I knew it was all suspiciously easy.It took longer to get to the shipping agent at the airport than it did to arrange the shipping (which took as much as ten minutes).

So The Old Dear will fly to Panama next Thursday - I ride to the agent, do loads of paperwork, spend ages in Customs doing more paperwork and turning everything out of the panniers yet again (no doubt I'll have to do that in Panama as well, given from where she's flying), disconnect the battery and that'll be it. That's the theory, anyway, and previous reports bear this out.

The interesting thing is that it'll cost very little more to fly the bike than it will me.

The complication is that I'll actually have to go to an airline office to buy a ticket for me. I can't buy an e-ticket locally on the web with a foreign-issued card (unless I'm part of a tour group, aaargh), and can only buy a paper ticket elsewhere to be posted to my home address, which isn't a lot of use really. Es la vida.