Seattle to Ushuaia

I made it to Nogales, Arizona today after saying goodbye to Victor.  Yesterday, we spent almost the entire day just lounging around, joking and watching television shows, and it was brilliant.  I don’t do this very much, and after 6 days in the saddle, I felt entitled to a “sabbath”.  The only productive thing I did was install the T-mod kit.. everything else was just pure relaxation.

Well, maybe not all of the time was spent relaxing. Here I am midway into unpacking and repacking my gear at Victor's house.

This morning I woke up and finished packing all my gear into the panniers (which I had removed from the bike to work out a more efficient and effective packing strategy).  I now have the expensive and difficult to replace items in the locking panniers, and the rest of the “disposable” gear in soft bags.  When it came time to leave, I fired up my bike.. which promptly quit about 30 seconds later.  Thinking it was just cold, I played around with the choke and got it to start again, only to have it die after a few seconds.  I thought: what is going on?  This is not happening!

After fooling around with the choke and making sure that the fuel line was fitted properly, I took a step back and thought about it.  Could I have mixed something up when I installed the T-mod?   Does the bike not run properly if it has a ventilation tube installed?  (unlikely)  After thinking about it for a few minutes, I realized that after installing the T-mod the previous day, I had forgotten to reattach the vacuum tube to the gas tank.  No vacuum tube = no fuel = no run.  I attached the tube and the bike fired up right away.

My friend Victor, standing next to my motorcycle, on the last morning I spent at his house.

I left Victor’s house at 10 AM and drove to a local auto parts shop.  Something I have needed to do for a while was relocate the license plate, because under heavy loads, the rear wheel on the KLR has a nasty habit of catching the lip of the license plate which could potentially rip off the plate or at least damage it.  A few days ago I found my plate bent almost completely in half!  Before crossing the border into Mexico, I wanted to drill some holes in the rear fender and move the license plate up to a more secure location.

To do this, I needed a power drill, so after leaving Victor’s house at 10 AM, I drove to a local auto parts shop in the hope that they might have a drill that I could borrow.  The first one I tried did not, but they pointed me to a tire store just down the street.  The tire store was not very busy, and after chatting with the man at the sales desk, he went to the back of the store to ask the head mechanic if he could help me out.  The mechanic, whose name was Stu, brought out a pneumatic drill and made short work of my fender.  We had the plate remounted in about 5 minutes, and I even got to reuse the original mounting screws!  I thanked Stu profusely, and he indicated that it wasn’t a big deal, and that he was happy to help.

The license plate should be safe from the rear tire now.

I left Scottsdale and programmed in Nogales into my GPS as the next destination.  Nogales sits very close to the USA-Mexico border, and the police presence here is very noticeable.  I saw one road block on the northward side of the highway and lots of police trucks parked on the side of the road with large antennae poking up into the sky. I know that border security is a touchy subject for many people, but I must say that it feels a bit icky to see so much police activity in such a small place.

I will stay here for the night, wake up bright and early, and head over to the border right away.  The USA border is open 24 hours per day, but the Mexican border does not open until 6 AM so I will try to arrive around then.  I don’t think immigration will take very long, but this will be the first time I have ever imported my motorcycle into another country, so I want to leave myself enough time to take care of all the paperwork and still be able to make it relatively far into Mexico before the sun sets.  I would love to get to Hermosillo by tomorrow evening, but we’ll see how things go.