North? Or South....?!

So our original plan was to drive to Panama, and as it sounded pretty complicated and expensive to ship south we were going to sell Elvis here and fly home. That plan had been out of the window for a while as we were so loving life out here, and we'd decided to drive back north to the states, store the van somewhere (possibly Jo's relatives in Arizona). We would then return another time with more funds and then ship from Mexico to South America for another big adventure.

As soon as we left our most southernly point (Johnny Fiestas!) a day started driving north we had pangs of regrets and started to reconsider...

We'd been looking into remotely registering the van in the US and it was a huge pain in the arse, plus the costs involved in insuring it when it was dormant there would quickly add up, and undoubtedly there would need to be repairs after years in the hot/cold extremes of that part of the world. We'd worked out we wouldn't be able to make it back home in time for Christmas, so had decided spring would be a good time to try and re-acclimatise to British weather.

We also thought that you never know what would happen in the future, and tearing yourself away from lives in the UK is never an easy thing to do, sooooo maybe we should make the most of the opportunity now.... We have at least 6 more months on the road and Panama is the normal jumping off point for South America. We'd also discovered that it wasn't going to be as expensive as we'd thought, and we luckily found a couple of aussie dudes to share a container with, which would half the costs.

The biggest downside to this decision was the fact we were due to meet my little sister in the Yucatan (Mexico) in early November, and we were so looking forward to seeing family again, as well as touring with her and Nick for a while. She helped make the decision easier by telling us not to spoil 6 months just for the sake of 2 weeks with them, but it was still a tough call.

So after much deliberating we finally decided - we were going back to South America!Read more