No photos for you!!!  I wish there were but the computers have not been too impressive lately.  We are in Heredia, Costa Rica, just outside of San Jose.  The reason for this particular stop is to get the bikes worked on, and also to figure out what happens next.

In our last episode, I think I touched on the idea fact that the three of us are starting to have differing concepts about how this trip should proceed.  Eric thinks we are going too fast, I think we are going too slow, and Dick leans towards keeping moving at a decent pace, but not too fast.  Eric has decided that he doesn't particularly like riding a motorcycle long distances.  This is his first road bike, and apparently the experience has not been all he hoped for.  He is trying to decide now what to do next.  I guess he is leaning towards spending a week in one place somewhere in Costa Rica, then deciding if he wants to slowly make his way back north, or head to South America and see if he can catch up with us.  I was pushing to get us to Panama before the end of this week to get a flight to Quito, Ecuador before the Christmas rush.  This is not going to happen, though if we really pushed hard it could.  I don't really want to travel too fast myself, and Costa Rica is a beautiful country.  In our push to get to San Jose we already passed by the Arenal Volcano, which looked well worth checking out, but we did ride up to the Poás Volcano yesterday as a day trip.  A friend of Dick's is also in the country so if we can figure out where he is we may drop by.

I last wrote from Granada, where we spent a day.  I thought we were going to head straight to Costa Rica the next day, but instead tried to go out onto an island in the giant Lake Nicaragua.  The island itself is quite large, consisting of two linked volcanoes, and I think I heard someone say it is the largest lake island in the world.  The whole stop was a surprise to me, having thought we were heading to Costa Rica and I hoped to Panama before Christmas to get the bikes flown to South America before all the knowledgeable air cargo people left for the holidays.  I wasn't too happy, but decided before taking off on my own I should wait and see just what everyone wanted to do.
The trip out to the island didn't happen.  The 2:30 auto ferry was already booked full, but they told us they could put motorcycles on the 1:30 boat.  I was glad to see motorcycles come down the dock from the boat when it got in, but they were of course the small local motorcycles.  When we were allowed to ride out there, I saw the boat.  Yikes!  I wish I could show you the picture, well, someday, but for now just picture a 35' power boat, with a passenger cabin and the cargo goes on the roof, which was about 6' above the dock height, and the boat was rocking hard in the big waves.  How are they getting the bikes up there?  And then they are loading 4 fancy wood cabinets with mirrored doors up there, which take up most of the space.  We spy a 20' steel ramp, that perhaps is used to load motorcycles on to the top of this thing, but there's no way I'm riding up that ramp with the boat moving like it is.  It was with quite a bit of relief that we had to turn around and get our money refunded when they told us there wasn't enough room.

We headed to San Juan del Sur instead.  This is a beach town just north of the Costa Rican border.  I guess the beaches were more to the north and south of town, though there was a little bit of beach at the town, it had more of the feel of a harbor town.  Kind of a cool little place but it didn't exactly have the relaxed beach town feel that I would have liked.  And then there was the Little Drummer Boy playing a loud drum, out of time, at about 4 in the morning. 

The following morning we headed early for the Costa Rican border, which we had heard was easy but would take a lot of time, some reports suggested 4.5 hours.  We got through in 1.5 hours which is probably a record for us.  This left us enough time to ride all the way to San Jose, but I kind of wish we'd stopped at either Playa del Coco, which was highly recomended by Glenn and Shiela, or the Arenal Volcano, which puts on a constant fireworks display.  I guess I may just have to come back here someday, there's plenty more to see and Costa Rica is easy to get to.

We are staying in Heredia, "The Safest City in Costa Rica" because of the easy access to San Jose, but also the Poás Volcano, which we went to see yesterday.  The weather held out long enough for us to look down into the crater and see the fumaroles and pool of water that had little bergs of sulfur.  Today we headed down into San Jose to have the bikes looked at.  Eric's clutch isn't fully disengaging.  Dick wanted to have the valves checked on his.  I decided a valve check would be a good thing too as it has been 6000 miles.  I was able to find the BMW shop surprisingly easily, and the General Manager, Norval, spoke perfect English.  They were booked solid through Wednesday, when they close for the holidays, but a mechanic listened to my engine running and said the valves sounded fine.  They don't like to open up an engine until they start getting noisy, and said the service interval really should be more than 6000 miles, since after the first couple checkups the valves are remarkably stable and don't usually require adjustment for a very long time.  Here's the address from Norval's business card in case anyone out there needs to get in touch with the shop - I had a tough time finding an address on the web, in fact what I found was on the local motoclub website and it said the shop was 800 meters west of the Pop's ice cream shop on Sabana Oeste.  And I found it with only this for an address, but should you try to do the same be advised that there are Pop's ice cream shops all over the place, and I was driving up and down the wrong street for a while.  The other Pop's shop was less than a mile away.

Motocicletas Bavarian, S.A.
50 Oeste del Plantek de Fuerza
y Luz, Los Anonos, San José, Costa Rica
(506)290-4031

This address varies considerably from what I had, but directions in San José often consist of "go 300 meters from the Coca Cola plant" which happens to now be a bus stop, and people don't even know the name of the street they are working on.  Yes, good luck.

Dick and Eric were able to find the Kawasaki shop even more readily.  It was visible from Rt. 1 coming into town.  Both bikes are there now being worked on, and will apparently be done this afternoon.

Once the bikes are back, we need to figure out just what we are going to do.  The plan that seems to be evolving is that Dick and I will spend a few more days in Costa Rica, maybe visit his friend Red, and then aim for getting to Panama City a day or two after Christmas and try to arrange flights south for us and the bikes.  Eric may stick around in Costa Rica for a week or two, and do some hiking and hanging out.  He may then head to South America and try to catch up, but since he feels we are already moving too quickly he would have to move even faster once in South America to catch up, so I have trouble seeing how this would be reconciled.  I think we will try to make some time once down south, travelling fast for a couple days, and taking days off where we find interesting places that deserve it.  I think we can still make it to Tierra del Fuego as long as we keep some momentum, and then can check out Chilé more thoroughly on the way back north, as there isn't anywhere south of Santiago or Buenos Aires to ship the bikes from back to North America.  Yes Dan, you can ride it north if you can figure out how to make it happen.  Speaking of Dan, after reading the blog on dropping the bike avoiding the kid on the bicycle, check out this sage advice:

a. nice work on getting away before it crushed you.  be careful
b. don't panic and hit the kid if you have too, there's plenty of the little bastards down there.(try not to do it in front of the villagers)
c. sometimes you might consider doing a full brake on the rear only and going with the slide, shift your weight, hang your ass off the seat in the direction you need.  it might fishtail a little and maybe stop soon enough maybe (depends on the situation I suppose).
but a rear tire skid is controllable, resist the urge to front brake hard, add some slight front brake after you are already into the skid to slow. you might not dump it and survive, or brake and ditch, but you might get hurt off the bike as such.
d. don't listen to me. sounds like you are gettting the feel for it
 
Hmmm, b has been recomended several times, but I'll just go with d, as it happened to quick to put any concious thought into.  I'll work on c at some point for the practice.
 
Okay, that's about it.  One thing I believe I forgot to mention about Antigua, Guatemala is that it has the nicest McDonalds any of us had ever seen.  By far.  This place was tastefully done in a colonial looking building with this amazing courtyard with a fountain and walkways between shrubbery (Bring me a shrubbery!) and a scattering of tables.  The food was very authentic too.
 
I also didn't mention how amazingly bad the roads were coming through northern Costa Rica, the potholes deserve some sort of mention.  No more bent rims, however.

Monday December 19, 2005 - 10:46am (PST)