Hemingway said that nothing is any good unless it’s finished. This is the story of something that was almost good.

“In 2006, Zach Levenburgh and Graham French set foot on a voyage which would be the longest moped trip in history. Their five month, 13,000 mile trip to the southern most tip of South America at speeds of around 30 miles per hour are a testament that travel is not solely about the destination.”

The two succeeded, pulling into Ushuaia – the southernmost city in the world – in May of 2006. They published a photo book of their adventure appropriately titled “Moped to South America” and had planned put together a documentary with the footage they’d shot.

Unfortunately, the last two weeks of footage were stolen at the very end of the trip. The two were so determined to finish the documentary that they actually flew back to Argentina a year later, spent a month reshooting everything they lost and released two trailers on YouTube (1, 2). The documentary was screened in August of 2007.

And then… nothing. It’s been over two years since the premiere of the movie and it’s nowhere to be found – it itsn’t available on DVD or for download. There’s exactly one site on the internet where you can buy their book. Mopedtosouthamerica.com is dead. Their trip blog was half-assed to begin with, but it ends abruptly and offers no hints as to where this all went. They didn’t even bother to link their trailers.

I wonder if they just got lazy. It’s heartbreaking that such an ambitious trip should fade into obscurity, relegated to the netherworld of Google’s cache, but there’s an lesson to be learned here: you have to follow through. Unless you want to keep it a secret, the adventure isn’t over when you go home – the rest of the world couldn’t be there with you, so if you want your trip to have an impact on anybody you have to document it. If you can’t recreate the places you went and the people you met with photos, video or good writing, the journey will be for you and you alone.

Stories are only good if they’re told. A novel is nothing if never written down, a film useless if never shot. The adventure is just the story, the bare bones of what meaning it may hold.

How will we hear about yours?