hoboworld.to

After spending the night at a great campsite very close to Predazzo on route to Lago di paneveggio for yet another mountain pass to cross. The camp site was the first we stayed at which had a proper restaurant serving fantastic Italian cuisine. We drank loads of good wine and ate pizza for dinner. Which is where we found our new mascot. Gnomie the wooden hobo 15.

Gnomie 15 our new mascot.

The following morning we woke and went for a walk into town before starting our journey again. On route over the mountain pass James came around a corner only to find that the corner was actually a foot thick gravel pit.. oops off he goes.. Thankfully a big Itallian Harley rider was there to help lift the bike and get us back on route.. Its amazing how friendly the Itallians have been so far… Its been very good.

The hope was that we would get to Cortina D’ampezzo. Unfortunately we stopped for lunch just outside cencenighe agordino. Where we stopped we did a small offroad section down to the sides of a beautiful river so that we could enjoy some nice scenery while we ate some food. Away from the noise of the road. Well that’s when things started to get interesting…

Heathers bike developed an intermittant electrical problem that only existed when her bike turned left. We took the front display and head stock apart trying to find what was causing the dodgy connection. Unfortunately we couldn’t isolate the problems further than the fact that her ignition block had something wrong with it….

James trying to isolate the fault

Given any normal area we could have just got back on the motorway and cruised into a normal town to find a mechanic to replace the bits.  Unfortunately this is the alps.. straight roads don’t really exist which makes riding more fun… especially when you can’t turn left. No more mountain passes for us until we get this problem resolved… On the bright side of things we had to wild cam so we could be near the bikes.. Of course this was because we didn’t want to pay the £130 excess for getting recovered on a Sunday from over 100km from the nearest recovery company that BMW would recommend. That’s probably ontop of some crazy other charges based on milage. In the end we camped in an amazing spot where we think the locals may not have been too happy for us to be!… Ooops.. we explained our situation to one friendly local who had the same bike as James and he seemed cool with it.. However I think the other locals had different ideas… At least we got an amazing view..

Scenery where the bike broke down

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 14th, 2009 at 10:00 am and is filed under Alps, Italy, London to Sydney, malfunction, motorcycle touring, Wild Camping. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.