Day 96

Day 96 - February 7th, 2006 - San Jose, Costa Rica

The next morning we went to the mini storage unit to pick up the bikes. We loaded them up and were about to head towards Panama when I realized my rear brake felt funny. I looked down to see the aluminum bracket was broken! (See the circled areas on the picture below) My bikes was tipped when we tried to get it over the cement lip into the storage unit, so the damage to the bracket definitely happened back then. It's rather unfortunate that we didn't notice it at the time since it is much easier to get parts in Canada than in Costa Rica, or anywhere further south for that matter. Because of our discovery we had to change our plans pretty quickly and headed for the Kawasaki Dealership in San Jose as opposed to the Panama frontera. Unfortunately, the part that we needed was not very common, so therefore wasn't in stock

and, we were told, it would take approximately 3-4 weeks to ship to San Jose.

Instead, the people at the dealership assured us that they could weld the bracket. At first Jan had some concerns, but they prepared the bracket remarkably well, and for a price that couldn't be beat...around $22, tax included. The people at the dealership were fantastic. It was pretty important to have the brake fixed that day since I didn't feel comfortable driving the rest of the trip without it, so we were very grateful that they offered to fix it that afternoon. They dropped everything to help us out, and even gave the bikes a good wash after the work was done. We were on our way in less than three hours, including a lunch break at Denny's. We highly recommend them! While at the dealership we also met a fellow KLR driver who happened to be a professional photographer. He generously offered to take a few pictures of us infront of the dealership and with our bikes. We don't get to be in the same pictures very often so it was nice to have someone take some shots of the both of us. His shots are shown below.