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We arrived back at the warehouse in Miami Springs bright and early yesterday, as instructed, and set about the exhausting task of removing the chocks and ties strapping our bikes into the crates. The process took about 4 hours in all, including the time it took to get the bikes running and return our rental car to the airport. The Fatboy had been strapped down onto its side-stand, and chocks put under the front and rear of the tires to prevent it from rolling. Even so, the windshield had been pressed up against the edge of the crate, and is somewhat bent. There were also some scuff marks in the varnish from the metal tape used to strap everything in. I’m hoping I can fix most of this myself.

Octavia’s Street Bob fared considerably less well. The crating contractor had lifted the whole bike off the wheels by fitting chocks under the frame, with the stand still up and then strapped the bike into the crate totally upright. Not surprisingly, the bike had moved under the metal tie-strips quite considerably, taking the paint off several parts of the bike, and bending the side stand. Worse, they had folded a flattened cardboard box over the tank, staples down… so the tank is badly scored, and will probably be cheaper to replace than repair.

When I sent the bikes back to Miami, I found out that the consolidator had shipped them from LA to London uninsured, and since I didn’t have sight of the bikes in England, didn’t waste my money insuring them for the return trip: The loss adjuster would have declared any damage I claimed for to have occurred on the outbound journey. Instead, I’ve saved around $1600 on the cost of the insurance premiums I didn’t have to pay, so my hope is that the cost of repairs will be less than this.

Once I’d installed the new batteries, and after careful inspection for any mechanical problems, I took both bikes for a test ride and they were thankfully still running well. I’ve booked both for their 5,000 mile service now that we’ve ridden over 250 miles back to Orlando, so they’ll get a thorough inspection from a qualified mechanic tomorrow incase I missed anything. It was well past 3pm yesterday by the time we were underway after a late lunch, and we stopped for a couple of hours outside Fort Lauderdale around 6pm to escape the bumper-to-bumper traffic on the interstate in the blistering evening sun. Shortly after setting off again, another of the short Florida thunder showers drenched us through to the skin.

This morning I am a broken man. The skin on the back of my hands looks like crispy fried duck from being in the sun all day. The skin on the palms of my hands is sore and blistered from too much crowbar fighting. The muscles in my arms, back and legs are stiff and sore from hoisting and heaving two huge Harleys out of their shipping crates. But. (And this makes it all worthwhile). But… the bikes are finally back in the garage, and we have another 10 weeks to explore Florida before our tourist visas expire.

Moral of the story: Unless you know exactly what you are doing, or unless you have no personal attachment to the goods in transit, shipping things back and forth across the Atlantic is a hair-tearing stress-inducing nightmare. If I had known back then what I know now, I doubt I would have put myself through this. On the other hand, I think I’ve learnt the hardest lessons now, so maybe I’ll be equipped to do a better job if I decide to ship the bikes again.

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Yesterday afternoon, my broker called to confirm that our Harley’s have finally cleared US customs, and that my import duty would be 2% of the current value of the bikes. Adding on the documentation fees, taxes, and the broker’s bill I ended up having to pay about $850 to get them back into the country… a far cry from the $15,000 greedy UK customs wanted! Had returning the bikes to America been planned in advance, rather than a damage control exercise when UK customs told me what I would have to give them, I could have avoided even the 2% fee by collecting carnet documents (a sort of passport for vehicles) before shipping them from LA, which would have reduced my bill to $450.

We set off from Orlando in a rental car at 9:30am today, covering the 222 miles to Miami Springs in a little under 4 hours. By the time we’d visited our broker to collect our clearance paperwork and found our way to the warehouse it was almost 2pm, when we discovered that we were supposed to have brought a truck to take away the crates containing our bikes. The staff were actually quite sympathetic in the end though, and agreed that if we return first thing tomorrow morning with a crowbar and fresh batteries for the Harleys, they will put the crates outside for us to break open ourselves.

After stopping for directions a couple of times, we found a Harley dealership in Fort Lauderdale and bought some new batteries. On the way to a cheap hotel in North Miami we also collected a gallon of gas to get our bikes started with. We dashed out for a quick dinner at a local restaurant, where I had what is most definitely the best steak I have ever eaten before a romantic walk back to the hotel along the beach at dusk. The blurry photo above is a storm cloud out at sea with lightning flashing inside it — the weather in Florida is extremely localised, to the point of being able to see a band of rain a few miles in the distance, with the sun shining behind it. We’ve had several thunder showers over the last 2 weeks, most lasting for only 30 minutes or so, but nothing quite so spectacular as this storm cloud in the distance…

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If you’ve been following my Groundhog Day Resolutions posts, you’ll remember that my second resolution is to Read a Book Every Week, and that in amongst my busy schedule I’ve had mixed success with keeping it these last few months.

On a related note, before I left the YUK I was keen to leave my bank accounts in a good enough state that they would take care of themselves while I am away. One of the things I did to make that as easy as possible was to go through all my Direct Debit payments, and cancel as many as I could — cell phone contracts, utility bills, magazine subscriptions etc.

Now, I’ve been a member of Audible for almost 4 years now, and made great use out of the audio books on my daily commute to work helping to make my daily hour of driving much more pleasant — I sometimes became so enrapt with the book I was listening to on the way home that I’d sit in the car for 10 minutes on the drive before going in just to get to the end of the current chapter, and I would actually look forward to the morning rush hour drive the next day, knowing I could get back to a rivetting book. Maybe there’d even be bad traffic, and I’d get some extra listening time :-) Since I gave up my day job, however, my book credits have been accumulating, and there hasn’t been an obvious point in my routine to keep up. So, I came very close to cancelling my subscription, except that 50 Spiritual Classics caught my eye as an interesting book to listen to on the flight, so I decided to get that first, and cancel my subscription later. You might have noticed that very book has appeared in the Now Reading widget in the sidebar.

Tying all this together, is my ongoing difficulty of reading an actual physical book every week, so I’ve dusted off my iPod (which is doing the honours as a portable Apple TV with a selection of my favourite movies and a TV cable while we’re in Florida) and spent my remaining credits. The cheapest service plan costs only £7.99 for a book of your choice every month, plus you get two free books when you join — and they can cost non-members upwards of £30 each for the heftier tomes. Alternatively, you don’t need to tie yourself to a monthly subscription if you’d rather pay for books on an adhoc basis. As soon as we collect our Harley’s from customs tomorrow, I’ll have ample opportunity to catch up on my reading as I ride around Florida for the next few months, and I plan to kick my target of 4 books before the next GHDR review day into orbit :-)

I thoroughly recommend audible’s service. They have an enormous selection of books (my wishlist is backed up for 2 years worth of books from my subscription), and even if it takes a little creativity to find the opportunity to listen to the audio programmes, I guarantee it’s much easier than making the time to actually sit down and read a dead-trees edition of the same book!

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I’m always game for spreading around a little link love, and participating in a fun meme. I was tagged by fellow Brit blogger Ian Hedges 10 days ago, just about when my schedule went to hell in a hand basket in the frantic 2 day packing window between the end of Download 2007 and my flight from the Green Unpleasant Land.

There is an link to a nice pdf somewhere in my 8 facts if you click in the right place…

The Rules

• Leave a link back to the 8 Random Facts post from the blogger who tagged you.
• Quote these rules in your post.
• Reveal 8 random facts about yourself.
• Tag 8 other bloggers to take part, and notify them they have been tagged.

The Facts

1. I have never played bass guitar. I have no musical training, and since college I’ve given up on my daily regimen of 3 hours of electric guitar practice, so I am currently the proud owner of very little actual musical talent. Despite that, I’ve been in several bands over the years: I played drums in my first band, Hemlock; lead guitar in my second band Alien Fuck Beast; I was lead singer in the first line-up of D-Fex, before being relegated to rhythm guitar chops; I’ve not been able to hold a band together since I hit the road, so I bought a keyboard to compose electronic music, and to remix some of my earlier music under the moniker of very own Ill Will project. Check out an eclectic selection of my tracks and remixes on myspace, if you dare! (Bass by Jon Green, lyrics and vocals by Jammer Jackson.)
2. The first time my technical writing was published in England was from an email interview for a leading British Linux magazine who didn’t even pay me for it! A couple of articles (and several months) later, I realised that it required effort to get a cheque out of them than was involved in actually writing the articles, so I had to double my hourly rates to cover it, and they could no longer afford me ;-)
3. My second book was half written when O’Reilly pulled the plug on it, in the wake of 9/11. After reworking it some, it was accepted by APress for almost a month before they pulled the plug on it. I decided to give up on the whole thing, and come up with a totally new concept for my next book (which does have a publisher… at the moment).
4. On average, it takes somewhere between 3 and 5 years to earn a black belt, depending on what martial art you study. Despite practicing martial arts since I was 14 years old, I didn’t actually earn a black belt until I was 30, although I became moderately proficient in 3 other styles before settling on Tae Kwon-Do long enough to actually earn my black belt. If I hadn’t become a voluntary nomad for the last 12 months, which makes attending classes in Droitwich Spa rather impractical, I’d be eligible to take my 4th Dan early next year.
5. By at least one convention the land masses on Earth can be classified into 5 continents. I have lived on 3 of those continents in my life (Africa, Europe, and America) and plan to live on the others over the next 2 years (Asia and Australia).
6. In the 10 years since I got my driver’s license, I’ve owned 10 cars and 7 motorbikes. You might think I have a short attention span, but the real reason is because each vehicle I bought went somewhat faster than everything I’d owned previously… at least until I left England to ride Route 66 in October last year; Harley’s aren’t reknowned for their blazing speed. I still have one car and 3 motorbikes. Anyone looking to buy?
7. I haven’t owned a Windows license since Windows 3.11 for Workgroups (about 14 years ago); I haven’t owned a Windows machine since Windows 98 SE (about 8 years now); I haven’t touched a Windows installation since Windows XP SP1 (about 2 years ago); and that makes me very happy ;-)
8. I have a conspiracy theory of my own: All conspiracy theories are untrue.

The Tags

I pass the baton to Frank Pohlmann, James Urquhart, Simon Barker, Bill Toome, Mark Shead, Alex Shalman, David Seah and Maia Jose.

Not including mailing lists or spam, I typically receive a couple of hundred emails every day, and I try to respond to the relevant ones as soon as they move into my attention — marking them unread to remind myself to get back to them later is generally doomed to failure as incoming mails push that message ever further from the front page of my email reader. Consequently, I tend to be a little shy about advertising my email address, and made a conscious decision not to include a contact page. I’ve even gone so far as to obfuscate the Message Me link on my myspace page.

A good proportion of you, gentle readers, don’t use RSS or email subscriptions to read my articles, and since I’m currently ruminating on how to improve your experience when visiting this site, I do want to supply some means of getting in touch without leaving an off-topic comment. Enter Plugoo, an IM flash application newly embedded into my sidebar. Not only will it queue messages for me when I’m offline, but I can answer you in real-time if I’m online :-)

I plan to leave it in place for a few weeks to see how it works for me (and you!) before I decide whether to make it a permanent addition to the site. So, why not try it out and say “hi!”…