Day 137 Sunday, October 30

WHOO HOO! I'm back on the road again! I'm not going to bother with entries between the last entry and this one because I don't really feel those days have been a true part of my trip. They've been more like a side note and haven't really contributed much.

I got my bike back on Thursday after a bit of a hassle on dates with BMW. They'd initially told me the bike would be ready on Wednesday, Oct 26. With that in mind, and after having talked with them Weds morning to confirm the bike would be ready, I undertook getting myself from Sacramento to San Fran. Took the bus from Steve and Heidi's house to down town Sac. From there I hopped on AmTrack and headed into San Fran. When the train had gotten about 4/5 of the way to San Fran, my phone rang. It was BMW telling me that the bike wouldn't be ready until Thursday. Needless to say that definitely got my hackles up. in essence, I'd just wasted my entire afternoon and nearly $40 in transportation fees. The service manager told me that the complicated wiring system I'd installed on the bike was slowing them down and that the mechanic was so irritated that he wasn't even willing to speak with me. That didn't do much to liven my spirits either.

Anyway, Thursday, I repeated the trip over to San Fran and this time the dealership had the bike ready as promised. However, there was a slight problem. I had a Cee Baileys windshield on the bike and there had been a mistake made somewhere during the repair meaning BMW didn't have the windshield. Credit to them, however, they definitely made up for that small mistake. They gave me a LOANER WINDSHIELD! How about that? The service manager told me they are also going to give me the correct windshield, http://www.ceebaileys.com/wsdesign2-euro.htm, a $200 item for free, and they'll ship it to my brother's house in San Diego also for free. They just asked that I stick this loaner windshield back in the mail to them. Pretty cool. They also knocked an additional $100 off of my bill for yesterdays inconvenience. All in all I was completely satisfied with the results.

But there was another problem. Friday, October 28, I realized a mistake the mechanic had made in re-installing my instrument mount. That meant I had to take the winsdhield and a small piece of the fairing off to reposition the mount. But that unearthed yet another problem. Turns out the mechanic had cross threaded two bolts in a custom bracket that holds the instrument mount to the motorcycle. Now that was a BIG problem. Steve Li has absolutely no tools appropriate to fix the bracket! Also, the bolts which got stripped out were a size 10-24 bolt. Anybody who know hardware knows that the next common size up from that is a 1/4" bolt. Nearly double the size of the original hardware and WAAAY too big to fit in the flange of the stripped out bracket. So I searched around town all day Saturday for some specialty hardware to fix the bracket with and yesterday I spent the better part of the day cursing at the lack of tools here and installing the hardware I'd purchased. Long and short of it is, that I got the bracket repaired, got the motorcycle back together, and got fully prepared to get out of here today.

I'm totally psyched to be back on the road! I head up to the Redwood forest today and then resume my trip down the coast. Unfortunately, I'm definitely going to have to skip Olympic National Forest on this trip because the weather has broken up there in Washington. The forecast for the next 10 days calls for 50 degrees and rain, rain, rain. No fun for camping weather!

Leaving Steve and Heidi’s, I drove up I5 to Hwy 299 then up the coast to Redwoods. I really enjoyed Hwy 299 over to the ocean. It’s a beautiful road. I’d already decided that I was going to make it to the Prairie Creek campground tonight.. I pulled in tonight in thick fog and a very slight drizzle. I set up camp and then went over to talk to the guy in the next campsite, Jasen. . He’s out from Kentucky in his Toyota pickup on his own adventure just after having graduated from college with a Bio degree. He had a fire going and we sat around it and talked about our respective travels for probably two hours.