The Red Dragon Has Landed!

When we cooked up our scheme to explore Europe as a family by motorcycle + sidecar, we gave a lot of thought to whether renting, or buying, a vehicle in Europe made more sense than shipping ours. We concluded that not only would it be a huge challenge to find such a vehicle at all, but to find one for rent was highly unlikely, and that buying would create all sort of unknowns (as well as costs).

And beside, that'd mean leaving our beloved Red Dragon home -- like leaving a member of the family home after she had proven herself on countless adventures in the past, and been dialed in over the years to be just what we need.

So Alenna sought out an agent in Europe that might help us by receiving the Red Dragon on the east side of the pond. What she found was the unparalleled Knopf Tours in Heidelberg, Germany. Along with his entire family, Stefan Knopf is a highly accomplished rider himself, including having a trip -- with family of six -- from Chile to Alaska under his belt. He runs the perfect business offering all the services we needed: trans-Atlantic shipping of the rig in a container, ushering it through customs in Germany, storing it in a warehouse (among hundreds of other clients' bikes) until we arrive, and offering an adjacent Bed & Breakfast for our first night's stay in Europe. He even walked us through, and provided us, all the paperwork and guidance we need to be legally insured, border crossing-ready and roadside breakdown-protected anywhere on the continent.

Stefan's whole existence revolves around people enabling people, the world over, to ship their bikes to Germany and use his property -- and his knowledge -- as home base while they explore. For a very fair fee, he eliminated all the logistical hurdles for us and answered all our "What if?" questions without once raising his voice at me. ;-) He clearly knows what he's doing. Thank you Stefan.

We received word from Stefan last week that the Red Dragon is safely in Germany. This game is on! We're doing it.