The man who said he would look at my bike, did, it was one look, followed by "What sort of bike is that ? I thought it would be a Harley, I'm not going to start looking at that."

He then sent us to the Harley dealer, saying they worked on all sorts of bikes. The Harley dealer took one look at the bike and said, "Its a metric, we don't work on metrics".

Now, Jean and I were stood there thinking the same thing, "does electricity work in different units in the US?"

At least he directed us off to a Yamaha dealer, who would have worked on it but his "technician" was in Vegas. But at least he rang around some places and found us an Aprilia dealer in Baton Rouge (60 miles away) who said "come on over".

We quickly de-camped, packed the bikes and headed on back out over the swamps, via the place where the final scene from Easy Rider was filmed.

After doing some pre-work while waiting for the mechanic to fit me in we got down to tracing the fault. By 1700 today is what my bike looked like.

Lets see what tomorrow brings :-)
Note, even the panniers have been stripped off.

After hours of testing, the rear reg plate light was seen to be shorting, so that has been removed. Unfortunately there was still as secondary fault, which is intermittent and linked to the petrol tank being on or off. By 19:30 we had to call it a day.

We loaded all the camping gear onto Jean's bike, and the dealer gave me a loan bike. As he walked me out to it he apologised for it being an automatic, so I assumed it would be a scooter.

How wrong I was.

I've never ridden an 850 automatic before.