February 01, 2014

by Cathy Liu in Mexico City, Mexico

Today is lunar New Year’s Day, and I started the day by telling my teammates that one way or the other, I’ll have fish on New Year’s Day. We’ve been on the road for 40 days, traveled roughly 4000 miles, according to our original itinerary, we should have been in Panama by now. Our ambulance broke down in Louisiana, Mike got seriously ill and was unsuited to travel, then it took us more than a week to resolve issues with our Jeep. We replaced fuses, circuit breakers, rear axle assembly, fuel pump assembly, broken tire, coolant sensor, and the catalytic converter, before this trip, my car always worked fine, I had no idea that a car could break down for so many reasons…

Despite all the unexpected problems and unforeseeable circumstances, my resolution for the new year is to finish this rally. During our long preparation process, there was never a doubt in my mind that I would go on this journey, but some people who also wanted to come along couldn’t launch with us due to various factors. Now that we are on the road, some of us might leave earlier because of time or other constraints, I still like to reach the southernmost tip of South America partly because I haven’t met my goals yet, partly because the troubles we encountered were nothing that we couldn’t handle.

I still haven’t seen the Amazon rainforest. My goal is to drive to the end of the world, and I still have thousands of miles to go.

Traveling on the road can’t be as comfortable as living at home. If I start with hardships such as my fingernails are not long and not well manicured, my list would go on pages and pages, instead of listing out all the things I gave up, I like to let everyone know that we have plenty of food to eat, we mostly stay in motels with running water and electricity, so far all the bathrooms are flushable, nobody has lost his/her temper, and while some teammates are getting thinner, I probably gained some weight.

By the time I finished writing this blog post, I had boiled instant noodles with peas and Beach Cliff Sardines in Louisiana hot sauce. I’ve accomplished my goal of the day, my resolution for the year will also be complete.

UPDATE: A few hours later, the team had dinner at Mexico City’s Chinatown, and I ordered a steamed fish =)