard enough. You guys did some hiking up a volcano up over 16,500 feet and even into the snow. Can you tell us about that adventure and how that idea came up?
SPEAKER_02:Yeah. So it honestly started like, I just had posted a Instagram story, um, just wherever we were, whatever town we were in. And someone messaged me and was like, yo, there's this really cool hike, like down past Mexico city. And we kind of looked at some photos, looked at the mileage and we were like, ah, this should be, this should be doable. Um, And so, yeah, we kind of bypassed Mexico City, went straight for the hike, and we planned on just camping like pretty close to the trailhead and then storing all of our stuff in like a bush or something and then doing the hike coming back down. But the problem was it was a national park, and this has actually happened a few times throughout our trip. This happened to us this year in Cotopaxi down in Ecuador. But a lot of national parks, they allow vehicles, but they don't allow motorcycles because I think people just– kind of go off trail and do stuff like that. So the hike turned from like, I think it added an extra eight miles to the hike because we couldn't get any further. So, and we, we had got to the trailhead or not the trailhead, but like the visitor center, like kind of late at night. And so we were really considering not doing it. Cause we were like, what are we doing? Like, this is, this is really gnarly hike. And all of us are really into hiking, but on a motorcycle trip, we're also really tired from all of that. But we were just figured like, we're here. we should give it a shot we'll just hike up as far as we can and then turn around like at least we'll be able to hike to the highest elevation that any of us have ever been and it's going to be all good um and yeah we just started going we left at like 3 a.m started hiking and just like we're feeling okay like it was really challenging i think we started at 12 000 feet got to like 13 14 15 and then we were kind of like we i feel like we could do it we can make it to the the top one it's just one of those things where you just keep pushing further and further and further and so yeah we made it uh we made it to like the first of three summits we actually didn't summit the whole mountain there's another peak that's a few hundred feet taller but we were like pretty happy with the one that we got to um and yeah it was honestly one of my favorite moments from the whole trip because um yeah it's it's easy to get sucked into all the motorcycle riding because it's so much fun but it's nice once in a while and like a month-long trip to just do some sort activity that um is different from that gives your gives your ass a break and um yeah it's just also nice to stretch your legs because a month of sitting on a motorcycle isn't the best thing for your uh for your leg health
SPEAKER_04:yeah and you guys ran into the mexican special forces doing some training up there so it was definitely a really badass thing that that you guys did and i'm not one for fear-mongering in mexico because nothing drives me more crazy than people's first question oh was it dangerous but you did have a little run-in with the local cartel and I think they were more upset with you filming maybe you could tell us about that experience
SPEAKER_02:yeah so so funny like we made the made it through the whole trip with no problems the only other weird thing that would have that happened was on the same day that Jonah and Jesse encounter those cattle guards in that remote part of Mexico they were sitting at this little like pull off and a like in the middle of nowhere and an extremely nice extremely tinted like Ford Platinum showed up and And this guy kind of hopped out and they saw there was like a shotgun mounted in between him and the like the driver in the passenger seat. And he just kind of came up to them and was asking them what they were doing. And then they were like, yeah, we're just on a motorcycle trip. And then he left and it was totally fine. That was the only other like weird situation we had. But literally our last day, like we had to basically go down to the border of Guatemala and cancel our vehicle permits before we stored them. And yeah, we were like two miles north of the border and we were coming around this corner, pulled into this gas station to fill up and almost immediately, like a bunch of SUVs pulled up. They first pulled up to Jonah and we're basically just like, yeah, they had problems with the GoPro and they're wondering what we were doing. And so they're yelling at him and then a couple more cars show up like more guys hop out and they start yelling at me and Jesse, who are currently getting gas at the pump. And we didn't know what to say. where you're just like, it was so sudden and... Honestly, like as quickly as they arrived, they just disappeared, drove away and it was totally fine. And I think they were just checking us out. Yeah. Just like wondering what we were doing. Like the reality is in whether it's the cartel or like we encountered another, it's sort of like a anti-government group called FARC in Columbia. And really they don't want problems with tourists because I mean, specifically for the cartel, they make a ton of money off of tourists. And it's also just really bad press if anything happens. So you just kind of have to be trusting in those situations and being like, yeah, bad things can happen. But bad things can also happen back home. So yeah, we did have a bit of a run in, but everything ended up being okay. And yeah, if you just are to dick and treat people respectfully, they yeah, they don't. We haven't had any other problems.
SPEAKER_04:Usually really bad things happen in situations that you really shouldn't be. If it's 3 a.m. and, you know, you're at a dodgy strip club, probably something bad is going to happen. But if you're just riding motorcycles and, you know, you're just taking videos, maybe hide the camera when you're at someone's border crossing, you know, is all. And speaking of the Guatemala border, that's where you start episode two. And when you cross the border, you're immediately in the jungle. Can you tell us how that border crossing went and maybe what your thoughts were as you entered the jungle?
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, it was it was really interesting because, again, like a lot of the landscapes were just like so surprising, like I thought we would for sure, like already be in the jungle. Like when you think, whenever I thought of Guatemala, it was like dense jungle. Um, but like just North of border, like the night before we went to the border, we were staying in like a little pine tree forest, which was really interesting. That was actually like decently high altitude. And then we wound down towards Guatemala and yeah, like almost immediately it turned into this like dense jungle and it was really pretty, really beautiful. And that's why I just like, um, like the thing that I like almost most about these trips is just being surprised around every single corner. Like every single day you wake up and you're really unsure of what you're going to see, what the landscape is going to be like, who you're going to meet. And, um, yeah, Guatemala was amazing. Like from the time we, we, I mean, I don't want to talk too long about it, but yeah, like Guatemala, we were in, there's beaches, there's volcanoes, there's like, we camped at 12,000 feet one night in this super high area. Like Yeah, just being surprised around every corner is really, really fun.
SPEAKER_04:By this point, you've covered over 4,000 miles. People often make changes to their bikes and gear. You've already talked about changing to the Moscow Moto bags. Did you make any gear changes or did you find that you had more or less gear by this point?
SPEAKER_02:Probably a little bit less gear. I don't know exactly. I can't think of any specific things, but just like as far as the clothing we bring, like I probably brought more clothes on the first trip. On the next following trips, I think I brought like four t-shirts because I just realized that you just wear the same thing every day, which is your riding gear. So it doesn't really matter. Camera gear has changed a little bit. Like we've experimented with different lenses and different drones, stuff like that. And then just like making our bikes a little bit more durable. So we put like case savers, we put little roll bars up in the front of our engines, stuff like that, just little modifications, brighter headlights. We got Baja design lights on this most recent trip. And there's always little stuff that you can kind of improve. One thing that we really did not do a great job of on this last one was the like charging ports for all of our gear. We actually ended up being in Peru during the rainy season, which we really didn't want, like the beginning of rainy season. And so all of our gear got completely soaked. So in the next one, we're going to be doing a little bit better job of getting more waterproof stuff and having multiple wiring systems. So we know that we have one that works to charge the gear. And yeah, there's a million little things like that.
SPEAKER_04:I actually saw that and I didn't know they had problems. I saw the little green USB ports by your handlebars. I thought, wow, those aren't very water protected. Were those the devices that failed?
SPEAKER_02:Yeah. So we actually got new ones for this trip. They were like USB-C. So they charge a little bit faster and they did have like a cap that goes over them. But we were the rain that we were going through was like there was one point where it was like it was like a foot deep of water on the road. We're like we felt like we were boats like going through. There was just a wall of water above us. So it was just like no matter what you did. you were going to be screwed. So we're just bringing extra on the next trip. That's right. They
SPEAKER_04:cost like 10 bucks. Just bring an extra one. You mentioned and you mentioned some of the other countries. So what countries did you cover in episode two?
SPEAKER_02:So episode two, we picked our bikes back up in Mexico, went down through Guatemala. And then from Guatemala, we went to El Salvador, crossed through this little stretch of Honduras. And we're hoping to get into Nicaragua and spend because we want it. We kind of had to make decisions like we only had a month and you know there's a bunch of countries down there so we kind of decided that we wanted to spend a lot of time in Guatemala a lot of time in Nicaragua a lot of time in Costa Rica and then a lot of time in Panama so we were going to skip El Salvador and Honduras it's unfortunate but we just have to make decisions like that and so yeah then we I had an incident where I basically got stuck for 10 days of the trip which was pretty brutal Jesse and Jonah can We'll be right back. Eventually, 10 days later, I was able to figure everything out and make it down to them. And then we completed the trip through Panama. So it was six different countries on episode two.
SPEAKER_04:And I was really impressed by some of the footage in that active volcano. I actually flew into that volcano from a marina on the Pacific coast. The marina manager just happened to have a little airplane. And I'm like, this is, you know, this is crazy that I've been in that volcano. But the footage you got was amazing. in that volcano were you prepared for that or was like this is just amazing let's just get the drones up
SPEAKER_02:um i mean we we had heard the volcano uh erupted every like 15 minutes or so um and we had someone kind of convince us like we we camped out at this little like guiding outpost the night before and he was like you have to get up there before sunrise or else you're not going to see the actual lava so we were like all right sounds good and so we headed up i think we got an prepared for it to be cool but we just like it's just one of those things that no matter how many videos or photos you see of it and I'm sure it's probably similar when you went there like nothing prepares you for that it's just so cool and just such a powerful experience just being like the earth is alive like most places don't have lava coming out of it but right here you can really see it it's just a constantly erupting volcano and we sat up there for probably an hour and a half or two hours just watching it eruption after eruption and just basically till all of our drone batteries were dead.
SPEAKER_04:Yeah, it was really amazing. Everyone has to go see that. It was really amazing. And one of the fun things I always had to laugh at is you guys aren't exactly moto chefs. Uh, you know, I saw a lot of peanut butter, a lot of cans of tuna, uh, you know, some simple flatbread. Are you planning on improving on this or what?
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, I think we might be the, whatever the opposite of moto chefs are. I We don't really have any plans of improving it. It's just kind of like you get what you can get. Like even if we were to bring like nice camp meals, we'd be done with them in like a week and then we'd be back to the peanut butter and tortilla diet. So and it's a lot of it is honestly dependent on like what we can find. Like a lot of the times we're in these really remote areas where we can't get. We can't even find peanut butter, which is tragic. It's always a really sad day. And so we're eating just like the most random stuff. Like if we can find a little stall on the side of the road that's selling street food, like that's amazing. But yeah, and we try to stock up on stuff when we're in bigger cities, like the essentials. But yeah, our diet is not great and probably not going to improve just because we can't really find any of that stuff
SPEAKER_04:where we go. Well, it's definitely entertaining and a little bit cringeworthy for someone who's 50 years old to watch what you're eating. But speaking of getting food and supplies, you're not always on the Pan American Highway. So how often are you on the Pan American Highway and how often are you off on a little side road?
SPEAKER_02:We're probably off it the majority of the time. I think probably like 90% of the time we're off the highway. We try to not spend a ton of time on the highway just because it's a little bit more dangerous. And also we kind of just try to find the twistiest dirt dirtiest road um that we can and highway riding is fine like if we really need to cover some miles and stuff we'll get on the highway and get from point a to point b but if there is some sort of alternate route we'll usually take that so yeah it's probably it might even be less than 10 where we're actually on like big highways
SPEAKER_04:it's really great it really shows in your adventure too and sometimes you guys get into trouble but you know with those small bikes and with teamwork you know you guys always seem to uh get out of whatever trouble you get yourself into once you made it as a group to panama after your little separation time there what was your plan where are you storing your bikes and how do you plan to get around the gap
SPEAKER_02:yeah so um so that one that one was actually pretty simple there's a there's a company called overland embassy and they actually specialize because there's no roads between north and south america so there's actually quite a lot of travelers that come through there in mexico it was a little more challenging because there wasn't it's not like a common thing for people to do but yeah i Panama there's this company that's called Overland Embassy the dude who owns it is named Alejandro he's super cool dude he restores a bunch of old land cruisers and defenders and stuff so walking through his yard I was like ugh I need I need one of these. But yeah, so he basically stored our bikes and we've already we've already done the third leg. So he stored our bikes for about 11 months. And then when we when we wanted to do the next leg, he shipped them via airplane down to Bogota, Colombia. And then we just picked them up there. We had done all the paperwork before we left. So we didn't even have to go back to Panama for that.
SPEAKER_04:And maybe could give us an idea what the cost was to store your bikes and to ship them.
SPEAKER_02:I think it was like. Maybe a hundred bucks a month or something like that to store them. And then I think it was a thousand to ship them, which I thought was actually pretty cheap because if, even if you get a cargo container on a boat that takes like two weeks, it's, I think it's like only 800 bucks or something. So it's not that much more expensive. And yeah, it was just really easy. We just went to the airport in Bogota, picked up the bikes and then we were good to go.
SPEAKER_04:Yeah. That's what I paid also in Tijuana recently, a hundred bucks a month. You took care of it. They put the charger on. and that's around what I'm paying also shipping when I when I ship my bike to Europe I see it's about 1500 bucks and then by air it's about 1800 bucks and that's you know crossing the ocean so yeah it makes perfect sense plus you have a reputable team that's that's handling it and they understand motorcycles and it sounds like a white glove service which is great
SPEAKER_02:oh i was just gonna say i had a friend ship his van on a cargo container down to south america and he had like the whole thing looted and lost a bunch of stuff and we just didn't want to deal with any of that actually make a really good point
SPEAKER_04:that with air cargo it's a little a bit of a more professional environment that to put it politely, you guys did a lot of miles on those DR six fifties. Are you happy with your choice or would you choose something else?
SPEAKER_02:No, honestly, that's the, I think that's the perfect bike for what we want to do. Um, we could have gone like with like a KTM, uh, like, uh, we, we actually ran into a friend who was riding a, uh, KTM 500 EXC and he had ridden it from Germany. And then we met him in Columbia. Um, and that bike was really nice and actually I think Jonah actually when we got back from the last trip he bought one out in LA and I think I'm probably going to buy one too but the problem with those bikes is the parts are much harder to find like the DR has been the exact same for like 20 some years so and it's kind of just like as Jesse says it's like the tractor of motorcycles so pretty much anything we like we can have so we can bring simple parts to fix most things and then if there is something that needs something like like more advanced most mechanics will be able to work on it um and it's it's a little bit heavy but it's like it's also solid on the highway when we need it to be like i i really do think for a trip like this it's the perfect bike i think yeah the biggest the biggest reason being that it's easy to repair in these places where if we had a ktm or something like that it'd be a lot harder to get parts
SPEAKER_04:one of our sponsors is a tour company in columbia and their most popular bike that they rent is a DR650. So it seems to be appropriate for the area as well. And really the only trouble you guys had were flat tires. So how many flat tires do you think you've had and how great are you at changing them?
SPEAKER_02:You'd be shocked at how not fast we are still at this point. I have no clue how many flat tires that we've had, but we usually get a few per trip each. I think this trip was the first time, this most recent one in South America, I don't think I got a flat, which is crazy. We had other other flats but yeah and we we have a big like like a lot of people in the comments are like why are you not running tubeless tires but the thing is like if we pop a tubeless tire and we're in the middle of nowhere like there's we would rather have a tire that we can patch repair and maybe it'll take a little bit of extra time we'd rather have something that we know will work even if it's more effort than something that if it goes like you're just kind of screwed
SPEAKER_04:yeah everyone's got an opinion until they're stuck in the advantages to both. And people will get into fistfights at bars about this. And we will leave it to smarter people to figure that out. But how do you summarize a trip like this? Has this been the biggest adventure of your life so far?
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, yeah, most definitely. Like, I've been super fortunate to do a lot of really cool traveling. Like me and Jonah, several years ago, we went to Mongolia and stayed with these nomadic families for like 10 days and done a lot of traveling in a lot of different places. But there's just something about being on a motorcycle that you just feel so much more in tune with the places that you're going like any temperature change you feel it any like rain you feel it you're like you're really in the environment and also it's I think you're just a lot more like open to things when you're not in a car like if you're in a car and you have this little cozy place that you can go and like hide from the world it's a lot different experience like when you're on a motorcycle you roll up to a town and if you stop you're instantly just out with everyone like people will come up to talk to you you'll talk to them and even like the amount of problems that we've had have led us to some of the most like amazing experiences meeting all these people that we never would have met otherwise so it's just yeah it's a completely different type of travel and yeah I mean the places that we've been able to see because we have motorcycles like I mean there's no way we'd ever be able to get there if we were driving a car or doing a van trip or something like that but Yeah, it's been really special.
SPEAKER_04:Everyone I talk to on the podcast always says the same thing, whether it's Charlie Borman with his old motorcycle breaking down and, you know, there's a team will show up because it's a vintage bike or if it's, you know, Ted Simon, I'm waiting under a tree because, you know, something great will happen. All these little interruptions on motorcycles seem to give us great access into the places we're visiting. And there's always a great story that comes of it. But, you know, our podcast is about motorcycles and this adventure is based on motorcycles and you know where did you start to learn to ride what was your first motorcycle
SPEAKER_02:back in high school or maybe it was end of middle school beginning of high school i got a old xr um and a lot of my friends had a lot of like 250s and just did a bunch of dirt riding like we'd go out to the track and do single track up in the mountains and stuff so that was the first bike that i ever had um and then uh yeah i think i had that thing for like four years or something and then i started traveling and then ended up up selling it so i kind of got out of riding motorcycles and i just missed it a ton so when we first started talking about this trip like i was really excited because i just absolutely loved riding um and yeah just i don't i kind of missed that little bike like after riding the really big one now um i miss having that little one to rip around the track and just doing like little lines up in the mountains that honestly with our bikes with all the luggage we just aren't it able to do right now.
SPEAKER_04:I'm going to ship my bike to Europe in October and I'll be bikeless here and I have an old man, giant GSA, but I will replace the bike on this side of the pond with a small little bike. You guys have really inspired me with that. I'm going to go ahead and add your movie, your series to my motorcycle film club on our webpage. And I'm also going to add it to our show notes. Maybe you can tell us where people can see your other work, your drone footage.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah. So just on YouTube, same place you can watch Southbound. We're just distributing it there right now. And yeah, it's on the same channel. So you can see like different travel films stuff like that um all my drone videos and also on instagram my handle is at mcgee i share a lot of more i share a lot more there um just like the everyday moments and stuff like that so
SPEAKER_04:yeah it's really great everyone should check it out i think there's that venn diagram of motorcyclists we like the drone footage and all that geeky stuff it's really awesome anything with adventure we're always excited to see and I just wanted to say that, you know, as an older guy, the teamwork and the friendship amongst you three is not easy to come by. So I hope you guys continue your adventures and I hope you recognize how rare this adventure is. And you guys, please come back and talk to us after you finish your next episode.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, that sounds great. I really appreciate talking with you and appreciate you having me on. All right, man. We'll see you again soon. Take care. You too.
SPEAKER_03:And we are back. Yes, we are. Aaron, you're doing a great job with these interviews. It also happens to be a lot easier when you are working with someone who is a professional.
SPEAKER_04:I met him in Aspen when we were doing some work down there and you know, we were just chatting about motorcycles because we had a bunch of bikes there and he's like, oh yeah, I'm heading down to Mexico and we're going to, we're going to do it every few years. Sorry, every few, we're going to do it once a year and we're going to do a few weeks every year and we'll just ditch the bikes whenever we're finished our three, four week stint on the bikes. I thought it was a really cool concept. And then a year later I saw his video and I go, wow, he's actually doing it. So I reached out and I said, let's, let's have a chat about it.
SPEAKER_03:I guess right after you had done the interview, I watched the, the first one. And then this morning I actually watched the The second one, you know, I'm on vacation. I did watch it at 1.25 speed, and it's still a comfortable listening speed, but it's great. And it was, what, 117? It was an hour, 17 minutes. It was a great full-length feature just to sit back and relax and chill out. So that was quite nice. There's a couple of things that really stuck out for me. And one of them is that if you treat people respectfully, then... you're going to get a long way. And these guys have respect in, um, you know, in droves, right? So they are extremely respectful. They take in the culture and, uh, and they're just nice guys. So they, you know, they didn't get into any trouble. They got into a couple of, you know, like a couple of sketchy situations with the, uh, the, uh, as you said, with the interview with the, um, the woman's rights, uh, parade, a lot of anger there. And then also with the drug cartel was, they just wanted to make sure that they weren't filming, you know, them in that, in that particular area.
SPEAKER_04:Sure. And if you were to ride across America, you would, you would get into trouble too once in a like the fact that they had these little dr650s they assembled them with you know less than perfect parts to get going and they destroyed them and then moscow moto came in and goes guys stop with this nightmare let me send you some gear and uh and then they're they're all better off for it so but they went and they didn't really have a plan they didn't really know what they're doing and they made it so you know everyone stopped whining and you're never going to have the perfect bike and just go out and do it and you're going to survive and it's going to be an awesome adventure
SPEAKER_03:yeah i have the same gear that they um I was really happy to see that the... the Moscow gear that they have been given. It's the same gear I put on the, on the Tenere 700. I love that stuff. And he made a comment in the second one. It's like, this gear is so easy to take off and on. And every time I'm someplace and I pull it off, people just look at me and they go, man, that's so nice. It is easy to take off and put back on.
SPEAKER_04:Yeah. So I used to have a set of those bags for my GSA for going off road. And, you know, I just don't really do that much anymore. And I've switched back to the hard bags because if I'm camping at the hotel or checking into a cabin, I can just open the bags and pull the liner bags out and then the dirt doesn't come inside. So there is no perfect solution. But for me right now, when I'm doing less off-roading or if I'm doing a section of off-pavement throughout the day, I still prefer the hard bags, but I'm not doing anything silly anymore. I'm not dropping the bikes. Everyone's seen my pictures of me destroying bikes. You know, that's just not my thing anymore. But those young guys, they're out there getting it. And I think it's fun to watch. That's for sure.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah. I thought it was a smart decision too, that they all bought the same bike so they could carry limit the number of tools they need and also limit the number of spares because what's the chance that both three bikes or two bikes for that matter break a a shift lever on the same day.
SPEAKER_04:Yeah. And I think it's great that they actually carry those few levers now instead of having to jerry-rig it and get home. So yeah, good for them. Yeah. And I'm looking forward to talking to them again when the third episode drops.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah. One of the things that you and I talk about, I think in our last episode, we're like talking about doing a through hike. You're like, yeah, we're going to do a through hike. And in the first episode, he talked about one of the most rewarding things they actually did was one of these hikes. And they hadn't planned on it. They did it in like, you know, training shoes. Um, but they did it and they, um, and in episode two, since they had such a good time in the first one in episode two, they actually hiked a volcano. I won't, uh, I won't say where, but, uh, I don't want to spoil it, but it was quite cool.
SPEAKER_04:Yeah. And it's just, just did it on a whim and you know, that's what you do when you're young. You're like, ah, let's go hike this volcano. Okay. And you just, and you just go do things, which is, which is awesome.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, that's cool. Um, and then they store their bikes for 11 months and then they come back and then they ride them for four. So the last time it was, um, I thought that was quite cool. They met a guy who set him up with the company because it was at the north end of the Darien Gap. or shall I say the west end of the Darien Gap, but on the north side of Darien Gap. And then they were gonna come back and the third episode was gonna be the other side of the Darien Gap south.
SPEAKER_04:Yeah, and that company, I forget the name of it, but that company has a good reputation. And I've spoken to a lot of people that have used that company, even with like trucks and four by fours and other forms of transportation. So they are a reputable group for handling that specific mission and they do it well.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah. Episode two, they actually show that. They show the name of the company outside setting up and they give it a reference. So if you want to figure out who that is, if you're planning on doing a trip like that, go check them out. One of the things that's interesting, and it's a red thread that runs through every single one of these episodes. interviews or stories or anyone you talk to is that there's a red thread and he summarizes it really really nicely he says there is just something about being on a motorcycle that you feel so much more in tune with the places that you are going end quote and the problems that they encounter lead them into meet people that they would not have met otherwise and finally the motorcycle gives them access to places that they would not have been able to access had they been on anything other than say foot or horse so that's the red thread we hear throughout is that it gives some access to the culture that you just wouldn't get another way.
SPEAKER_04:Yeah, for sure. People want to come up and talk to you. Once that pane of glass is removed, once that cage of the car is removed, people for some reason will come up and talk to you. And I think also the regular person in these third world countries are on two wheels. So you kind of relate that you're both on the same mode of transportation and there's some interest. There's like a professional interest in, oh, that looks different than mine. Let's talk about that bike you're run because we're all on, we're all on the same thing.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah. It's, it's also quite cool that, and this is same thing from Alspeth Beard. anyone we've spoken to and they say when something goes wrong that's when the adventure begins and on bikes these bikes that they're running something's always going wrong quite often it's in the only flat tires sometimes within a within a you know within 30 meters of the last flat tire but nonetheless that's when the adventure begins when they didn't expect it to go a certain way and then they sort of mean people that they normally if they just ridden past them and hadn't stopped and never would have met those people
SPEAKER_04:and listen if they could bring you a cold beer while you're fixing your tire that that even works out better
SPEAKER_03:it's even better if you're drinking a cold beer while they're fixing your tire. Just
SPEAKER_04:saying. Right. That never works. That never seems to be the way for me.
SPEAKER_03:Hey, speaking of travel, I did some interviews. If you'll think back to the episode that we did about school, And I think it was, I don't know, the seventh interview in, I talked to, and I'm not going to get it right in Danish, but her name, if you're an English speaker, is Dorothy Krogh. And anyway, she just left for a seven-week adventure to ride her DRZ 400 Suzuki, big tank tricked out for some off-road backcountry adventures in Australia for seven weeks. Yeah. Shout out to her. Be safe. Have fun. And we'll talk to you when you get back.
SPEAKER_04:Absolutely. I'm jealous. That's really cool.
SPEAKER_01:Ladies and gentlemen, can I please have your attention? I've just been handed an urgent and horrifying news story. And I need all of you to stop what you're doing and listen. Cannonball!
SPEAKER_05:Hey, Cannonballers, thanks for subscribing to our podcast. We appreciate it. If you're not a cheap Canadian and want to buy us a coffee, head on over to buymeacoffee.com. Or better yet, buy us a case of Sweet Ass Craft IPA. We'll list it on patreon.com. Links are in the show notes. Now, back to the riveting podcast in progress.
SPEAKER_03:Aaron, is there any ADV Cannibal Rally news you'd like to share with us?
SPEAKER_04:There is. I know we're over time, so I'll just rip through it here. So I posted for competitors a all-in-one GPX file, which can be used for Garmin or whatever app you're using. So in that GPX file, it has all the segments for each day, the optional off-road segments, and it has the checkpoints all in one file. So don't go enter your checkpoints in manually. I saw someone doing that. That's really cool that you're doing that, but you can just grab the one GPX file and you can pull it into whatever, you know, whether you're using Basecamp or an app, it's all in one. It's super easy. And I wanted to mention shipping. We have a couple of people have canceled. So 38 dropped out, number 20 dropped out, number 21 dropped out. So there's some shipping spots available. So if you're looking for shipping, please reach out to me and let's welcome number 32. Roberto is from Asheville, North Carolina, and he's on a suite 1200 GS. Very nice. Welcome, welcome. Yeah. And let's talk about 2026. So Cary Label has signed up. for 2026 from North Carolina. And he's on his Triumph Tiger 1200 Rally Pro, which is a badass machine. Hunter is back and he has signed up for 2026. And we all know he's on his trusty F900 GSA.
SPEAKER_03:Very nice. Welcome back, Hunter.
SPEAKER_04:And I just quickly want to ask, some people have been asking about the Checkpoint Rally app. That is a scorekeeping app for the ADV Cannonball Rally or other rallies. And how does it work? There's nothing for you to do. So just download and install the app, keep it up to date. And when you check into the rally after you've signed the waiver and promise not to sue me when you drive off a cliff, you simply get a token. It's a little code. You will enter it into the app and then you never have to touch it again. So there's nothing for you to learn how to use except for open it, leave it open and enter that token into the app.
SPEAKER_03:And that's it. What if I accidentally shut it down right before I cross the finish line?
SPEAKER_04:And you're a Muppet.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah. Fair enough. Now everyone knows Aaron.
SPEAKER_04:Yeah. You know, it's funny because in our regulations, I say to cover my ass is that you should have a separate phone running the scoring app, have the continuously powered, in other words, recharging all time and open, and then set your phone, your iPhone up to never close. Just get a cheap iPhone. And that's the reason why. So even during testing the problems we've had are not my fault by the way there's one problem is the common one is they'll install the app enter the token and then immediately when the the phone asks you the os asks you not my app but the os asks you would you like to grant gps access to your device and they freaking click no i'm like you moron this is the purpose of this freaking app is to have is to have access and then it'll just stop working like your app is crap i can know you're crap because you you you denied access to the GPS for the GPS app. So I think it's just our inclination to deny access to our very important, you know, GPS location. And then the next thing they do is they deny access to notifications. And then when they drive through a checkpoint, they're like, it didn't tell me. I'm like, well, because you told it, you couldn't give you notifications, you Muppet. And then, and then the third thing that happens is after a few days, Apple will ask you, this app has been gaining access in the background to your GPS data. Would you like to continue granting it access? And then everyone's like tinfoil hat response is no. And then it stops working. I'm like, okay, well then it's not my fault. Like you've denied access to it. Like, you know, I can't help you with this. And then they're calling your app doesn't work. So no, you don't work. So anyways, and then the fourth thing that's happened is some of our testers have been, let's call it advanced users, right? And they were running it as part of a suite of apps. And then they would wake up in the morning, open the app and they throw it in the background. Okay. It does work in the background, but every once in a while they'd forget to open it or they would close it by accident and then it stopped working. So that was another. So that's why we simply have that rule, a cover CYA rule, which is just have it on a separate device because even these advanced users were closing it by accident. So anyways, those are all the failures and you'll notice that none of them are a programming failure. or an app failure. They're all just user failures. So anyways, that's my rant about the GPS app.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, indeed, Arendt. I see you have some energy on that. I also know you did a lot of work to make sure that these things do work. And then these are things that because of global data privacy, et cetera, et cetera, the phone is required to ask you if you want to continue to do that. And as you say, your tinfoil hat response is, no, you cannot have access to my phone any longer. Why have you had access this far? Because you forgot that you said yes the first time because the instructions said, make sure you give it access. So these are great things that you've obviously now gotten your instructions.
SPEAKER_04:More than that, I won't give you the token to activate the app, I'm going to do that. When you come to check in, I'm going to set it up on your phone and I go, it's working and I'm going to prove it to you. Now, if it stops working, it's your problem. So, you know, I may be a little fired up about it, but I'm like, you know, I don't want any negative feedback because everyone at a rally loves a complaint. So I'm just getting it out of the way now saying it works. We know it works. I'm going to set it up for you. And if it stops to work, it's because of something that you've done.
SPEAKER_03:Right. And if it's and if it's something that you've done, you will quickly be referred to rule number one. and rule number...
SPEAKER_04:Rule number one is don't be a weenie. Rule number two is if you think of complaining, please refer to rule number one.
SPEAKER_03:It reminds me of the... There was a complaint card and it said... It's a complaint card. If you'd like to file a complaint, please fill out the information on the back. And it was like a little tick box.
SPEAKER_04:Right. That's exactly it. So anyways.
SPEAKER_03:All right. Hey, but, but the, uh, to close that point out and they did a lot of work on the app and then the testing that you did on it was bulletproof. So well done there. And it's up on Android now.
SPEAKER_04:It's on Android, but we know Android is, is inherently less stable. So if you choose to be like, I don't know, anti-Apple for some reason, and you choose to run an Android app, that That is your problem. Go for it. You do whatever you want. But if your Android crashes or the app crashes or the GPS stops working or whatever happens, that is your problem. But we feel really comfortable about the iOS app. I have been testing both. I have a Samsung tablet. I have a no-name brand Android phone that I keep with my GSA. I run software on that to reset my computer on my GSA. So I have them. But even just using them or even actually being a developer with the Google Play Store, it's even a nightmare. You would be surprised that it doesn't even work right. So the whole ecosystem is just less polished. So anyways, I know that's another rant. So I'm going to drink my beer and shut up.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, maybe we should both do that. And
SPEAKER_04:with that,
SPEAKER_03:anything else you'd like to attribute or are we at the end of your list?
SPEAKER_04:Here's my final contribution. Roll the outro.
UNKNOWN:Thank you.
SPEAKER_06:Thanks for listening to the ADV Cannonball podcast. Please give us a five-star review on your preferred podcast platform. That really helps us with the algorithm gods. All hail the algorithm gods. You can buy us a copy on buymecoffee.com slash ADV Cannonball or directly help save this sinking ship for the price of a pint at patreon.com slash ADV Cannonball. Follow us on all the socials with the handle at ADV Cannonball. If you'd like to send us a question or Thanks for listening. And remember, don't be an ADV weenie. Keep your right hand cranked and your feet on the pegs.
