A day later and $1000 lighter

We are on our way again. Keep your fingers crossed…

Mmmmm…

Meatloaf was good. I can’t believe I ate the whole thing…

The Waiting Game

Well, work at the shop has finally begun. Problem is, the parts actually arrived at 9:30 this morning. In the meantime, I’ve kept busy by installing new grips and we’re now idling away the hours at Cookie’s Grill. If the meatloaf sucks, you’ll be the second to know…

Take the bike out of gear first…

Othello tunnels

Prior to calling it a day in the metropolitan town of Chilliwack (population 80,000–which is HUGE compare to where we’ve been lately), we stopped by the town of Hope, which has been used as a location for the movies Cliffhanger, First Blood, Shoot to Kill and others, to see the Othello train tunnels. The tunnels are part of the kettle Valley Railway which opened in 1916. Considering the landscape and the technology that was available at that time, they are beyond impressive. They blasted a series of short tunnels through different rock faces allowing the railway to pass through the gorge. Anyway, here are some cool photos I grabbed during our hour-long hike.

At hell’s gate

Given the fact that our solution has a limited lifespan (unless we charge the car battery every night), we’ve arranged for a service day in Chilliwack, BC on Thursday. So, that meant we had a lot of time to cover 90 miles today. We started by by sleeping in. I mean, seriously. I crashed out at 10:30 last night and didn’t get up until 9:00 am. I guess I could feel the toll the miles were taking on my body, I just hadn’t realized how exhausted I had become. Anyway, after a relaxed breakfast and finishing some laundry, we visited the Hell’s Gate Airtram, which has a long history stemming from the Canadian Gold Rush.  The air tram can be taken across the 35 meter wide gorge of Fraser Canyon and above the fast running Fraser River, which passes more through it per day than Niagra Falls. This is another one of those sites that I visited with my parents 30 years ago, so it was interesting to see how it had changed.

The complete and official history can be read here: http://www.hellsgateairtram.com/history.html

History repeats itself

Deja vu (all over again)

Seems like we’ve been down this road  before. No more than 40 kilometers outside of Kamloops, we started having electrical problems again. Realizing that we need actually need a stator (alternator), but we also need a way to be able to get from where we’re stopped on the side of the road to a shop that can actually get the parts and do the work in real time. Drawing on our portfolio of MacGyver solutions, we bought a car battery and wired it to the Goldwing’s battery. This will allow us to keep the bike running until the juice in the car battery runs dead. While it’s not a perfect solution, it is one that will allow us to keep moving south.