It was a bit of a clanger for a first post... Thanks for not hitting me over the head! I did want to make it clear to someone thinking about this as a nice reliable "Honda" that it's not a normal honda. You can't expect one with 25 000 k on it to behave like say a CBR1000 that has 25 000 k on it (ie, work perfectly and behave like a bran new bike). I've been following Postie Notes and I think I get it. I think JFK's speech writer summed it up the best. "Not because they are easy, but because they are hard". If you set off to go around Australia, or Sydney to London on a postie, you're doing it *because* it's hard. That's an *admirable* goal. Having ridden a postie for 4 hours a day for 2 years over every imaginable surface (from a motorcross track to a 6 lane highway) in every kind of weather, even an earthquake, but never leaving my own postcode, I have a very clear idea of the challenge you've set yourself. I don't think that ATWR, the first poster, had any idea of what a postie is really like.

"We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too"