Rubber Side Down: The Lowdown

Friday, February 8, 2013

The Lowdown

OK, so.

This guy:

...and this gal:

...joined forces several years ago and formed this amazing team:

And as the Gaijin Patrol, they have been cutting a streak of awesome all across the globe ever since (well, until recently, across a very specific few corners of the globe). In Osaka, we educated surly Japanese teens with only a few hundred pounds of crazy, a thimbleful of good sense, and exactly zero years of teacher training. We did battle with ogres, survived earthquakes, climbed motherfucking mountains of sand, avoided making eye contact with maids, got assaulted by children, found Happy Beach, rocked the roof off of various ghetto bars, and ate bugs one time and it totally wasn't an accident or anything, you guys, for real. Also, Tommy Lee Jones was there, though that may have been a dream.

At last, when our combined rockage threatened to shake The Big O into the sea, we left for the good of the land. Having saved our money carefully, we decided that the wisest course of action would be to invest it in further education to better our future career prospects and prepare for the children that we would one day bring into this world.

Then we said, "Nah, fuck it, let's buy some bikes."

And so the legend was born...

Having had little experience riding bikes since our idyllic childhoods in the Midwest, we were relatively new to bike camping. We had done a fair amount of reading in our apartment in Osaka, and as we studied Japanese and nursed our bruised bodies (children be violent), we dreamed of circling the globe like Travelling Two or Going Slowly. Realizing that it was far easier to drop everything and be full-time bike bums before having children than after, we decided there was no time like the present and no way like holyshitgorightnow. After all, though we were comfortable teaching in Osaka, there was little room for growth or challenge. Sure, we could have stayed longer, saved more money, played more gigs with Raku Three, studied more Japanese, but...well, that would have just been more of the same. So, clearly: bikes.

The first thing we did with our bikes was to educate ourselves in their maintenance and upkeep so as to better equip ourselves for world traveling. No, wait, first we put a bunch of sweet stickers on the bikes. Then the other thing. The next thing we did was to bike across Missouri, then bike from San Francisco to San Diego. There will be more written on this, but SPOILER ALERT WE MADE IT. And so, bikes sufficiently broken in, we flew back to Asia, never to return until we had kicked its ass.

The Plan, in short, is to bike around Asia until the money runs out or we get sick of traveling. Right now, we are still in Phase 1 of the Plan, which involves very few bikes. The reason for this break is that, as of press time, it is winter in much of the world, and thus far too cold for bike camping. So, to wait out the winter, we flew to Seoul to teach more childrens and make a little more cash to support our travel habits. Since winter still stubbornly has refused to end as of February, we thought we’d blow some of the vacation dough on a trip to the Philippines until it’s warm enough to return to Japan and The Plan, which, if you’ve been paying attention, is to bike around Asia until the money runs out or we get sick of traveling.

That about brings us up to speed, then. From here, there will be frequent posts about what we’re up to at the moment, periodically intercut with flashbacks to the last few months of travel. Expect photos, whimsy, and more analogies than you can shake a regulation stick at. But first, a sample of what else we’ve accomplished since our ogre-battling etc. days: