Second Thoughts and the Swedish Man

Tomorrow's the day. We're nervous. We're excited. We're packed and ready to go. Tomorrow we begin the motorbike tour of Laos!
We've spend the last two days packing and tying our bags to our bikes, to make sure they'll stay, and Ricky even figured out a way to tie up the guitar so he doesn't have to carry it on his back. We finally got our license plates, too, so we're actually legal.
As of this afternoon, we were ready.
And then we had dinner.
The only other customer in the Indian restaurant was a white man that we thought we recognized. We started chatting, and remembered him as Dan, a Swedish man working in Luang Prabang. We got to talking about the trip we were about to embark on, and he tells us that he did part of the same trip in March.
He proceeded to caution us about the cold, the many hours spent on a bike, sore legs and back. He said he even cried as he drove, wishing he didn't have to finish the trip.  He also told us the trip was double what we had calculated it to be, because of the twisting mountain roads.
Well, that took us by surprise. And by that I mean that we almost wet ourselves thinking of the misery that lay ahead. Admittedly, I was a little distracted by Dan's accent (oh yah!), but once I got past that, I was a little scared. And now, second thoughts. I'm all for it still, but Ricky was fairly certain we ought to just cut our losses and sell the bikes now. But we're doing it anyway. We have to.
So here we are, going to bed, hoping we are ready and prepared for what might come our way: rain, flat tires, running out of gas, breaking down in the middle of the jungle...
This is going to be an interesting ride.
Stay tuned for the update on how it went!
If you don't hear from us in a few days, we were probably eaten by tigers. Seriously. There are still wild tigers in Laos.