Looks like it's more trouble dealing with the AUS travel insurers than dealing with a pretzler in a foreign country.
Nope, no trouble at all so far. All we've done is lodge a quote on the insurers website.
Only one question remains though....what happened to the little GS500??
Did that stay in LA as a "deposit" for the next US-trip?
Unfortunately for that little bike, a happy ending it is not. Because of the small size of the individual states, and the relative transparency between their borders, when you buy a vehicle you don't pay rego and you don't pay tax. You get a temporary plate (30 day permit in our case) which gives you 30 days to get home, take it to your local RTA and get it registered and pay the sales tax in your home state.
So we left Arkansas with the bike on a 30 day permit and didn't think much about the future. By the time we got to Arizona I started making some enquiries and I discovered that due to the strict emissions rules in California, California residents can get second hand vehicles registered, but any new vehicles must comply with Cali emissions rules. Unfortunately for us, although the Suzuki was 5 years old, it had only 2400 miles on the clock when we bought it, and fewer than 5000 miles when we got to LA. The definition of what constitutes a new or 2nd hand vehicle for those purposes in California is 7500 miles. A vehicle with 7501 miles is "second hand". A vehicle with 7499 miles is "new".
We tried to sell it to a bike shop in Las Vegas. They were willing to buy it from us, at the price they set, but there was an issue with the paperwork. The dealer we bought it from hadn't correctly signed the title over to us, even though we had sufficient suplementary paperwork to prove legal ownership. That was going to take a working day to sort out between the dealer in Vegas, the dealer in Arkansas and the DoT. It was late on Friday afternoon at that stage, and Monday was a public holiday and we had to leave Vegas on Monday morning in any case.
That left us with two options. Park the bike in LA and just walk away from it, or plan B... whatever that was. I made a few phone calls and Plan B turned out to be trading the bike to a bike wrecker in South Central LA in return for a bag of beans, or the monopoly monetary equivalent.
