Well, the moment we have been waiting for for nearly 2 years has finally arrived. Steve and I left Denver on Monday February 12th at about 5 in the evening. We were planning on leaving several hours earlier but it took a lot longer to leave than we estimated. It was pretty emotional as Steve said goodbye to his family and we both said goodbye to Mogulee. I have a few more days to say my goodbyes as my parents are meeting up with us in L.A.
After leaving Denver, Steve and I headed for Vail where we were meeting up with Kira and a photographer from the Vail Daily who is working on a story about the expedition. Kira is also a photographer who we met that will be joining on the expedition next month in Australia. After taking some pictures and eating some food, we hit the road bound for Las Vegas. It was a rough drive and with only about 45 minutes worth of sleep over the course of the last emotionally draining 24 hours, we were forced to pull over in the middle of Utah to rest. A few hours later at around 8 a.m. Vegas time we arrived and were surprised by our room mate Mark who secretly flew out with my girlfriend Karie (who flew out a day early) to surprise us. Our friend Lori was also there and we all spent a nice "low key" day together Vegas style.
About 1,000 miles into our trip around the world, we are now in L.A. where we are finalizing some things with sponsors, getting the final necessary paperwork to take the cars out of the country and reassessing the pile of gear that we threw in the back of the Tundra in a effort to get out of town as quickly as possible. We are here for a few days, getting the Sequoia and the Tundra ready for their 4 week journey across the Pacific and are then flying out of the country on Tuesday the 20th.
The last 3-4 weeks have been probably the busiest and most stressful in my entire life. I think Steve would agree that they have probably also taken a few years off off of our lives as well. We should have some time in the next few days to catch our breath and give everyone a full update, post some new links and sponsors on the website and finally show people that we are in fact driving actual Toyotas around the world since we have yet to put pictures of our sweet rides up.
