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June 26, 2013
Postcards from Nowhere: Peoria to Panama
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Above: A self portrait of me driving down the PanAmerican Highway through Panama, immediately after crossing the border from Costa Rica.
The woman I loved more than any woman I ever met has left me, so I decided that I need to go on the biggest road trip ever to try to clear my head. Over the last month or so, I drove my KTM 990 Adventure from Moline, Illinois to Panama City, Panama.
The bike I drove is a 2010 KTM 990 Adventure that I bought new off the showroom floor in Moline, Illinois. I purchased the bike as a Christmas present to myself six months ago, and just told them to hold it for me until I could come and pick it up.
Jen was wrapping up her freshman year, I wrapped up my project in San Francisco. Carrie decided that she was done with me and started going out with a new guy. So, all of the sudden, I went from commuting between SF, Denver, and Jackson, to pretty much having nothing to do with my time except to focus on how bored and lonely I was.
Instead of sitting around and stewing in my misery, I decided to hit the road on a motorcycle adventure I've always planned on taking, but never really found the time or the impetus to actually initiate.
These photos were all captured over a one month period in May-June of 2013 where I drove the bike from Moline, Illinois, to Panama City, Panama, a journey of over 5,600 miles. The photos were all shot on a Canon EOS 50D with one of the following lenses:
- EF-S 17-85mm f/4.5-5.6 IS USM image-stabilized, ultra-sonic telescopic zoom
- EF 100-400mm f/4.5-5.6L IS USM image-stabilized, ultra-sonic telescopic zoom
This trip is broken into two different slideshows.
The first slideshow covers the trip through Illinois, Missouri, Arkansas, Tennessee, Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas, Mexico, Belize, Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua.
The first slideshow starts out with Stay by Rihanna, one of the many songs that Carrie used to sing to me in the car, followed by Today Has Been Okay by Emiliana Torrini. I heard this song on Grey's Anatomy in Nicaragua (I think) and liked it. The third song is A-Team by Ed Sheeran, another favorite of Carrie's because we convinced her that the lyrics included the following: "A bee stung my neck and made me scream..I peed in a jar of cold cream...", etc.
The images in the first slideshow are compiled into a 90 Meg (9:20) Adobe Flash slideshow (Panama1.swf) that you should be able to open and view with any browser (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, etc.). To view the slideshow, just click on the photo above. If you want to view the slideshow as a Windows executable, you can play this version (Panama1.exe), and it allows you to play, pause, skip forward, backwards, etc.
The second slideshow covers the trip from Costa Rica to Panama.
The soundtrack for the second slideshow is Home by Philip Phillips.
The images are compiled into a 32 Meg (3:28) Adobe Flash slideshow (Panama2.swf) that you should be able to open and view with any browser (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, etc.). To view the slideshow, just click on the photo above. If you want to view the slideshow as a Windows executable, you can play this version (Panama2.exe), and it allows you to play, pause, skip forward, backwards, etc.
Image post-processing was done in Adobe Photoshop CS5 Extended. The slideshow was created using Imagematics Stillmotion Pro.
Click here to view the other slideshows.
Lyrics in the extended entry.
Posted by Rob Kiser on June 26, 2013 at 10:30 PM
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