On the road again

I'm off this morning to Cape Girardeau, Mo., and GrassRoots BMW Motorcycles to get a new battery for my '03 K1200GT. It's one of the new (in 2003, anyway) gel batteries and has performed well for the past five years. However, when I tried to start the bike Sunday afternoon after about four weeks of idleness, the battery was too weak to fire the engine. I put it on the trickle charger and within a day it was registering as fully charged. Nevertheless, I know that batteries can fail at inopportune times and I'm loathe to head for the West in a couple of weeks with a five-year-old battery that may or may not be good.
It's 145 miles to GrassRoots, so I'd better get moving.

Ouch!

I bought my first $50 tank of gas today when I filled the tank on the Subaru at the Hilltop Kum & Go (yeah, I know) about noon.
Actually, it came to $50.01.
I'm sure several of my readers have already crossed this painful threshold, but today was a first for me. The sad thing is that I fully expect to see a $100 tank of gas eventually, and probably sooner than I'd like.
This means, of course, that I'll favor my 30 mpg Honda del Sol over the 24 mpg Subaru Forester, but when weather permits, I'll do my traveling on my 40 mpg BMW K1200GT or Maria's 49 mpg BMW K75S.
I ran an errand on Maria's bike yesterday morning and noticed the shifting was conspicuously notchy and I had to forceably stomp it down from fourth to third gear a couple of times. I mentioned the problem to one of the service technicians at Grass Roots BMW Motorcycles later that day and he opined I have a leaking transmission seal and the gears need oil.
So I checked the level this afternoon, found it nearly bone dry, and ran down to the nearby Advance Auto Parts store for a liter of 80W90 hypoid gear oil.
Naturally, Maria's bike's toolkit is missing the tool that serves as a dipstick for transmission oil and naturally my new bike doesn't come with one and naturally, I couldn't locate the tool kit from my old K100RS. So I just kinda eyeballed it, being guided by the owner's manual specs.
After adding the oil, I buttoned it up and went for a spin. Voila! Buttery smooth shifting.
So when Grass Roots opens on Tuesday, I'll call and book some service time to get the offending seal or seals replaced. So what if it's 145 miles to their shop? I'm looking forward to the ride.

BMW RAMS club meeting

We went to a BMW club meeting yesterday in Cape Girardeau, Mo.
This being a regional club, the monthly meetings are scattered over a wide area. The membership center of gravity is around Memphis, but this being the Mid-South with its extended riding season, there's no reluctance to ride 100 miles or more to a meeting.
Unfortunately, yesterday's forecast was for severe weather in the afternoon, so we chose to drive rather than ride. The destination was Grass Roots BMW Motorcycles, which is a BMW-only dealership and a damned good one at that. They are very supportive of the BMW Riders Association of the Mid-South. They served up a delicious pork steak lunch, handed out a bunch of door prizes and gave us 10% off anything we cared to buy. I found a nice summer-weight Fieldsheeer High Flow Mesh jacket for $99.95 and Maria took a shine to a cap.
The round trip mileage made it an investment of about $29 in gas, compared to about $16 worth of gas if we had ridden my K1200GT. But our read on the forecast turned out to be right and we would have done the last hour or so in rainsuits.
Now I have to go grocery shopping at Sam's Club and Kroger, so I'll leave you with a scan of the club patch.