What are we actually getting into?

Once the flights were booked and my time off was approved, reality hit.

Hard.

Eight hundred miles. Actually… more than that. What did that even mean? How many miles would we need to ride each day? Where would we sleep? How remote was remote? And how much of this had we wildly underestimated?

At first, the questions came slowly. Then they snowballed.

How were we getting from the airport to our hotel with two massive bike boxes? Would a taxi even take us? Were we going to be assembling bikes in an airport parking lot and riding straight into the city? Would we have cell service down there—or be completely off the grid? And what about Spanish? We speak little to none, and these weren’t exactly tourist-heavy towns.

Then came the questions we hadn’t even considered at the beginning.

Our route ended in El Calafate, Argentina. What was the closest airport? We couldn’t travel with bike bags the entire way, so we’d have to pack our bikes into cardboard boxes at the end of the trip. But where do you even find bike boxes in a tiny mountain town? And once we had them, how were we supposed to get both ourselves and two enormous bike boxes to the airport?

And that was just the logistics.

What about food? Would there be grocery stores along the route? Where would we sleep—campgrounds, wild camps, hostels? How often could we resupply? What happened if weather delayed us for days at a time?

None of these questions had clear answers at first. They just kept piling up, slowly turning excitement into equal parts anticipation and quiet panic.

But somewhere in that chaos was the realization that this wasn’t just a bike trip—it was a full system to build. Training, gear, logistics, language, timing. Every piece mattered.

So we started breaking it down.

One question at a time.