Hi all, myself ( Pete ) and a friend of mine, Tony have been planning a trip for nearly 5 years now and it is just round the corner. We’re doing this trip for us and to bring some awareness about the charity that family and close friends of Pete Banks, a ,son,friend and brother that passed away, have been working with over the past 7 years. Riders for health. www.riders.org . This trip was actually thought up by Tony, Pete's dad and he asked me to come along if I fancied it. I went away and had a think.....bike trip from Canada to Ushuaia for 6 months. Well I thought...I am not guaranteed to make retirement as this was when Tony wanted to go when he retired, so YES MATE!! definately coming!!!! It was quite far away at this point, so the trip only came up in conversation…. everytime we met up..lol. We started to look at different bikes, Yamaha's, KTM, Triumph,BMW. After looking into the requiremnets of what we wanted we settled on the XT660z tenere's. I managed to get one at the right money as I was going to use it to commute to work but Tony was holding off for a while as it wasn't needed at that time.
As the time has gone by we have looked into which area’s we are wanting to visit and how we we’re going to bring awareness of riders to the people that we meet on our travels. Now maps aren’t cheap are they!! Looked around in shops, online etc. Eventually we had to bite the bullet on some maps and just get them as they were needed. Brings me to the point of what you need on the trip, if you have deep pockets then the worlds your oyster as they say with all the gadgets that you can get for your bike, camping, shipping the bike or flying the bike, but as most of you who have done travelling or are about to the trip comes down to one thing. What’s your budget?
After we had decided on what our budget was and where we wanted to go, and a bit for contingency, we could decide on what year of bike we could go for. I went for a 09 tenere and Tony, after waiting to closer to the date of leaving came across a xt600z tenere from 1988, so he bought this with the idea of stripping it down and re-building it from scratch so he knew that everything on the bike was sound and he knew the life of all parts that were on it. My tenere only had just over a 1000 miles on the clock so was quite happy. I have now only got to 9000 miles, she will have a full service before we leave. I have upgraded the chain and sprockets to the D.I.D 520 ZVMX-110 chain because of the extra weight that is going to be on the bike and they guarantee the chain up to 25,000 miles. Which with the help of Tony changed last week.
Here’s my bike.

Here’s Tony’s Bike, nearly complete.





here's my bike.