After looking at the tail section I called a friend to see if he had any experience with it. He told me about another woman with an F650 who rode around for a while with no tail light and license plate because she didn’t know it had fallen off. Great. His suggestion was to use cable ties, duct tape, whatever, to get it attached well enough to make it home. That was not my favorite option.<\/p>\n
I spent over an hour at the gas station trying to figure out how to reattach the thing with no success.\u00a0 Four open slots have to fit into clips and then screws that go through the clips need to be tightened from under the top case. The wires to the light are so short the tail assembly can’t be turned sideways to get a good look at the back of it. The wires to the light connect somewhere inside it. I couldn’t see any way to get all four slots in four clips at the same time.I tried taking the tail light off so see if I could disassemble it further and then attach it. That showed me nothing.<\/p>\n
I gave up and got cable ties out to fasten the tail section on. One after another they snapped in two when I tried to use them. They had deteriorated and were brittle. The last two I had didn’t break so I put the motorcycle back together, tested to make sure the brake light was working, and decided to stop at the first motel I saw.<\/p>\n
I registered at motel just a few miles down 25 and the lady behind the desk said I could park right in front of the office windows so they could keep an eye on the motorcycle all night. I pulled the bike around and tested the brake lights again. Nothing. I walked back and checked — no tail light either. My first order of business had to be getting more cable ties and taking the assembly off so I could find out why the lights weren’t working.<\/p>\n
A bunch of men from BNSF railroad were coming back to the hotel. I asked about cable ties and one of them dug through a truck and came up with a hand full of them and gave them to me.<\/p>\n
I started taking the motorcycle apart (the top case and some other parts had to be removed) parked right by the entrance to the motel so, of course, everyone was asking what I was doing. I told them what happened and a couple of the men checked it out while others went for tool boxes and stayed around to chat and see if they could help.<\/p>\n
Everyone was amazed that I had 42,000 miles on my motorcycle, that I was riding alone, that I had been dumb enough to go over Vail Pass in May… Most the guys had motorcycles and one said he didn’t think he’d put 42,000 miles on all his motorcycles combined. Another man asked how many miles I had ridden and when I said 550 he asked in how many days. When I told him today he was shocked. Another man chirped up that he’d ridden 200 miles in one day once and it was awful. He wasn’t joking — he was dead serious. Perhaps a salient point here is that they were all Harley owners?<\/p>\n
I told them that I’d never been on a motorcycle until 2006 and that I’m still a newbie — the general consensus was that 42,000 miles kind of eliminated the newbie status. Especially after they saw my stickers from Mexico and Canada. I still think I’m a newbie.<\/p>\n
You want to hear a funny thing? A lot of BMW riders see the stickers on my cases and ask if I’ve been to all those places. Harley riders see the stickers and never question if I’ve been to the places or not. What’s with that?<\/p>\n
Dan and Hillbilly (I never heard his real name) did all the work attaching the tail piece. Over two hours of trying over and over again. I don’t know who designed that tail section, but I suspect it was the Marquis de Sade. I still don’t know how it was installed at the factory, but then that may be why it fell off.<\/p>\n
I kept telling everyone it was taking too much of their time, but they were determined to get it on and didn’t stop until it was attached and the lights were working. They were only able to get two of the four slots secured so they backed up the install with cable ties.<\/p>\n
They truly were just a great bunch of guys — fun to talk to, so nice about helping — one guy even brought me food from the restaurant next door. Once it was fixed I barely had a chance to thank everyone before they disappeared. Maybe that’s because it was after 10:00 PM.<\/p>\n
One heck of a day and I didn’t get to bed until midnight. But all in all a good day since I survived and my motorcycle was ready for the sprint home.\u00a0 Besides, you don’t usually get to find out how truly heart warming people can be until something goes wrong.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
After looking at the tail section I called a friend to see if he had any experience with it. He told me about another woman with an F650 who rode around for a while with no tail light and license plate because she didn’t know it had fallen off. Great. His suggestion was to use […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[64],"class_list":["post-1072","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-trip_planning","tag-california"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.motorcycle-journeys.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1072","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.motorcycle-journeys.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.motorcycle-journeys.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.motorcycle-journeys.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.motorcycle-journeys.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1072"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.motorcycle-journeys.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1072\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1075,"href":"https:\/\/www.motorcycle-journeys.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1072\/revisions\/1075"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.motorcycle-journeys.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1072"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.motorcycle-journeys.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1072"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.motorcycle-journeys.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1072"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}