On the way down the canyon, I gotta tell you how happy I was that the rear brake was fixed! That would not have been fun without the rear brake, but the RX3 was a joy to ride down that canyon and back to flat earth. At which point I took a look at the odometer:
At 194.8 miles, it's about ready for its first oil change. Off to O'Reilly's to get the necessary stuff...
The oil change process was straightforward except for two things: one, I didn't have a new filter yet (more on that later), and two, the bolts were seemingly drenched in Gorilla Glue and then tightened by Bruce Banner in a bad mood. Holey Moley were those 17mm bolts tight. I got two of them eventually, but the third would not loosen with my 12" socket wrench. The O'Reilly's people were extraordinarily helpful, and loaned me an 18" wrench so I could break the seal on that last bolt. Nasty toxic sludge spewed forth. And the drain bolt was interesting, it has a very strong neodymium magnet in it, which serves to catch small floating bits of metal, almost like it's an additional filter. It had about 1/8" of black gunk piled on top of it, which I presume were metal shavings. I cleaned that off, cleaned out the strainers, got as much oil out of the filter as I could, reassembled, refilled, dumped the old oil in the O'Reilly's waste oil collection tank, and hit the road again, this time to the appropriately-named Garden Of The Gods park.
Folks, if you haven't toured Colorado, you have to. This was scintillating.
The Balancing Rock is pretty much the first thing you encounter. I couldn't get a picture that showed just how cool it was, but it was breathtaking.
(for some reason I always leave the light on. I stop the bike, pull the phone out of the phone holder to take the picture, and see that I never turned the key all the way off. That's a bad habit!)
To be continued...