Weekly update #2

Registration papers

After a nervous two weeks I finally heard back from George (a friend of a friend who helped de-register my bike in Germany). This was the missing piece of the puzzle. Without these papers I couldn’t start the process of importing my bike into Hungary and registering it. If I had of lost these papers then who knows how on earth I could have registered it. Relieved is an understatement.

That godforsaken battery

In week one I reunited with my bike and had my fears confirmed – the battery was dead. As you would have maybe seen in this video last week, I attempted to restart my bike by rolling it down a hill.  We all know how that ends. But here is what happened afterwards.

Exhausted, I rolled my bike back into the garage. There I stood, hands on hips, panting, with a slick layer of oily sweat on my back as I watched camera man Rick remove the seat cover. He was looking for the battery. I scoffed and told him it wasn’t there on my bike. He scoffed and told me I had a disconnected spark plug.

That’s when I remembered. I disconnected it last year by accident (by accident I mean I accidentally didn’t know the difference between what a battery looked like and a spark plug so I disconnected the spark plug and left for the airport).

Restarting a motorcycle is like playing the pokies. You’re always losing but then there’s that moment where you get a little bit of change and you think I’m going to win the bloody jackpot. Addicted to that small chance it would start we decided to give it another go.

We rolled it BACK out of the garage and down the hill again.

But it didn’t start. We drank all the juice.

Why mistakes are awesome

This is truly one of those cliché cases where making a mistake turned out to be the best way to move forward.

Knowing how to manually manoeuvre your bike is imperative to feeling comfortable riding it.

If, like me, you don’t have that much experience with bikes or you’re not very strong, then the thought of toppling over with your motorcycle can be frightening. Whether that be stationary at the lights, taking a tight fast corner or slowly rolling over gravel. What new riders don’t get taught is that any anxiety you have about your motorcycle will hinder your ability to ride safely. The best way to counteract your fear is to get comfortable with the weight and balance of your machine. You need to know your limitations – and the bikes – in order to become a better rider

It’s a shame that after all of the ‘training’ I had in order to get my motorcycle licence, nobody ever stressed the importance of this simple exercise. 

Moving into an apartment

I’ll be having a partner join me for some of this year’s trip and we decided that with all the paper work and bureaucratic nonsense surrounding the registration of my bike that we would get an apartment in Budapest for the summer. This means I can get a Hungarian registration card and register our bikes in my name. It also means I can leave some of my gear back at the apartment and fly back to recharge (me, not the battery this time).

And that’s a wrap! *shakes fingers