When life gives you lemons, go ride Lemonade!

The best-laid schemes o’ mice an’ men Gang aft agley, or so said the poet Robert Burns.  We are not making any hard and fast plans for more than a month in advance.  We may have learned our lesson (or maybe not).  

The good news is that Kathy has been released by the doctors and we can return to our trip.  As far as anyone can tell the chemo treatments were successful, but that is only a guess, no one knew if she really needed them in the first place.  They were done as an insurance against the possibility that the tumor "may" have released cells into her bloodstream.  She had some side effects but not as bad as we were led to believe they could have been.  The side effects lasted through the first week after treatment, then during the second week she would get to feeling like normal, then do it over again.  She is looking forward to feeling good for more than a few days at a time.

We have tickets for the flight to Lisbon from Portland, Oregon on the 26th of September, 2006, 13 days from my writing of this.  Our good friend in Lisbon, who has been looking after our GoldWing has sent us periodic updates about it telling us how lonely it is.  He once sent us a picture of it and some other bikes that were "visiting" it.  This is the longest (April through September) that I have gone without riding a motorcycle in many years!  I will have to learn all over again, and do it in downtown Lisbon traffic.  They don't drive any worse there than in the USA, just differently.

The plan is to spend a few days in Lisbon visiting the city and getting over jet lag and then heading north.  We want to go to the Intermot Expo show in Cologne, Germany that runs from the 11th to the 15th of October.  According to the computer program it should take 3 days to get there.  We plan on taking nearly 2 weeks.  We want to go through Porto, Portugal (see a friend or two) and then wend our way up the back roads through Spain, France, Belgium and into Germany.  After Intermot we will work our way up the Rhine river and over to Munich.  That is a month's plan and all there is to it.  After Munich we will follow the weather and be forced southward as it cools.  We will probably find an apartment in the south of Spain to spend the winter.  From there we can take trips around southern Spain and into Morocco.

Now on to our next trip.