After 2000km, 2 days of rain, and a 3 day adventure riding camp (with a few crashes but at least it wasn’t us that broke bones) we are safely recovering in Victoria. We are also now the proud owners of 2 pairs of very sexy mx boots as one of the course participants broke her foot in three places and was wearing street boots.

Well, the bags are packed and in a few short hours we will be hitting the road again.  This time Diane decided to cut right to the chase and injured herself before the trip instead of waiting until we are in a foreign country or out in the toolies. But at least the air cast can be strapped to the back of the bike while we are riding.  Not so sure how that will work once we are at the duel sport riding camp?

Today will be a short day, as Linda just finished a night shift and figures she needs a nap before we head out. So tonight we head for Medicine Hat, AB, to the Gas City Campground. We are both very anxious to get on the road again!

Well the motorcycle goddess may not have smiled on me, but she did at least grin.

I put the new oil into the bike, fired it up and damn, clutch still wouldn’t disengage.  I drained all that nice new oil out, took the clutch apart,  and put it back together.  This time I was smart enough to try the clutch before putting oil in the block and waisting another couple of litres.  Still no joy.

We had to go to the local KTM dealer to pick up Linda’s bike, now with 2 smoking new tires on it.  The owner of the shop used to be a Kawaski dealer, so I brought my shop manual to ask him some questions.  The end result was he didn’t have a clue as to why it wouldn’t disengage.  Which I toook as a good thing, as we fully explored the few places where something could go wrong.  So we go back home, stumped but not ready to throw in the towel yet.

I pulled it apart yet again.  On a whim I took the new clutch springs out and put the old ones back in, buttoned things back up and tried the clutch.  Yippee!  This time it worked.  Filled it up with oil and took her out for a test drive.  Everything worked like a charm.  Another hour putting accessories back on the bike and all is well.

It has over 500km on that clutch now and everything still seems good so I guess I must have put it all back together right 🙂

Stay tuned for an update on the 2nd off-road experience, and why Linda is starting to have second thoughts about doing the TCAT.

So, after a winter of nursing diane’s leg back to health, we are ready to start on the next leg of our adventure.

We have purchased 2 new-to-us ’05 KLR 650s.   With an early spring here on the prairies, we were itching to get out for some riding and get a feel for these new dual sports.  We stopped at the KTM dealer (no Kawi dealer in town) to order some new tires for Lind’as bald beast and toodled out to the grid roads.  After riding in and out of ditches for about 15 minutes, we found a road marked “Impassible”.  Well that sure sounded like a challenge to us!

Although it doesn’t look that bad in the pic, unfortunately the road won.  What made it impassible was the fact that it was wet, sucking, clay.  Linda manged to get off the road into the ditch, more by chance than planning, as that was where she landed.  I dumped mine withing about 5′.  We got the rubber side back on the bottom, then tried to keep moving on.  Linda in the ditch did pretty well.  Me on the road… not so much.  Stopped severl times to claw the clay out of the wheels and tried very unsucessfuly to get the monster into the ditch.  Eventualy we managed to get it into the ditch, where it promptly up and died.  The efforts of getting off of the clay blew up the clutch.

So, I think, what the H$#% now.  Ah, lets see if our Harley riding friend can come and rescue us.  Lucily for us he was home and drove his truck from about an hour away to came and rescue us, for which I am eternaly thankful. Unfortunately there were rude comments about import bikes and probably will be for most of the year.  A small price to pay though, and he dropped it off in our driveway.

Before we even got the bikes I knew I wanted to have some mechanical skills for dealing with issues on our planned big trips.  I had kind of hoped that books and seminars would be the way I learned, not by the seat of my pants out of nescesity.  None the less, I broke out the Chiltons manual that night to see if I could figure out what I needed to do.  Was pretty sure it was the clutch so  got up to speed on how to get at it, and what parts I would need.  I figured I would wash the mud off the next eve then roll it into the garage.  Well the best laid plans of rodents and homosapiens…

The weather decided it was time to go back to being winter, so everything got put on hold for a few more days.  Once the weather broke and the mud came off I set myself up in a corner of the garage and with manual in one, a wrench in the other and the bike on a shiney new motorcycle lift, pulled the cover off to see what the damage was.  I was fearful that I would find broken bits of metal, but to my surprise what I found was burnt oil, burnt clutch and large amounts of clutch fibres in the case.

Note the black crud on the outer basket

And the crud on the pressure plate.

Pulled the clutch plates out and cleaned the crud out of the case.  Then went in the house to see where I could order a clutch kit from.  I got one from Dualsportplus.com, a company in eastern Canada.  By the time it arrived a few days later, I’d had time to think of the repair a bit, and with the amount of gunk in the right side of the case and my lack of knowledge about haw the oil gets from one side to the other, figured I better pull off the left side just to have a look see.  Probably didn’t need to do that, but it gave me piece of mind.  There was no crud to be found.

So I battened the left side back up and started putting things back together on the right side.  Once again it was manual in one hand and wrench in the other.  I only had pull the case off once after it was all torqued back on as I had missed greasing a couple of spots.  Oh and there was that issue with an oil plug…  I have to pick up some more oil today and hopefuly take it on a test ride tomorrow, motorcycle goddess willing.

The Paris experience was not quite what we had hoped because of Diane’s lack of mobility, but what we did get to see and do we thoroughly enjoyed.

Some tower in Paris

First order  of the day was a blood test, then we headed off to the Cafe de Industrie for lunch.  Lunch was awesome, thanks Shawn a for recommending it.  After lunch we went to the Lourve, got to skip to the front of the line because of the crutches, then exchanged the crutches for a wheelchair.  What a huge place, we got lost several times, and ended having Diane hop up or down stairs many times as it is really not accessible.  We did get to see Mona and Venus amongst many other great works of art.

After the Lourve we headed to the Eiffel tower.

Once again we got to skip most of the line which was great because it was really long.  We only went to the second level, which was more than high enough for Linda.  It was quite crowed so we weren’t able to get the boobie shot in.  The East elevator broke just as we were going down, they suggested people take stairs, but that was definitely not an option for us.  They did get us to the front of the line for the other elevator though.

By the time we got down Diane was pretty much done so we headed back to the hotel, had supper at a nearby restaurant (La Belle Angela) which was awesome, then called it a night.  They are not as generous with painkillers in France as they are in Canada so added a Tylenol Body Pain to get to sleep.

We arrived in Lyon, got to our hotel and they had no record of our booking.  2 hours and a couple of calls to hotwire got it resolved.  Bookings.com works much better in Europe, the rest of our booking were through them and there was no trouble.

That day we walked down to the Rhone river, had a snack and walked back home, stopping at a supermarket to pick up some supper.  Supermarkets have saved us a ton of cash.  They have cheap beer and wine and an abundance of inexpensive food.

Next day we rented some bikes and rode to the old part of town.  Very picuresque (not like the rest wans’t) we had lunch and wandered around.  In the eve Diane missed a step and broke her leg.  Ended up being both tib and fib.  In emerg they casted and set her to a ward for the night while insurance was sorted out.  Next day was spent waiting and fasting then in the afternoon it was decided that surgery would take place in Lyon.  The doctors and nurses in the hospital were awesome.but hospital food is the same the world over.  If you have to get hospitalized abroad France is a good place to do it.  Next afternoon was released and went to the hotel.  Who knew it was that hard to walk with “Canadian Canes”

One more day in Lyon for Diane to get accustomed to the crutches, then on to Paris.   First day we found the Harley store.  How is it we always manage something Harley without even looking??  We have also managed to find a couple of great places to eat, the Vasche Acrobatic and Le Restoo.  Both had great food and friendly staff.  Le Restoo caters to a mainly gay clientele.  We were also able to see the Notre Dame cathedral, they let us in the out door because Diane is on crutches.  IT was still a long walk around the church, but worth it for the history.For those looking though the hunchback doesn’t live there anymore.

After Florence we went to Riomaggiore in the Cinque Terre national park.  We had a small apartment right on the harbour, with a balcony that had room for 2 chairs and a table.  We spent a lot of time out on the balcony people watching and drinking wine.  That is, when we were not out hiking.

The hikes in Cinque Terre range from “your grandma could do it” to “OMG! this is supposed to be fun!”

Trail from Monterosso to Vernazza. There was about 1000 of these steps up.

The views were well worth the effort though.  Even if we had to swim sans clothes as we didn’t take bathing suites with us.

We left Riomaggiore on Oct 6.  Caught the train to La Spezia.  Caught another train to VentiMagilia, which stopped in Riomaggiore.  It seems we didnt need to catch the first train after all.  When we got to VentiMagilia we were supposed to connect to a french train to Nice.  But, all of the french trains were cancelled because of a strike.  We hooked up with a couple of women from USA who were trying to get to Nice as well and shared a taxi.  Fare wasn’t bad considering, only 120 Euros shared between us.

Linda’s cousin Shawna met us at the train station and we walked to her apartment and met Scott who was making supper.  And yes, real men do eat quiche.  Next day Shawna and Scott went to work and we wandered around Nice and enjoyed a beer or two. Saturday we went to Monaco, saw where Shawna teaches and looked at the little boats in the harbour, one of which was 1/6th the size of the cruise ship that was also there.  Met Shawna and Scott at the beach.  Ocean sure is more buoyant than the pacific. In the evening we went for Moules Frites.  We were thinking a plate of mussels, but instead we each got a pot with 1kg in it.  We were stuffed and couldn’t finish.  Sunday we enjoyed a nice french breakie.  Linda had grand marnier crepes that were loaded with grand marnier.  In the afternoon the four of us took the bus to Eze, a medieval village high on a hill, where we had a great picnic lounging by a fountain.  Then we hiked out around a point to another beach for some more swimming and sunning.

Monday we caught the train to Lyon for the next leg of the adventure.

We finally got some new pics up on the pics page.  There are some from Cinque Terre, Nice and Lyon.