"Road Signs"

After a delightfully restful evening at JJ’s cozy “Warm Showers” cabin, we headed to Eye Candy Custom Cycles to catch up with Sam and get started on the much-needed and long-awaited top end job on the Transalp. Sam had very generously offered a lift in his shop, access to his tools and his priceless “supervision” which would make this task actually feasible.

We arrived at the shop excited to get started, only to find out from a somewhat grim Sam that the parts of the Transalp were on back-order and were not likely to arrive for another week “or so.”

Roel had also just found out that the US Consulate in Vancouver had closed it’s doors to non-Canadians applying for US work visas, so he would actually have to fly back to the Netherlands in order to apply for his work visa to work at the winery we had been accepted to intern at in Sonoma, beginning in August.

We were devastated. The opportunity we had been waiting for since last October had finally presented itself (expert mechanic, excellent shop, affordable top-end job), but we didn’t have a week “or so” to wait for the parts to arrive. Due to time restrictions and our desire to still see everything we had wanted to see in BC before heading back into the US, we were going to have to continue South, where we would intercept the parts in Vancouver, from which Roel would fly back to the Netherlands.

Many of our travel decisions are dictated by “signs," like roadworks detours or random encounters with people who share some special piece of local knowledge with us. Although most of the time they are always positive “signs” which guide us to one town or another or to some special experience, sometimes they are walls or gates that we simply cannot get over, under or around. With no other choice, we took this as a sign that we weren’t meant to work on the engine at this time. And perhaps… the solution to my oil consumption problem will just be to simply replace all of the seals, which we will try to do on our own when we reach California.

With that, Roel changed his rear tire and his oil in the comfort of Sam’s shop, and we headed South in a hurry.