Hours of Daylight – 15:16

We did it, we did our first overnight in the van since moving to Idaho! It was not a major expedition or anything like that, just an overnight at Bruneau Dunes State Park. We didn’t even leave the house until about 1:30… as the park is only about 50 miles from where i’m typing this. The only delay getting there was caused by a road crew resurfacing a long stretch of the only road into the Bruneau Valley from the North.

This was my second trip to the Bruneau Valley. The first had been on the motorcycle about two moths earlier. We were also coming in the opposite direction, South from Mountain Home. On my first trip there i noticed a well done homemade sign: “Will the last person to leave the Bruneau Valley remember to feed and water the snail.” Turns out the valley is home to the endangered hot springs snail. A quick qoogle search reveals: In Bruneau Valley, Idaho, the Fish and Wildlife Service moved to cut off 59 farms and ranches from their water rights to avoid lowering the water level of the hot springs where the Bruneau hot springs snail is found. In 1993, a coalition of landowners filed suit to remove the snail from the protected species list since the snail can be found in concentrations of more than 6,000 snails per square foot. The Courts did rule that the listing was “arbitrary, capricious and abuse of discretion and otherwise not in accordance of the law.”

Cutting off ranches and farms from their water rights is, quite simply, a death sentence.

Further reading, from the Beef Industry publication The Gatekeeper: Many in the cattle business can recall the furor that erupted when the Bruneau Hot Springs snail was listed under the Endangered Species Act (ESA) in January 1993. The ruling encountered fierce opposition from local farmers and ranchers facing restrictions on the use of water from underlying warm water aquifers.

“It’s hard enough to keep these small communities together without the threat and cost of these kinds of listings,” Davis says. “The snail listing is still a cloud hanging over our valley.”

However it is difficult to find any current information on the Bruneau Spring Snail, so i’m going to assume the whole thing is in some bureaucratic netherworld somewhere between “listing” and “enforcement.”

But enough about the vagaries of endangered snail species land management, let’s talk about retail. I hate retail. I hate to shop. I hate salespeople. I hate to give money in exchange for crappy clothing that will fall to pieces (or just get dirty) in no time at all. But what i hate most of all is feeling i’m somehow bugging or bothering a salesman or business owner by trying to give him my money. I’m going to relate a rather long story now.

When we first arrived here i visited Mike at Big Twin motorcycles. He’s the local BMW dealer, so that’s where i have to get my service done if i’m to honor the BMW warranty. I asked what cargo boxes he’d recommend for my R1200GS. He told me to go see Tim Bernard at Happy Trail down on Chinden. “He makes very good bags for the 1100 and 1150GS, and he’s now making them for the 1200.”

I rode down to Happy Trail and found they were having an open house. I met Tim, he demoed a prototype set of his boxes, we arrived at a price, and i said i’d like to have a set. However right from the beginning something felt wrong. Tim and his people were strangely disengaged from me, the customer. Tim got up and left me sitting at his desk a couple of times, i have no idea why. The price we discussed was in the high $800 range… probably something like $895. I should have written that down. I left his shop with great anticipation that soon i’d be able to carry stuff on my bike and not have to use a backpack or kludgy bungie cords.

Two months passed. I called now and then and was always told one thing or another. Each time i was told the boxes were unavailable i asked the salesguy, Todd, to call me when he had news. All i wanted was for him to call me for a change… even to say, “sorry, they’re still not here.” Finally i called one morning to hear “yep, they here, they’re done.” I said i’d be down in five minutes.

I arrived at Tim’s shop about five minutes after i put the phone down, went in and asked for Todd. Well, it turns out the boxes were not done. They had “finishing” to do… basically putting the decals on. So, i wandered around the store looking at this and that. 15 minutes passed. Todd then reappeared and began punching keys on the cash register. OK, i thought, let’s get this transaction done! He produced a bill over $1000. Not only was the bill too high, with lots of line items i didn’t know about, but along the bottom was a quote from the bible. Todd disappeared into the back of the shop. I took the printout over towards Tim, and asked him to explain why there was a “labor” line item when i was going to mount the bags on my bike myself.

We sat down at his desk and he twiddled a nasty windows POS application. He starting saying things like “this is too low,” and “ok, now i just have to teak this.” I asked specifically about the labor charge. “Oh, that’s what we charge to drill the holes that you’ll use to mount the bag on the carrier frame.”

“Well,” i started, “i thought we’d arrived at a price.”

“We did, for the bags. The other charges are apart from the actual bags.”

I got the deer-in-the-headlights look… the nasty metalic taste in my mouth…. Tim got up and walked out the front door.

Not knowing what was going on i got up and walked over to “my” new bags that were now sitting on the floor near the sales counter. The left top had a scratch. Not huge, but not small either. The decals were on…. proudly informing the world i was riding a 1200GS…. and on the back of the bags two “Happy Trails” logos. Tim came back in. As he passed i called his attention to the scratch.

“Oh… oh, well, uh. We can figure something out about that.”

He turned again and walked outside. The girls at the counter were busying themselves with all sorts of paperwork. I was totally invisible. I stood there like a moron for about two minutes…. then turned… and left. I got in my van and began to back out of the parking space. Tim came over.

“I’ve changed my mind.”

“Oh, well, oh…”

I babbled on like an idiot, “no hard feelings, just not right, gotta feel right when dealing the bike, doesn’t feel right.”

“Oh, ok then.” He backed away from the driver’s side and i sped away.

I called Al Jesse’s place: “how soon could you get a set of your bags to me in Boise, ID?”

“You order them now you could have them tomorrow.”

“Don’t need them tomorrow, but that was the right answer.”

I ordered the bags, but asked them to ship them slowly so i could save a little money. I’d waited in vain more than two months on Tim’s Happy Trail boxes… i could afford to wait a little longer for the Jesse bags.

Then, this past Saturday at the Bruneau Dunes campground a guy rode in on fully loaded 1150GS Adventure. He had Jesse bags and the Jesse top case, too. I saw where he parked and after he had his tent up i walked up to say hello. Turns out he was a young guy who was on his way back home to Utah after traveling over 24,000 miles up to Alaska. He’d been out more than three months. The bike was filthy, but there’s something about the 1150GS’s; dirt looks really good on them. He said he’d dropped the bike twice in mud but the boxes hardly even got scratched. The left one leaks, but he showed me a split in the weather stripping that could be fixed with some silicone caulk.

So, maybe that’s what’s next for me…. first get the ability to haul the gear, then haul the gear up to Alaska for a couple of months. We shall see.