Well, our 5-month adventure on a motorcycle through eight countries came to abrupt end a few days ago, when Hermes, the BMW we rented from Romania, was STOLEN in Palermo Italy !!!.

As we have come to find out.. this is quite common. It doesn’t matter whether you lock or chain your bike – if they want it, they know how to get it. And foreigners (and out of country license plates) are easy targets. Never a fun situation, but less so when this was is your only mode of transportation– and all of your future stays have already been booked in advance – based upon using the bike to get there.

But since we try to find the silver lining when things go south, we are thankful for the help of our lovely AirBNB host who spent most of the day driving us to different police stations in order to find the right one. And translating in order for us to get a police report.

Many times, when we’re only staying for a couple of days, we leave all of our luggage and clothing in the buckets on the bike, but because we needed to reorganize, we brought most everything in with us, so we only lost a few replaceable items and some food.

We were also thankful it happened the first day rather than the morning we were to catch a ferry to Sardinia. We had to decide: do we take the ferry to Sardinia WITHOUT Hermes, and then another ferry to Naples? Or do we can the whole thing. We decided to carry on to Sardinia, and that is where we are now, and that will be shared shortly. But we DID need to cancel our Amalfi Coast leg and instead go to the destination where we’d be the longest, so we could catch our breaths; that will be Tirana, Albania, which we booked for a month. After that, we’re still working out details

Kat was never fully on board with this trip since the only bike we could get this year was much larger than we’ve had before ..and her concern for our safety was valid. So, who knows? Maybe this was a blessing in disguise ..keeping us, from what could been much worse. Sometimes you just have to let things go, and it all works out the right way.