No sane person would want to dismantle his or her beloved motorcycle and store it in a leaky old boat. We certainly didn't; after all, it was a perfectly good motorcycle. But we did. To get our CX500 on board, we disassembled it on the dock (with quite a crowd watching) and had to squeeze each bit through a hatch the size of a TV screen. The frame was the tightest squeeze; we had to twist and turn it to get it through.
For the next six years, seawater leaked all over our CX, and for long periods the engine itself was submerged in bilge water 8-10 inches deep. Everything corroded. The wiring loom turned to mush. (Now, why couldn't I have destroyed my perfectly good motorcycle by crashing into the side of a truck, or spinning off the road at high speed like any normal biker?)
By the time we landed in Florida and took the CX out again--piece by corroded piece it was nothing but a pile of scrap. It took a whole month to rebuild the CX on the front deck of our boat (more crowds), though only 20 minutes to get it running. (And only four months of riding for the parts to stop dropping off--all those bolts I forgot to tighten properly!)
From Florida we traveled across North America to Vancouver, Canada, crossed to Japan with the arrival of spring, 1999, then headed by ferry to Vladivostok at the far eastern end of Russia. During the short Russian summer, we rode a third of the way around the globe: through the Siberian forests and, finally, back to Europe. We had traveled around the world twice.
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