Spring has arrived, all of a sudden. Montreal was at around 22C, which made the great piles of snow all over the place seem rather surreal.And I've sussed the Canadian accent: it's quite subtle - sort of vaguely Scottish/Irish in that the 'ow' diphthong is pronounced 'oh'. For instance, 'aboat' for 'about' and 'oat' for 'out'. You have to listen quite hard, though.

So after some cogitation I decided to get myself on to the TransCanadienne and head west, more or less to see how far I can get.

After a snack stop west of Ottawa I was thoroughly enjoying the ride in glorious afternoon sunshine when there was a sort of bang and a graunchy noise, and the rear wheel tried to lock, which isn't ideal at around 75mph.

So clutch in, which didn't help much, and ground, literally, to a halt.

There is a particular, nasty, smell to over-hot EP90; the white smoke is a bit of a giveaway, too. I appeared to have a box-full of neutrals.

Put my helmet on the ground next to the rear wheel (standard N American distress signal) and practised swearing in ten major languages. A Vulcan stopped, and a nice chap called Rod took my details and went off home to ring for help, if possible from the BMW dealer in Ottawa. He came back having found the dealer and alerted them but unable to track down an available breakdown truck. While we were pondering, a police cruiser stopped and the nice young man telephoned Dwaine in Renfrew, who was out within 20 minutes.

Motor Sports World in Ottawa hung around to wait until we arrived at around 6pm and helped us get The Old Dear off the truck. She wasn't very cooperative, as the gearbox is either full of neutrals or has all the gears engaged at once depending on what you're trying to do. We discussed things a bit, and they reckoned 63,000 miles isn't bad for a gearbox really. I suppose so; after all they've been known to self-destruct at anything from 5 to 100,000 miles, or even never. I have one at home which lasted 90,000.

Thing is, when I changed the oil at Stan's place the old oil looked perfect - clean and absolutely no sign of water - and the magnetic drain plug had no more than the normal amount of swarf adhering to it. There have been no symptoms (like clicking when you wheel the bike backwards); no warning at all, in fact.

So now you know why I put the new gearbox in before I left home. So that it could explode somewhere civilised. And, of course, having bypassed Ottawa I've paid the price and have to be a tourist here for a few days.

Anyone know where I can get an exchange reconditioned box on this continent?