Luckily, because John had been planning to have his bike serviced before left Utah, we had taken down the details of Triumph dealerships in Denver, Kansas City and Dallas. So, we were able to ring the Dallas dealership first thing, and arrange to have John’s bike collected. (Worryingly, Americans don’t use ‘towing services’ for roadside assistance of this nature, they use ‘wreckers’!)

The wreckers and the dealers, European Cycle Sports, couldn’t have been more helpful. Unfortunately, our next problem was going to be availability of parts.

Although damage to the bikes seemed fairly minor, being European, the parts are not as readily available as either Japanese or American makes. However, since we were not due to leave Dallas until Sunday, we hoped that we would not be delayed too much.

We still needed to be able to get around in the meantime, so we arranged to hire a car. We duly booked a compact model from Enterprise, and their agent, Neil (from Huddersfield), collected us from the motorcycle dealers. To our good fortune, our ‘compact’ turned out to be a Grand Cherokee Jeep – thanks to a cancellation – at a very favourable ‘compact’ price!