I’d found a bike that looked fabulous on the Kijiji website and had sent a few emails back and forth in the weeks leading up to departure. The guy seemed genuine, so I’d made plans to contact him the week before I went out and to view the bike as soon as I could on arrival.
With that falling into place I then just had to sort the travel insurance, with a bike riding add-on, the bike insurance and currency.
The travel insurance was easy enough as I’d joined the Motorcycle Action Group (MAG) in the spring, and one of the things they offer is normal travel insurance, with free cover for riding a bike up to 1,500cc. It’s an annual policy which is good for 31 days on any trip, so perfect for me.
The bike insurance is trickier, as I’m a foreign national riding in Canada and America on my own Canadian bike. If it had been one of bikes from Scotland, the thing to do is just pretend to be based in the US and get insurance from there, which is nice and cheap, but as it’s not a UK bike, I had to go a more expensive route using Motorcycle Express as recommended in the HUBB. For a months cover it’s going to cost about the same as a year at home, but there’s no way around it and I’d run out of time for researching other options. An important point to note here though is that it takes three business days from agreeing the quote until the policy starts. More on this later.
The currency should have been easy, as I work in the head office of a bank, but it turned out the rates weren’t so good, so I ordered online with a currency specialist. Well I tried to but the payment kept failing, with no reason given, it later turned out that as I’d been trying to order from work the payment was declined as it was a shared internet connection. So I did it from home that night, and while I got the larger Canadian dollar order through the US dollar order was declined. This time it was a suspicious transaction, this despite me telling my bank I was going to do it.
In the end I got it done, but I only picked it all up at the Post Office on the day before I left, which was too close for comfort. Oh, and on the Tuesday as I was packing my external hard disk failed so I had to order a new one, which I ended up collecting at 6am on the Friday morning, before I had to be in Glasgow by 7am to check in.
Fortunately everything fell nicely in line, but it could have gone all wrong. I’m taking this as an omen that the trip will go well.
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