June 24th - Vancouver, BC (BST -7hrs)

The guy shaking hands with John is Timo. While we were waiting for Portland Motorcycles to put my bike back together, he brought his Finnish 1200 GSA in for service. Timo was midway through his own, solo, “Long Way Round” adventure. He left Finland in April, and has crossed Europe and the Balkans, Russia, Mongolia and Korea, before flying his BMW 1200 GSA into Vancouver for the start of his North American leg. Now, that’s a real trip and a half. Timo had been on his own for the majority of the trip, except for crossing Mongolia, and his only technical issue had been a punctured tyre – caused by riding over one of the many broken bottles discarded on the road by Russian drivers.

My bike was only in for a routine 24k inspection but, as luck would have it, when they dropped the final drive, they discovered a gunky mix of dirt, oil and water, along with a leaking seal and, inevitably, some corrosion. The service manager had never seen anything like it, and assumed I must have been doing some extreme off-roading. I didn’t want to disappoint him, but the presence of red-coloured soil suggests to me that it has been there since our last US trip in 2006 … (The Wilde brothers will remember our back roads tour of the cemetary in Erick.) Anyway, the technician polished off the rust as best he could and replaced the seals, but the extra work meant that the bike wouldn’t be ready until lunchtime, so John and I were left twiddling our thumbs all morning.

We eventually got away at about 2pm. With a minimum five and a half hour ride ahead of us (without any rest breaks), we didn’t bother with any sight-seeing. In addition, John had promised to look in on a family friend, so we needed to get a bit of a wiggle on.

As it was, it was nearly 9pm by the time we arrived at the Hotel Patricia. We certainly do pick ‘em. When we mentioned where we were staying to Claire, she laughed and warned us to look out for the crackheads. She was right. What a place! We didn’t dare leave any luggage or accessories on our bikes overnight, so took everything up to our tiny room before meeting Claire and Steve next door in Pat’s Pub. Great place. It was film night, and they were playing some sort of Australian slasher movie about vampire zombies. It was extremely hard not to be distracted by the sight of our hero brandishing a lawn-mower as he defended himself against the undead masses. Very messy.

Despite our closet-sized room, we liked the hotel well enough. Comfortable bed, good linen and friendly staff and, after a few pints of the pub’s micro-brewed cream ale, we were asleep before our heads hit the pillow.

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