After saying goodbye to the other two couples with whom we spent the last week with, we loaded up the bike to go. Our plan was to take te Highway of Legends going from South to North and see some of the sights we missed yesterday due to the rain.
I had also found an interesting article on the Internet about this famous road that explained which are the most well known places to stop and enjoy. We went to the front desk to get it printed and while we were there we met a lady that was the owner of the hotel. She is from India and as I have been to India before we started chatting and I mentioned I loved south Indian food (where she is from), so we agreed that on our trip back down as we were planning at staying at the same hotel, she would prepare us a South Indian meal. I am looking forward to that.
When we got out to get on te bike, I remembered Doug mentioning that our back lights did not seem to be working so I checked and indeed nothing worked. We had no running back light nor brake lights and no hyper lights.
I suspected that this would be a bad connection problem in the circuit between the battery and the hyper lights connection as nothing was working and computer was not signaling a lamp failure. This was most probably due to the very heavy bumping that I encountered on the day of the mountains. But I just could not see how to get to these connections. I called Joel but even after call I couldn't do it.
So we had to abort our plans of doing the Highway of Legends again (we will probably do it on way down) and as my GPS has a way to look for the closest dealer which was in Colorado Springs, we decided to go there to get it fixed.
We got on the I25 and went on our way. It was a windy ride and we also got drizzled upon but nothing serious so we did not stop to put rain gear on.
When we got to Colorado Springs, the dealership we encountered was a very large Harley Davidson dealer and not BMW. I went to speak to one of the sales guys who very graciously went inside and found where the BMW dealer had moved to and we put new address in GPS. While this was going one our bike had become a kid of magnet to many people around who came to chat and take pictures. We finally were able to break free and made our way to the BMW dealership.
When we got there Paula went inside while I went around the corner to speak to Jim their service manager. He came out and we checked the lights and as he moved the back light it came on and off confirming my suspicion that it was indeed a bad connection.
We went inside to speak to the tech and he said it would be very simple to remove the light (two screws he said) and then I should be able to see all the connections and fix them. Jim suggested that as I could not do this in their property (some rule related to customers working on their bikes inside their property), I should go just outside and put the bike on the curb just under a tree and work there. And that is what I did.
Taking out the light was more difficult than tech had said (there are 4 screws actually and two of them are quite difficult to get to specially without proper tools). But eventually was able to see the onnectiins and one of them was indeed broken. The hyper lights that connect through a crimp mechanism had cut right through the wire. So had to reconnect the wire (which was quite tricky since had less than 1/2 inch piece of wire to work on one side), re-crimp the hyper lights somewhere else and close up.
Good news is that light is fixed, not so good news is that we missed all the fun riding and it was getting late and we had not had lunch yet.
We looked for a place to eat and found one of our favorites. We had lunch at Panera Bread in Colorado Springs and treated ourselves to their very special Bear Paw.
As it was getting late, we decided to stay on the I25 to Denver and then take the I36 West to Boulder.
Although it was a Saturday, traffic was still quite heavy and we had a number of start stop occurrences.
As we approached Boulder it was great to see that we were getting closer to the mountains and I am looking forward to staying in this beautiful little town or the next couple of days where we will be meeting our daughter and some friends and have some time off the bike.
Over the last many tens of thousands of miles we have done touring on a motorcycle, we have found that stopping for 2-3 days every week is a good way to give rest to your body and be able to enjoy riding many weeks in a row.
For dinner we walked to Carellis in Boulder which is a great Italian restaurant (voted best Italian reataurant in Colorado) and although the rest of the food was very good, the highlight of the evening was a Massimo crepe with a glass of Limoncello. Troppo buono !
It was great to see our daughter and enjoy such a great meal together.
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