Riding through British Columbia next week…

In other news, I have to go to Vancouver, BC mid-next week for some work. I’m planning on riding there and figure maybe I could spend the weekend riding up north to Whistler, Pemberton and Lillooet and back. And possibly a detour to Vancouver Island and Victoria for a day if I have the time. Hmm… first long ride of the summer. I think I’m going to spend this weekend sorting out my camping gear and the like, which I haven’t really sorted through since the x-country ride last August. Cannot believe that almost a year has passed since then!

GPS mount miracle…

I finally got the time to plug my new battery into the SV (yes, it’s been that kind of week at work). Bike started up just fine, of course. If it dies overnight, we’ll know that it wasn’t the battery at fault.

I got an extra bonus present as well. My Garmin GPS mount had gone AWOL last month – GPS refused to charge in the mount no matter what. And the mount on the XT was frakked as well – the GPS kept rebooting. I was righteously pissed off and gave Garmin an earful. Two mounts gone bad in a month with no way to fix them except for replacing them. At $60 even with my corporate discount, this was *not* a great option. They grumbled and sent me a replacement because one of the mounts’ warranty had expired a day before. And lo and behold, the mount on the XT miraculously started working two weeks ago. Today as I started to swap out the SV’s mount, I decided on a lark to just test it out – and voila! It was working like nothing had happened.

So now I have two working mounts on both bikes, and an extra mount that I never needed to use. I have an inkling that maybe the hot, sunny weather might have something to do with it and some moisture in some housing dried out completely, allowing the circuit to complete. Whatever it might be, yay! I’m keeping the extra mount handy though. Knowing Garmin’s crap quality and astonishingly bad design, I’m sure I’ll be needing it sooner rather than later.

Or maybe I’ll get a third bike to put the mount on. Yes, that seems like a very reasonable course of action.

Battery activating in 10, 9, 8…

So I finally bit the bullet and ordered a new battery for the SV – a Yuasa YT12A-BS. It was a lot cheaper to purchase it on BikeBandit.com with my AMA discount and some points I had accumulated with them, so I chose to go that route instead of getting it from a local store. The only downside to this was that I had to activate and charge it myself before I could plug it into the bike.

It turns out that activation involved adding sulphuric acid to the battery and then sealing it up. The acid was provided in six little connected vials which you have to drain into the battery. Having burnt myself a couple of times with acid in chem lab back in the day, I was a little wary, but it was pretty smooth sailing.

It’s now sitting on the charger. Be nice if this were the end of my electrical woes. A girl can dream, right?

Kluane National Park on Bing homepage today…

Today’s Bing.com US homepage shows Kluane National Park in the Yukon Territory, a name that brings back bittersweet memories. If you click on one of the “hot spots” of the page, it links to a map of Kluane Lake. I rode past it two years ago on the Alaskan Highway heading towards Anchorage:

And if you look a few miles north, it shows Destruction Bay, where my bike broke a week later while I was headed back south towards Haynes Junction. I’m sure someday I’ll be able to see the names of these places without wincing.

Happy Canada Day, everyone!

Friendship aboard a motorcycle?

Someone just linked me to this old 70s Bollywood movie song that was a bit of a blast from the past. The actors appear beyond gay in today’s era (although they are in reality quite heterosexual and just very good friends *cough*), but it’s worth watching for the  motorcycle and sidecar and the actors doing their own “stunts” in total lack of protective gear. Hindi movie cheesiness at its very best! ;)

Incidentally, the movie the song is from is the highest grossing film of all time in Indian cinema.