I'd like to give you guys a story about how DHBC, in combination with a very nice service guy in Penticton, saved my honeymoon. We owe both you and the service guys at Penticton Yamaha at least a sixer apiece!

To start, my wife and I were married last May 11th, 2002. I'd recommended Canada for a honeymoon, and after the first 'but it's cold there!' she realized how nice the scenery, fishing, and motorcycling could be.

I started doing the research to plan the trip, and hunted down motorcycle rental agencies near Vancouver. We settled on renting a VFR and a Seca II. Our route was:
- Pender Harbour to Lillooet on the first day,
- to Okanagan Falls on day 2,
- thence to Vancouver, and
- returning to Pender Harbour on day 4.

While hunting down the rental bikes over the Internet, I'd been linked to your web page, enjoyed listening to your CBC interview while frantically planning the honeymoon, and had my father buy a copy of DHBC for us to pickup on our way through Seattle.

On the leg from Lillooet to Okanagan Falls, we stopped east of Merritt to take some pictures on Highway 97. Another sport biker stopped for a rest, and asked about our routing. We said that we were going to head east on 97C to Summerland and then turn south for Penticton. His memorable response was, "That road's no good." Better prophetic words have rarely been spoken.

Since we had too little time to go south through Princeton, we did head east down the Connector. As we'd been warned, it was a bit cool up high on the Connector, but it wasn't too bad. The road was certainly straight, well-paved and fast, even if the surrounding forest looked like it stretched to and belonged in Siberia.

Excitement ensued when I decided to pull off to see if my wife was warm enough on her bike. After crossing the biggest ankle-breaking cattle grate I'd seen, I noticed that my wife was acting a bit freaked out. As it turned out, she somehow managed to coast across the grate without any power, since the shifter pivot bolt had worked its way out and left the shifter hanging!

Let me set the scene here: it's about 4:15 on the Friday before the long Victoria Day weekend, up on the Connector. The sun was still high, but we were 60km from anywhere, and had one useless bike. People were passing by on the main road but there was little traffic here on the off ramp - in fact, at odds with the Canadian politeness we experienced for the rest of the trip, one couple in a truck with an ATV in tow passed us by without stopping even though we had a bike apart! It wasn't getting any warmer, and it certainly felt like the starving wolves would be out come nightfall…and my wife Charlotte had no idea what we were going to do.

However, we had a bit of time, a cell phone and our copy of DHBC.  Luck seemed to be completely on our side. The cell phone had some signal, DHBC had your full list of dealers and told us there was a Yamaha dealer down in Penticton. And when I called them at 4:30 pm, they hadn't left early on a holiday Friday! When I asked if they had any shifter bolts for the Seca, they said "bring the bike in, and we'll make something work. We'll be open until 6pm."

I sat for a few minutes, devising a way to make the Seca shift. Charlotte was frightened of hand-shifting, even if I could have found a coat hanger to turn into a linkage. Luck struck again when I discovered that Mr. Honda had secured the rear fairing on the VFR with similar 10mm bolts to the shifter bolts. They were even the right length - but without a spacer, they tightened down against the shifter so much that the shifter was really stiff. I worried: if the bolt were too loose, the bolt would fall out. If the bolt were too tight, Charlotte would be stuck in one gear.

I bolted the shifter on, calmed Charlotte, and we set off. Sure enough, Charlotte fell behind, overtaken when she couldn't get past 100kph. With trucks whipping around her, and knowing that she was growing tenser by the second, I pulled off the no-shoulder road to figure out what was going on. The shifter was too tight, trucks were motoring beside us at 120kph, and all I could do was loosen the shifter a bit and hope.

We rode off again, but not without the honeymoon gift of Canadians driving rudely after realizing they couldn't just run us over and keep going.  Again, Charlotte couldn't keep up, but had two gears this time. Again, we pulled over.
"How high were you revving it?" I asked.
"5 or 6 thousand," she replied.
Recalling that she rides a low-revving Sportster at home, I reminded her that the Seca was a rental sportbike and said just keep the tach out of the red.

Finally, with the Seca screaming away, we kept up with traffic downhill to Penticton, the clock ticking. You had chosen a good scale on the maps in the book, so I was optimistic that I could pick out the Yamaha dealer, even in a town I hadn't visited before. I called them at 6 pm to confirm that they were still open and, fortunately because of your maps, we were able to make a direct beeline there,  arriving at 6:05 pm. The clean feeling of arrival and relief was memorable.

The last guy there, named either Dave or Mike, took a look at the Seca, and started pulling pieces together to fix it. With a spare bolt from a tool kit, a dowel from a Yamaha head, and some Loctite, he bolted and secured the shifter peg back to workable. I'd asked him why he'd stayed late, as he actually hadn't been on the other end of the call the first time, and hadn't heard that we were coming in. As he put it, "It's the beginning of the summer season here, and I need to get used to people pullin' in on Fridays. It's worth it to make sure that things work out for people."

I tried offering a six-pack to him, hand-delivered the next day, but he refused. As seems to be the case with the best of the Good Samaritans I've met, his own professional satisfaction was all he wanted. At about 7pm, Charlotte and I packed back up and rode off to get some dinner and rest.

DHBC was really a lynchpin in this little adventure. With it open atop my tank bag, we had a map and a goal that let us concentrate on making the Seca move forward. With the remote location and the surprise of the breakdown, without it I think that we would have dithered while trying to make a plan, and would have missed the chance to have Penticton Yamaha fix the bike and allowing us to continue with the rest of our honeymoon.

Thanks again, Brian and Mike, for writing a quality book, from research to contents to typography to layout, which helped not by leading us to a good ride but by leading us to help.

Best regards, and the best of luck wherever you ride. And if you're in the Bay Area, and want to take us up on my beer offer, give a shout!
  
Jeff and Charlotte Dickert  jdickert@ugcs.caltech.edu