We had a great week in Puerto Vallarta, chilling, trying to learn Spanish, scuba diving and not riding much, just as well as James almost got a police ticket for turning left at some traffic lights. He managed to charm them with his cheeky gringo ways and was let off scott free. As our ticket for the Stahlratte sailing ship is on 14th November from Carti, Panama, we're having to scoot through Central America and the rest of Mexico. We got caught up in the madn...

Obviously all came good in the end! The intrepid PieRats decided after much deliberation to ride back up Baja, sampling fish tacos in Guerrero Negro and dodgy quesadillas at Mana Espinosa's in El Rosario, some mega stop off for the Baja 1000, on the way back to the border. Ridiculously, it took only a short while in Tecate (home of the beer) to sort all our documents, no questions asked! We celebrated our non illegal alien status by finding one of the many auto/...

Hearing tales of border madness, we hit Calexico fairly early, and happily found the whole road leading to the border lined with brokers selling auto insurance and money changers. How easy! Sitting in an air con office we get a goodly 3 months for US$114, which is just as well really as there isn't a border! No passport control, no papers, nothing. All most odd. How do we get our TIP and FMT? Even the guard was vague when I asked him, and he waved us through, sa...

After waking in Roslyn with the tent covered in  ash, we decided to head to Mount St Helens to see the queen of volcanos. For those that weren't around then, on the 18 May 1980 the whole side of the mountain bulged and then blew, with the resulting ash cloud taking 15 days to circle the globe. It's an amazing and iconic site, with swathes of trees still blown from the blast. We went down into one of the lava tubes, all sparkling with a silvery shimmer and a cons...

Our entry into the U.S started with vampire and werewolf fun, via burgers at The Brick and the Little A'Le'Inn. We arrived by boat in Port Angeles on the Olympic Peninsula. It was a fairly barginacious $55, but foreign bikers beware, you do of course have the usual customs hoopla to deal with. We chatted to a couple on a Harley (Hello Carole and Kenny!), spotted orcas from the boat and grabbed a litre of Captain Morgan in the duty free shop, so our Chalice Well ...