What Did You Do to Your RX3 Today?

[RC]

I had arguably the best maintenance day I've ever had, largely due to atmosphere, partly to mechanical success (knock on wood). I'm parked in front of a guest house in the tiny village of Shenako, Georgia, perched at about 7000ft with amazing mountain views. Staying here a couple days while one of my riding buddies recovers from a stomach virus, so decided to do some maintenance. The valves needed checking soon, the air filter needed checking, and I've had a tail light not working for nearly 2000 miles (luckily nobody cares about motorcycles or traffic laws in East Europe).

There also happened to be a wedding at the small church I'm parked in front of, which I got invited to watch. Interesting for a few minutes, but then I went back to work. I'm not big on faith, but after the ceremony when I had the tank off and parts everywhere, someone came up to it and said a short prayer for it to work well (maybe not that uncommon in East orthodox, as I've witnessed a priest perform a blessing of a car, even sprinkling it with holy water). Maybe it helped because the valve gaps were still within tolerance (first time!), the air filter was a little dry but amazingly clean considering I've crossed 2 different deserts and 60km of powdery dry mountain roads in the last 10 days. And I fixed the culprit of the tail light. The bike cranked up with only a little hesitation, hopefully too much dust didn't fall into the valve coverings cause the whole bike is caked pretty well.

I declined the invite to the reception party because I'm an outsider and I wasn't in the mood for heavy chacha drinking, but a little sad I did because I missed out on a sheep sacrifice. But probably better off for not because my guest house mother would have been quite upset if I showed up for dinner with a small appetite.

Hopefully the bike is top shape because there is only one way out of this area and it's 9800ft with very steep climbs and powdery loose switchback turns. But this far the rx3 has performed admirably, keeping up with African twins, teneres, and others, although the shinko knobbies are a considerable advantage.