As you might expect, we were on the doorstep of SWMotorrad as they opened this morning. I confess my bike was in a shocking state. We had been caught in a hailstorm in the middle of some road construction on the way up to Williams Lake and, in comparison with John’s relatively clean Triumph, the 1200 looked as though I had been doing some serious trail riding. Perhaps BMW deliberately design them to attract dirt that way, to give unadventurous commuters a little street cred. Anyway, the bike was going to need a good rinse before any work could start and I could either do it myself at the car wash a couple of blocks down, or pay the dealer to give it a valet job. John and I went for breakfast …

Winding on an hour or so, the bike was up on the bench, minus its rear wheel, and a technician was examining the thick brown gloop that was coating the drive shaft inside the swingarm. He shone a torch into the void so that we could see where water was getting in. The issue, as it turned out, was not nearly so serious as to require replacement of the final drive. Although the shaft was visibly corroded, its function had not been compromised. In cleaning out the muck from the swingarm, the Portland dealer had treated the symptoms but not the cause, which was odd as, with the bike up on the bench, it didn’t take a trained technician to diagnose the problem. The rubber boot that covers the joint between the gearbox and the shaft was perished, and so was allowing water and dirt into the swingarm every time it rained. It was this emulsified mixture of oil and water that I had seen leaking out over the wheel rim in Williams Lake – nothing to do with a damaged final drive at all. Even so, I now face the prospect of being endlessly ribbed by John. After all, isn’t this the bike that is supposedly built to go anywhere, stopped in its tracks by a leaky pair of wellies? The technician shrugged. “We see this occasionally”, he said, “We call them Oktoberfest bikes.”

The parts were relatively inexpensive and would be in tomorrow, so we could start making contingency plans to salvage the rest of our trip.