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Wed Aug 8 2007: Going Crazy in the French Riviera |
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Very bad news today.
In the morning, we ride two-up on Neda's bike to Paul's garage, hoping to pick it up and resume our journey. When we arrive, Paul has the bike up on a lift and is just unwrapping the Tourance that arrived from Germany. He mentions something in French that sounds like, "Your brakes don't work". WTF? I squeeze the front brake, and sure enough, I hear nothing from the ABS servos, and there's a flashing light on my panel. Cripes! When I rode it to Paul's garage the other day, I was going so slow that I didn't even notice that I had no servo assist for the brakes! The ABS system is electronic so there's nothing Paul can do. He shrugs. I shrug. This is very very very very bad.
Metzeler Tourance, all the way from Allemande!
My poor baby. Hey, nice calender, Paul...
I thank Paul for his help, and I ride off sans brake assist back to Cavalaire, keeping an eye on my speed and downshifting to slow myself down. Not only do the brakes not work, but the brake light doesn't go on, which indicates a problem with a contact somewhere. Neda rides behind me to make sure nobody rear ends me when I slow down. We park the bikes at the hotel and try to figure out our next move. This is where the comedy (tragedy?) of errors begins. I try to find my BMW Roadside Assistance card and discover that it's missing from the document pouch I carry! ARGH #1! So I call the closest BMW dealer, who is in Toulon, about 40 kms west, where we came from. My cellphone doesn't work. Turns out the SIM chip which I got in England doesn't work across service providers. ARGH #2!. I found out much later you can enable roaming, but you have to do it before you leave the local dialing area. I send Neda off to purchase a French SIM chip while I try to find the number for BMW Roadside Assistance in France. That led me to an Internet cafe, where I had to interrupt a woman during her session with my tale of woe, so I can look up the number. Normally, I pride myself on my above-average Googling skills, but for whatever reason I can't find the BMW Roadside Assistance France #, and the woman is still sitting patiently behind me, waiting for me to finish, so I hurriedly type a message on ADVRider.com, the Adventure Touring web forum, asking for assistance. You can see my post there:
http://www.advrider.com/forums/showthread.php?t=255395
The French keyboard is very different from the English layout. All the characters are all switched around. That's my excuse for the above garbled post on ADVRider...
Thank god for the wonders of the Internet. We hung out in the lobby of the Hotel for the
whole afternoon with all our luggage around us trying to figure out what to do!
Thanks to a poster called Railbender (in 22 minutes! I love ADVRider!), I get the number for BMW Roadside Assistance in France, and Neda comes through with the new SIM chip. Thank god the operator from BMW RA speaks English! But now I discover all the BMW dealerships in the area (the one in Toulon and also another one in Frejus, 40 kms east), are booked solid until the end of next week. ARGH #3!. We're set to ship the bikes from Germany next Friday, so that's not going to work. After a frantic back-and-forth with BMW RA, they manage to book me an appointment in Monte Carlo, which is a couple of hours away, but in the direction we need to be. The rub is that they can only accept my bike on Friday, and may not be done with them until Tuesday at the latest. That means we'll have to head straight to Germany from Monte Carlo, but it is what it is, so we go ahead with that plan. They then tell me that towing the bike to Monaco will cost me an arm and a leg, as my warranty Roadside Assistance coverage doesn't extend outside of North America. When it rains, it pours... To top it all off, in the middle of this exchange, I run out of money on the SIM chip ARGH #4! and have to send Neda to top off the card so I can resume the conversation with BMW RA.
What this means is that I have another day to sit on the beach and contemplate what a dumbass I was for crashing my bike. It's been a real struggle the last couple of days, and I feel like I've been very unprepared to deal with this situation. So sorry, you'll have to deal with another couple of days of me posting pictures of us on the beach...
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