Transformer, GSA style

There are just so many hours a day that one man can fill with hard work, or any work for that matter. Eight hours a day at graft during this time of the year is absolute murder. All the nice chickies are on leave and the ones left makes me barricade my office door from the inside. (None of them read the forum…. I hope). There I am, a somewhat scary man in my early thirties, hiding from the acting boss whilst ordering my minions to do the slave labour they were made for. Let them work the fields whilst I command my massive labour force (just four okes actually) from my air conditioned office to achieve milestone after milestone for which I will take all the credit. Aahh, life just cannot get better than this? Or can it? Yes, yes I say to myself. Soon I will throw off the shackles of employment and before I trudge home to the ball-and-chain of eternal love I will have two full hours of GS madness ahead of me. I will be riding through the meadows, waiving at damsels and then…. leave them behind. Why leave them behind you may ask, you leave them behind because soon they will begin to nag and slow you down. It’s inevitable, their like a black hole drawing a white dwarf closer and closer (this is apparently physics not soft porn, no editing required).

In the middle of my yearning for graft to end, I suddenly remember what my mother once told me. She said that men don’t get old; it’s only our toys that get more expensive. So what did almost every boy have or perhaps want? A transformer. Now, I’m not talking about the guy in Brakpan sitting on his fold-up chair whilst having an epileptic attack, no, I am talking about a machine that in the blink of an eye can change from something beautiful and sleek to something awe inspiring. In front of your eyes the mundane changes into something that you never thought possible, not even in your wildest dreams. I had the privilege this past Friday to experience this first hand.

I started off with this: Beautiful and sleek

And five minutes later I ended up with this: Awe inspiring

How could this happen? I pondered this for about 2 hours whilst being stuck in the rain after dark on an abandoned road with the bike refusing to start. It is quite simple actually, I blame Hitler. Having not been very interested in history at school I found myself now reading up on zhe (read any ‘Z’ with a German accent) little German for no apparent reason. How he used his dark charisma to bring us the Holocaust, the VW Beetle and the GSA. So, when I saw the flooded farm road ahead of me I thought I could crush it like the Luftwaffe! But alas, I was sitting on top of a U-boat and not a Messerschmitt. About halfway through the 30m section of water the Messerschmitt lost its direction and did an emergency dive. I did a belly flop (about 8 out of 10) to the right and the U-boat went left. Before I could get the kill switch, it managed to commit suicide by drowning. Standing up next to my sunken vessel the water was at knee’s height. I righted the bike, spent the next 30 minutes pushing it out of the water/mud and up a muddy hill to where I could actually put it on the main stand. I tried to get as much water out of the engine as possible for a desperate last-time start, I didn’t get it all. When the GSA did turn over, zhe starter emitted a spine chilling, satanic wolf scream that only Jamie Lee Curtis could properly imitate. Together we spent the next 25km in relative silence as we nursed each other home; me with a newly acquired throat infection and the GSA with something a little more life threatening.

Below is the GSA in the expensive care unit at BMW Motorrad.

The damage above is just over R10k and I will only have the U-boat back in 2013 due to the insurance assessors closing for the year.
All this before even paying the 1^st instalment on the bike.

Somewhere in this there is probably a very valuable lesson that can be learned.
I’m still laughing so maybe that is why I can’t see it (apart from the obvious plug spanner I will now add to my tool kit).
In the end it was still a crap load of fun!!!

RIP: Dog of War

I picked up the latest edition of the Superbike mag in the shops the other day.
The main feature for December is the battle royale for the best bike of 2012.
The middle of page 30 reads: "The GS is like a big daft Labrador. It doesn't care where it is, it's just happy to be out in the fresh air."

After reading this I decided that "my" GS is no Labrador.... so I named her Dog of War
Ha Ha..... Nothing was going to get in the way of Dog of War.

To my surprise changing the name of something apparently doesn't change its nature...... (sound familiar to any other married men??? )

So being new to the whole adventure scene I am still enjoying this a lot. The previous owner of my GS did 1579km in two years, I have done 1300km in the 8 days that I have had the scooter. This translates into "looking" for stuff to ride through and over etc......

With this in mind, look at Dog of War below. I was travelling in the opposite direction that the bike is now facing. Riding on a dry patch of road and then deciding to move over to the slightly muddy part (because I am now an explorer and conqueror of worlds) was not the best idea I have had.

I had time to take a quick snap with the cell before I saw a family with a caravan behind their car approaching. In one manly expression of raw power (please read as: tried to pick the fat bike up three times) I righted the GS in time to wave the vacationers on their way.

This was the end of Dog of War, welcome back my daft Labrador