We’ve been riding on some pretty nasty stuff and the bikes shake quite a bit on their own being one-cylinder engines. Screws have been falling out of both bikes since we got them and we go over them once in a while to tighten them up. Still, we’ve lost some.

About 2000 miles into our trip I noticed that my GPS holder was broken and that the GPS unit itself had cracks all over the case. The battery-lid was broken and is now held in place by duct-tap.

On the road to hell (the road to San Carlos, Nicaragua) my left case damn-near fell off after I had bottomed out the rear suspension for the n-th time. I guess my load is too heavy… anyway, the left case is sort of useless now, I managed to bend back the bendt parts but the case just won’t fit like it used to. Luckily I brought a duffel-bag with me so I re-packed all of my stuff, placing most of it in the duffel, threw away some things I had not used yet and strapped the duffel to my bike using rope.

The fancy hard cases are now nothing more than dead weight and I would like to just toss them… but it’s hard to do because they were expensive.

If I had to do it over I would not get hard cases at all, I would get a larger duffel-bag and some straps, that’s it! It’s cheap, it’s light-weight, it’s simple, it can be fixed anywhere in the world without special equipment. Duct-tape and zip-ties! :)

On that same road, The Road To Hell, it seems my steering-stem nut has shaken loose and my front forks are now producing these awful ‘clunck’ noises when I go over bumps. I hope to have that fixed tomorrow when we meet with an American KLR owner living nearby Boquete. I hope the bearings are still OK!

Oh, and my sunglasses broke too!

Not to worry, all is well!

:)