Over Memorial Day weekend, six buddies and I embarked on a 24-mile trek from the Grand Canyon’s North Rim to the South Rim via North Kaibab Trail to Bright Angel Trail. The trek took us deep down into the Canyon to the famous Phantom Ranch before we hit the lowest point and crossed over the Colorado River at the bottom of the Canyon. The photo above is of the group at the start of the journey. We started our journey from the North Rim at roughly 5:15am with the sun already up. Luckily the canyon walls kept us in the shade for the first couple hours of the journey.
The trek had its literal ups and downs, but unlike most hikes, the Rim to Rim journey starts with the easy downhill portion. That leaves the toughest most grueling stretch of the journey, the uphill, for the end of the day when you are at your most tired. I’m happy to say all seven of us made it, but it wasn’t always pretty. Blisters, sore muscles, and sunburns were plentiful and a couple out of the group suffered even worse with some cramps and dizziness towards the end. At a snail’s pace compared with our downhill rate of speed, we crawled up the steep canyon walls of the South Rim, mostly in direct sunlight, to finish the journey just an hour or so before sunset.
All in all, it was a heck of an adventure and no matter how terrible some of us felt at the bottom of the canyon we were all happy and proud to have conquered the task we had set before ourselves! I am thankful for the good weather on the journey, the good friends, and even for the good and bad times. Memories were made! God is good!
Within 3 days of returning to the United States from my motorcycle trip, I was fortunate enough to attend a Detroit Lions game with some soldiers from my unit for their military appreciation game! It was my first NFL game and it was a stressful one! Fortunately, in classic Lions fashion, they scored 17 points in the last 2:59 to win the game against the Bears.
Shortly after that, I met up with my family in Kentucky at an Airbnb in Kentucky for a Thanksgiving get-together. This was the first time I got to see my different nieces and my nephew interact together. It was so fun to watch the older girls playing with their younger cousins! We ate a lot of good food and watched a lot of football and had a good time solving puzzles and playing games. Our Airbnb was also close to the Ark Encounter museum which features a full-size re-creation of Noah’s ark. It was very interesting to walk inside the ark looking at the sheer space of the structure and learning about how they may have fed all the animals.
I got to spend some time in Saginaw organizing all of my things and searching hard for an apartment before my move back down to Arizona. I got to go to the jiu-jitsu gym for a couple of weeks which was fun. I also had an army meeting during this time so my road trip beard and unkempt hair had to come to an end.
Peak beardFor future reference…
I joined a group of friends last minute heading to Chicago for the weekend to watch the Lions vs the Bears. I didn’t have a ticket, but I decided to join the trip. I figured I had already seen the Lions vs Bears so if things didn’t work out for a ticket I wouldn’t be too upset. I planned to go hang out and watch the game with a college buddy if there wasn’t an easy/cheap way to go to the game. Before the game we all met up at a hotel in downtown Chicago on Saturday and got some Indian food and grabbed some cases of beer. We played some card games and it quickly turned into old times with a hint of group therapy as we processed things that had happened in high school with our now more developed maturity. Needless to say, it was a fun night! The next morning we grabbed some food at a local breakfast spot. Then we started walking to the game and I still didn’t have a ticket or much of a plan. I was going to see what the ticket scalpers had to offer. As we got closer to the stadium I saw my first scalper and I stopped to engage him. He said I could get one ticket for $100. For reference, all my friends paid $150 for their tickets. As I tried to do some bartering the scalper noticed my group of friends had stopped to wait for me to see if I could secure a ticket. When the scalper noticed this he said, “Wait, are you with this group?” I told him I was and he said if you were with a big group just have one guy scan all the tickets and follow behind them. The ticket taker won’t count. I asked if he was serious and his buddy chimed in, “1000% nobody will check! You will definitely get in.” So with his 1000% guarantee, all my buddies and I agreed it was worth a shot. Sure enough, I walked right in behind them as the last guy. We got into the stadium and found their seats along with an empty one right next to them, a seat that wasn’t offered on Ticketmaster! It honestly wasn’t that surprising that our scheme worked based on previous sporting event ticket-taker encounters, but it did seem too easy.
Unfortunately, the Lions lost, but it was a fun atmosphere at Soldier Field and at the very least I didn’t pay to watch them lose. Feeling slightly guilty that I scammed my way into the stadium I used my saved cash to pay for the whole group to get some famous Chicago-style pizza at Lou Malnati’s. The pizza was great and it was a good time. After that, the group split and we went our separate ways. Two of my friends and I headed back to Detroit in a rented Tesla causing us to stop for a couple of charges. On one of our stops, we walked to a nearby Five Guys and I ordered a shake. The girl at the register put in the order and then went to make it. As I tried to pay with my card the card machine appeared to have processed the payment immediately. Almost too quick… Next up both of my buddies ordered shakes and they both received receipts after they paid. At this point, I realize I certainly didn’t pay. My buddy Chad is all mad that things keep going my way and I keep getting free stuff. To appease Chad and my conscious I go back up to the register and say that I don’t think my card worked and I didn’t pay. The guy behind the counter immediately responded, “Don’t worry about it.” Chad was even more mad after that haha! Should I have snuck into a Bears game? Probably not, but I can’t deny my good fortune, and it makes me laugh to see my friend’s jealousy of it as it unfolds in front of them!
Empire State BuildingBrooklyn BridgeMe and my buddy Joe posing with Welch’s grape juice in honor of our buddy Welch who couldn’t make the trip.Lady LIBERTY!!!
The weekend following my Chicago excursion I flew to NYC to hang out with my buddy Joe, an army buddy. He had a nice studio apartment in the Lower East Side of Manhattan. He also had an expert read on all of the top local restaurants. The highlight of the trip was the variety and quality of food we ate. I may have had some of the best Indian food of my life, delicious NY-style pizza, sushi, shwarma, bulgogi in Korean town, pork dumplings in Chinatown, and meat on a stick from the street vendors. I was in heaven!
We did a lot of walking around the city. We visited the 9/11 memorial, the MET museum, the National Museum of the American Indian, the Empire State Building, the Rockefeller Center, the Brooklyn Bridge, and a bunch of other neat places. To me, NYC is a great place to visit, but I would find it a little hectic to live in. The thing that I liked about it was the diversity. There were so many different types of people from all over the world living together. On my last day there we went to the Brooklyn Bridge and I got to see the Statue of Liberty and it was really cool to think about how my great-grandparents came to America from Europe and as they entered the “land of opportunity” one of the first things they probably saw was that statue. What a blessed country we live in!
Immediately following my trip to NYC, I flew to Phoenix and headed down to Casa Grande, AZ to move into my apartment. I only spent two full days moving in and scrounging Facebook Marketplace for furniture to get it ready before I returned after Christmas and immediately headed back to work. I think I made some good progress for the short amount of time I had. I’m excited to get back to Arizona and start living in a somewhat normal routine for the first time in a long while.
After the quick trip to Arizona, I returned to Michigan and gathered up the rest of my possessions and loaded them into my truck, and headed to my parents. I watched the children’s Christmas program that I grew up doing on Christmas Eve. Following church on Christmas day, I headed to the west side of the state for family Christmas. I got to spend two full days eating good food, opening presents, and most of spending time with family. Then I hit the road early in the morning for my 30-hour drive back to Arizona. I made it all the way to Pratt, Kansas the first night. The second day I made it back running on fumes and happy to finally be stable in one spot for a while.
New Year’s Eve and Resolutions
After spending a couple of days of full effort unpacking and getting my apartment situated I headed to church on the morning of Christmas Eve. It was super nice to see everyone that I had met 16 months previously before I left for my army deployment. The church looked like it had grown too! The sermon message talked about how we never really know what will happen. Life is crazy and things can blindside you. You might make plans and instead, your entire world could get upended by world pandemics, war, natural disasters, and other terrible things. One thing that is certain is God will remain by our side through it all and he has a better hope for our future than anything this world could offer.
After church, I continued my organizing and unpacking. Toward the evening I decided I would go for a run up a mountain to watch the sunset. I knew of one mountain park in town where I could do this, but it was further away so I decided to check out a new one closer to where my apartment is. I got there and realized there wasn’t any actual path up to the top of the mountain. With sunset approaching I didn’t have time to change my plans so I decided to hop some fences and scramble up the rocky mountainside to do what I set out to do in the first place. It was the last day of an incredible year for me after all. I had to end it in appropriate fashion.
I climbed slowly up the mountain side and as I did I thought about what I wanted my resolutions for the new year to be. I tried to keep up my pace because otherwise I wouldn’t make it to the top by sunset. At a certain point, I decided I wasn’t going to make it and even if I did it would be much too dark to climb down safely without a headlamp or flashlight. As I decided to cut my loses and stop I turned around and saw that I already had an amazing view of the desert and surrounding mountains! I had been so focused on climbing to the peak that I hadn’t even noticed. Immediately I stopped and prayed to God and thanked him for an incredible year filled with experiences beyond my wildest imagination. I started the year as an infantry platoon leader leading patrols in Syria and meeting with tribal militia leaders on the banks of the Euphrates River. After that, I rode my motorcycle through 13 countries on two continents. Through it all I was able to come back safe and to see my family for the holidays. Words can’t describe how blessed I felt in that moment. With that filling my heart, as cliche as it sounds, I decided my resolutions would be to enjoy the journey. Life moves fast and if you spend all your time starting up at whatever peak you’re chasing you’ll miss out on the view. As I start a new chapter and a new year in Arizona I am looking forward to routine and more importantly enjoying where I’m at. After all, only God knows what lies ahead in 2024.
Since leaving La Paz I’ve run into several difficulties. For example, in Bolivia, a lot of gas stations do not sell to foreigners. The gas stations that do sell to foreigners do so at a much higher rate than the government subsidized rate for the locals. This was extremely frustrating and caused me to use my backup fuel can at least once.
Waiting for gas…Black market exchange rate
Problems followed me as I entered Argentina. I unknowingly entered Argentina during one of the busiest tourist holidays of the year and many people were traveling. That compounded with corruption and an upcoming election led to several gas stations being completely out of gas. I used my spare fuel can to barely make to a gas station that still had gas. Even then I had to wait in line for over an hour just to fill my tank. Soon after this, I realized the ATMs only exchange at the “official” government rate of 350 Argentinian pesos to 1 USD. Exchanging on the black market yielded me approximately 935 Argentinian pesos to 1 USD. Just another further complication in trying to navigate the political landscape.
Sad day…UN supporting the elections
Things took a turn for the worse the morning after a 14-hour hard ride the day before. The bike wouldn’t start. The oil level was super low. After filling it and getting some help from the mechanic above I got it pop started. It felt a little off, but it was running and the more I rode it around the more oil got spread throughout the engine components and the better it sounded. I thought I was in the clear. But after only a couple hours of riding I had lost most of my oil out of the air box bleeder hose. I filled and pop started it one more time to get myself out of the middle of nowhere and to a town with a mechanic. The mechanics there knew right away that it was probably an issue with the piston. If that was the case it would explain oil getting past a damaged piston. Not what I wanted to hear… I knew this could be trouble.
I was pretty frustrated when the mechanic didn’t show up until 1pm because he was apparently arguing with the local police to get his own personal motorcycle unimpounded. As soon as he returned from that he promptly went on a 2 hour lunch. I was pretty mad. I just sat at this shop all day and finally by 7pm we got the motor head off and found the cylinder and piston were indeed damaged. They would need to be replaced. Unfortunately for me, my motorcycle isn’t sold in Argentina. However, there is another Honda, the CBR300, which shares the same cylinder and piston. He ordered these parts off of what I would compare to a cross between Amazon and eBay. It’s a pretty common website in a lot of South American countries. He apparently didn’t have an account for this website and had to have his friend or ex-wife or something order the parts for him. He told me the parts would take 4 or so days to get here. Not ideal, but at least I’m getting the parts. On the day the parts are supposed to show up they don’t… The mechanic makes some calls and we wait one more day, which is infuriating to me because I don’t have a lot of free time. The next morning he tells me the parts don’t exist because they are out of stock in Argentina. I was fuming. If he actually had an account for this website he could have ordered the parts himself and likely would have found this out before waiting for the delivery date to pass.
Essentially back at square one with a bunch of burned time I immediately packed up my backpack and grabbed the damaged cylinder and piston and hopped on a night bus to Buenos Aires. I arrived at 6:30am and immediately started walking to get myself in the vicinity of all the biggest motorcycle shops to begin my search when they opened. I didn’t have a lot of luck. One shop said they might be able to replace it and they drove me to a machine shop to get their opinion. It was far from a sure thing and it would be about a week until it could get completed. I kept searching for the new replacement parts in the meantime. No luck! It seems they don’t exist in Argentina and Argentina is notorious for a long and frustrating import process. Part dealers were quoting 30-60 days, which I don’t have, to get me the parts I needed. Eventually, I settled on a racing shop that seemed to think they could repair my damaged cylinder and then modify a piston from a local Honda XRE300 to use on my Honda CRF300L. They seemed pretty smart and they spoke English which helped figure out a plan. They called my mechanic back at the breakdown location and ran him through the plan and ensured he would be able to properly adjust the engine to receive the modified piston. Sounds like it might just work! So I left the damaged parts with them so they could immediately start working on it. In the meantime, I continued to search and came up empty-handed on finding new parts. Waiting it is…
While this isn’t the solution or timing I wanted, I have to admit I wouldn’t have ever come to Buenos Aires if it wasn’t for this. Buenos Aires has been a wonderful break from the hard traveling and quick pace on the motorcycle. I’ve met some interesting characters at my hostel ($10 a night) here. I met a Jewish Brazilian who speaks 10 languages and is going to medical school here. I met a Russian who was a sniper in the reserves but deserted when the war with Ukraine broke out. Some very worldly and cultured conversations about what is going on in the world right now. It’s been interesting to hear about the election happening here as well. It’s like watching an alternate reality unfolding as I put myself in the Argentinian’s shoes.
While I have been waiting for the parts to be repaired I have been thinking a lot about how to make some lemonade out of all these recent lemons. I decided to go to a soccer game at the famous La Bombonera stadium in Buenos Aires and I couldn’t have made a better decision.
Tickets normally cost around $160 for foreigners trying to go since the tickets are only available to club members and are always sold out. I figured I would see if I could find myself a deal. I found a couple options online, but I ended up haggling a Facebook marketplace guy down to $60. When I went to pickup the ticket it turned out to just be this young kid. He was being really weird at McDonalds, where we met, about the ticket. He wanted to be very inconspicuous and said the fans want to rob him for the ticket and honestly I thought he was fun of crap, but I grabbed the ticket and gave it a quick look, and from my very limited knowledge it seemed legit. It was a plastic card with the game information printed on it which matched up form what I had seen on the internet. So I gave him the money and grabbed the ticket and left. I should have looked at the card more closely, but I’ll admit I bought into his inconspicuous behavior. Then I rode the bus back to the hostel. At the hostel, I looked at the ticket and realized the year on it had been scratched and was written poorly in ink a 3 over where it probably used to say 2022. I’m assuming I bought last year’s ticket…
After buying a $6 jersey from a street vendor I went to the game anyway and the old ticket got me past all the different police checkpoints on the way into the stadium. Then when I had to actually scan the ticket for the ticket takers the ticket predictably failed. I showed it to the ticket takers and they told me what I already knew… that it was fake.
So I stood around for a while thinking they might take pity on me and one lady tried, but they couldn’t do anything so I decided I would sneak in. Everything was completely barbed wire all around. I suppose the locals here are probably more desperate to watch their home team than me. I gave up pretty quickly on sneaking in. I decided I would wander around to all the different entries and try my luck at each one. At the next one I approached, I scanned again and showed them I got scammed and they felt bad, but still, they couldn’t do anything. I wasn’t going to give up. So I just stood there because if I left I definitely wasn’t going to go to the game. I stood there long enough for the ticket takers who saw my fake ticket to bond with me. Then some dude came along and had an extra ticket and the ticket takers immediately yelled for me and the dude with the extra ticket scanned me in all the way into the fan section!!
Worth the price of entry alone…Met some drunk fans who wanted to be friends!
The fan section was absolutely wild! A much different sporting experience than I’ve ever experienced. The fans were singing and bouncing up and down and taking their shirts off. People were shoving and pushing each other in good fun. It was hilarious to just people-watch! The area was actually pretty bad for actually watching the game. I had a lot of fun despite the 0-0 score because the atmosphere was just that fun! At the end, I met a drunk friend group and I took a photo with a girl from their group. They were a lot of fun. What an absolutely wild experience! First, I wasn’t even supposed to be in Buenos Aires and then I bought a fake ticket and I still got in and had this amazing experience! God must watch me sometimes and think, “This idiot…” and then bless me anyway!
We will see what happens next. I’m praying the motorcycle repaired part longshot works out and I can take it easy and finish out the final leg of this journey and make it home for Thanksgiving! God is good!
