Whitehorse and a Flat Part 2

After leaving a rest area along Highway 1. Or is it 97? The road is in Yukon Territories one minute, in BC the next, then back to YT. Well, anyway, I pull out of the rest area, and about 3 miles down the road the tire pressure warnings are lighting up the dashboard like a set of high-dollar driving lights. "Meh, it's just being a worry wart. I lowered the pressures to see if it would make the Continental TKC70s suck a little less. I didn't think I lowered them that far, though. I'll air them up next time I stop." The pressure reading said 32 front, 35 rear. Eh, that'll get me there. Then the rear dropped to 32, to 28, to 24, and by the time it got to 20 I was at the side of the road.

I have a plug kit, I have a pump. It'll be going in a jiffy. Except the Progressive Suspension tire repair kit kind of sucks. The reamer is also what you use to push the plug into the tire. How does it not puncture the plug? I imagine that it does. Maybe that doesn't matter. What does matter is that the plug style is kind of funny. For a small hole, I have to wonder how well it would go in. ("Shut up, Beevis!") Anyway, I didn't like it. It also didn't fix the leak. Now to be fair, the boot plug that we'll try later didn't work, either.

Alright, no workable tire fixing solution, what now? There's no cell service, and the next town ain't walking distance. Out comes the DeLorme InReach sat comm unit to text the wife to call BMW roadside assistance that you get three years of when you buy a new bike. In the mean time, there's no road shoulder to speak of, and the ditch isn't very inviting. I'll go back to the rest area and hole up there. I inflate the tire until the pump can't keep up with the leak, through the pump in the saddlebag as quickly as I can, and ride slowly. I ride until the PSI reading on the dash drops to the low teens, I pull off, reinflate, repeat. It takes me an hour to go five miles back to the rest area.

Once back to the rest area, Katherine finally gets back to me. AAA, whom she called first, will send a truck in the morning. Fine by me, I'll set up the tent and make myself comfortable. After all, there are worse places to be stuck.

Since AAA only covers the first hundred miles, Katherine tried BMW roadside assistance, as they cover the whole thing.

If I give you two numbers of high enough precision, it's possible to pinpoint within a few hundred feet where you are in the world. We call those latitude and longitude. Take those two numbers and type them into Google Maps or any variety of mapping apps, and the dot will zoom to exactly where those two numbers represent. BMW's roadside assistance was given those two numbers. BMW's roadside assistance couldn't find their ass from a whole in the ground. Katherine said she was talking them through how to use Bing maps (and failing, apparently). This went on for over five hours.

Of course, it's not like BMW has people sitting in their Berlin office waiting by the phone. No, I can almost guarantee the service is contracted out. But holy shit, if your whole business is based on contracting with car and bike makers to offer roadside assist, one would think you'd train your employees to know what to do with a lat/long, and how to use a fucking map.

When Katherine finally goes to bed around midnight, the truck is supposedly on its way. "Six hours", they say. I set an alarm for five a. m. so I can get the tent down and be ready when the truck gets here.

Six hours come and go, and I get a decent bit of sleep. No truck. I have plenty of time to ponder the lovely view. 

Katherine has now been in direct contact with the towing company. Oh, the truck had trouble with blah, blah, blah, but he's coming. 11:30 in the morning, the truck shows up. Twelve hours after he supposedly left. A really good athlete on a bicycle could have ridden from Whitehorse in that amount of time.

We get the bike loaded, and our journey begins. Nice guy, the wrecker driver. Neve did get his name, but he's a big, lean guy that could snap my twiggy self in two. Or he could be really handy at loading a dead bike on a trailer as well. He chose the second option. With three hours to kill, we talk. I tell him I had a friend years ago, owned his own wrecker, and how I understand it's a hard job. Jimmy used to get paged (hey, it was a long time ago) in the middle of the night to go drag someone out of a ditch. My driver says something about, "yeah, I don't go out in the middle of the night unless I have to." Then he says something I don't remember exactly, but something along the lines of "...so after talking to Capital Towing (for whom he works), I figured it could wait until morning", or something like that. He never left at midnight, he was never looking for me at 5 a. m. He probably didn't leave Whitehorse until eight, and never had any intention of doing otherwise. I don't blame the driver, I blame the person Katherine had been talking to. Just set expectations, and if it's going to be late morning, tell me. I've got nice shelter, food, and water, I truly don't mind. What I do mind is getting up at five in the morning, tearing down my shelter, for no reason.

I listen to the driver's tales of life in the Yukon as a wrecker driver. He asks about places I've been and places I'm going. He tells me about going down the Dempster Highway in winter to retrieve cars. "So, about how much would it cost to have you come down the Dempster to Inuvik to retrieve me, and bring me back?" $5-6K dollars, I'm told. When it's 40 below with snow on the road, that sounds like a bargain to me. Hell, I wouldn't do it.

We finally arrive in Whitehorse, and the driver is going to drop me at the Yamaha dealer to see if they have a tire. If not, he'll take me to the next bike shop, and basically drive me around until we establish that the issue can be resolved. Just as I get out of the truck, Katherine hits the sat comm to say that she called and they have one. I go into the shop and confirm. It's not exactly the right size, but I know others on the web say they use that size when the tire they want doesn't come in the factory-specified size, and it is said that it works fine.

The bike is unloaded, and so that the shop doesn't have to take a bike off a rack to get me in, i take my own wheel off in the parking lot. No biggie, on a BMW rear wheel it's five bolts and five minutes. The shop doesn't want to put the incorrect size on, so they're going to try a boot plug installed by a local tire shop. After an hour, the tire is back on the wheel...and it won't hold air. Wrong-sized tire it is, then. While I'm waiting, I buy a better plug kit.

24 hours after it all started, I'm back on the road and on my way to the hotel I booked. No tents for me tonight. I'm only 90 miles away from where I wanted to be, so I didn't lose a lot of time, and I have a story to tell. I spend two hours on the phone with my awesome wife who spent the better part of a work day on the phone dealing with incompetents, just make sure it's being taken care of. We "adventurers" don't do it alone, we all have support networks we can rely on. You can pack every tool you own, but sometimes it just can't be fixed at the side of the road.

I don't fool myself. I'm mostly self-sufficient on the road, but I rely on modern conveniences.You think Edward Shackleton just pulled out the sat phone? "Her Majesty's Ship Owners Association, how may I help you?"

"Yeaaaah, my ship's stuck in some ice. Can you send a tug? Maybe an icebreaker? Oh, wait, those haven't been invented yet, have they?"

"Yes, sir. Where are you located?"

"Somewhere near Antarctica. Look for three masts sticking up, it's about all that's left."

No, Shackleton and his men were on their own, and no one was coming. That's an adventurer. I'm a tourist going to places I don't need to be, with a ripcord to pull when it all goes wrong.

My last act for the evening is to get a picture of the lovely sunset in Whitehorse...at eleven thirty at night.