The second post was meant to be posted yesterday. I was going to wax on about how we have only one bike, but two bikes' worth of insurance. About how we have two bikes' worth of riding gear and how tomorrow (now today) we would go and collect the second bike (Helga) from near Gaillac, which as the epicureans know, is a wine region near Toulouse. It was all going to be appetite whetting, but instead this post has to be more like wiping up the literary crumbs once the feeding frenzy is done.
We've been. We're back. We have a bike. There was some speculation to the model of the bike. To how imitable our two bikes are. How similar, how different. The first post contained some minor inaccuracies due to some small miscommunication. The new bike was meant to be the single-spark model. Almost is. It is a BMW which is nice, a F 650 GS, which is what we were after. It has one cylinder, yes, but it is the two spark model. This is good news: our primary misgivings about the new bike were based around its supposed one-spark plug ignition, which it doesn't have. In all, this means the two bikes, far from being inimitable, are basically identical. This reduces the number of redundant parts we'll carry. The number of spares, the tools, and in effect halves the amount of mechanical knowledge required. Good news: we now know about half of what we needed to know last week, and so at the current rate, we'll know it all by next week. We have put out some cries for sponsorship. Fancy batteries, fancy suspension, fancy tires, bearings, and all the running gear really. All the stuff we suspect will wear. We've begun sending letters to see whether people want us to use their gear and include it in our reviews. We are also preparing a National Geographic explorer grant, and if we're amazingly lucky and worthy, we might end up with financial and in-kind support for our trip (check out our sponsor's page), which will be good since if you check our budget page, you'll see this is going to cost.
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