The Dom way round: Thanks Chico BMW

Saturday, 2 October 2010

Thanks Chico BMW

Well, I never did leave Chico on Thursday. The guys at Chico BMW worked on my bike all day. They replaced the triple clamp, front rotor blades and fine tuned the valves so she now sounds a whole lot better. Frustrating and expensive but I really couldn't have asked for a nicer bunch of guys to have do the job. They were all friendly and helpful and even let me sit in on the job and have a go at adjusting the valves myself (should I ever need to try to do it). I actually had a very enjoyable day.

Adjusting the valve clearance

So that's what it looks like...

I'm still very annoyed and upset with Alaska Riders and have just written them a letter telling them that I've had to spend well over $5000 getting problems fixed that I really shouldn't have. The final drive was not maintained in Alaska and the cracked triple clamp is indicative of a crashed bike. This was a serious problem as it could have caused me to crash which cornering – something I've been doing a lot of these last few days.

Anyway, enough of this negative talk. I'm got a great couple of weeks ahead of me and I'm determined to enjoy myself. Watch this space...

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Hello

Hi. My name is Dom and in July 2010 I rode a motorcycle (partly) around the world. I started in Alaska and headed for Panama. It took me 6 months and I covered 21,000 miles. I then shipped my bike from Panama to South Africa. I returned to the UK for February and in March 2011 I flew to South Africa. Starting in Cape Town I took three months (and 9,000 miles) to get to Nairobi.

As well as riding a bike I stopped off and did some voluntary work along the way. In Mexico I worked on a turtle rescue project for two weeks and in Costa Rica at a Sloth Sanctuary for three weeks. In Cape Town I taught for three weeks in a Primary school in a township.

In North America my wife, Tracy, came out for three weeks and also joined me for two months in Central America.

I returned to the UK in June 2011. Although I'd kept a blog (obviously) throughout the trip I honestly had no desire to try to write a book. But that changed. Within days of getting home I started writing. Then in Autumn 2011 I found out about The Ted Simon Foundation and applied to be a Jupiter's Traveller. Unbelievably they accepted me and I starting a whole new, and much more frightening, adventure... Trying to write a book about my trip.

'Gone Riding' was published in November 2013. Signed copies are available direct from me at www.domgiles.co.uk. The book is also on Amazon where you can also get the kindle edition. There is lots more information about my trip and the book on my website where you'll find links to my Facebook page and Twitter account.

I now use this blog to write about my current bike trips. In 2013 we went to Scandinavia for the summer and in 2014 we went to Romania. Summer 2015 was spent solo around the Balkans. In July 2016 I went to Poland, the Baltic and Finland.

In the summer of 2017 we went to Northern Spain and France and in 2018 we went to Ireland.

I sold my bike in January 2019!!!