Adventures By Guy

We learned lack of miles doesn’t always mean an easy day!

Scott and I didn’t take off right away as we didn’t want to hit Vancouver morning traffic. Hostel life is a bit different from what I am used to… Scott said this was a palatial Hostel. We got out at 0920 as it warmed up. Nice ride down to Vancouver. Came around a corner… Wow that is a big lake. It kept going… I’ll bet that is the ocean! Yep, some sound above Vancouver. Very beautiful to look over the sea with mountains around. Vancouver still had traffic but we finally got through it. We crossed the border at a little border crossing to avoid long lines at the start of I5. It was 20 miles further but we missed downtown Vancouver traffic and when we rolled up one of the Border guys waved me right up… We didn’t have to wait at all. Stopped, showed passport, took helmet off and on and we were gone. That fast. We gassed up a couple miles down the road and then ate tacos from a truck. Tasty and 3 for $6 I went back for another helping as I didn’t have breakfast! Got back on the road after lunch and 3 miles later Scott’s bike died. He had this problem twice in Alaska and a few times in Texas. The Alaskan dealer couldn’t find anything wrong and they had it for a week. The last thing they did was unplug and re-plug the coil packs for the spark plugs. So I asked where they were. He told me under there. So I removed the covers and unplugged both and plugged them back in. Maybe one of your coil packs is bad? We got it started and to a dealer in Ferndale, WA. They had only one tech that day usually 3. He got done with two jobs and went to work. They had a GSA 1250 but it wasn’t equipped exactly like Scott’s. Otherwise he would have done a trade in and ridden away. The tech was experienced and found a coil pack was bad. We were at Pacific Northwest Motorcycles. Kody is the owner. He is a retired Marine and is all about customer service. His philosophy is not to have e you be a customer for today but for life and he is growing. Right now he has 5 employees.  He got us in which is something of you know about Motorcycle dealers. He didn’t have the part but he found out who did and talked to them to verify they did then gave us the address.  Gave us a number of a person who he knows who could get out to tow Scott’s bike in a fast time. Very, very helpful all around. So if in Ferndale stop by if your bike needs tires or oil. He sells Indians and Zeroes too and has a lot of nice used bikes

We took a back road route to my sister’s house in case his bike quit again as we didn’t want that to happen on the Interstate. The route turned out to be quite nice. Small towns and just winding along down the valley. Got to my sisters place and tomorrow we will try to make it 40 minutes down to BMW of Seattle. I told Scott he should be complaining to the BMW mother ship and declare this thing a lemon. It has been dying like this since 500 miles but getting worse. They have put two complete wiring harnesses on it. He has been to a lot of  dealers at home and along this route now. He doesn’t trust it to get home and especially across the Mojave desert. This has been all documented. They can’t fix it. Hopefully a new coil packs will fix it tomorrow… but tomorrow is another day and another story!