As of this week, early June, Seattle is still having some heavy rainfall.  I was caught in two (smallish) storms early this week, and in both cases my pants soaked through immediately.  Realizing that mild rainstorms in Seattle are a far different thing than the terrifying midwest summer storms that I might be lucky enough to experience in the next week, I finally bit the bullet and dropped money on a real waterproof riding suit - the Phantom, from Olympia Motorsports.  Locally, I was only able to find a source for the hi-viz (read: instant migraine) color; nobody stocked the black "charcoal," and I just can't bring myself to wear something brighter than the sun in my daily commute. The closest source I could find with a charcoal suit in stock was down south of Portland, at BMW of Western Oregon.  I remember that being a very nice dealership that we stopped by on the way down to Fortuna, so I called and talked with their parts folks for a bit adn decided to go with that suit.  Saving me the (long) ride down to pick it up, they sent it out UPS Next-Day Air (at less than the cost of the tax had I bought it locally), and I stayed home this morning to sign for the suit.

When I hadn't seen anyone by noon, I called BMWOR to try and figure out if anything had gone wrong, and they did a little bit of digging before calling me back to inform me that UPS had neglected to ship the suit, it was still in Eugene, and furthermore that UPS had backdated their logs to claim that it was the BMW shop's fault.  Long and short of it was, there was no way my suit would arrive today, and I had scheduled the trip tomorrow to begin bright and early in the morning. 

In my previous dealings with shippers they've not been very accomodating when something goes wrong, but perhaps they take the word of a manager at a BMW dealership as being more important than that of a surly 30-year-old scientist, because I soon heard back from Lin at BMWOR that they'd arranged for the suit to be picked up, by me, at the Redmond UPS center, tomorrow at 9.  So I'll ride there in my old gear, with Jen following, unpack and change into my new PHantom in the parking lot, and then send my old gear back home with Jen and hit the road.  Assuming the suit fits, this may still work.

If not...well, after the money and the hassle of trying to get this all together, I'd rather not spend much time dwelling on the "not."

While waiting in vain for the UPS truck, though, I did manage to wire my GPS to my bike's electrical system, so I don't have to go through a pack of AA batteries every day I ride.  That's something.

In summary:  a big shout-out to Lin and BMWOR, and a big fuck-you to UPS for screwing this up and lying about it.  With luck, everything will come together in the end.  The bike is almost packed, the new tent will work well, and I'm hopeful that I can get on the road tomorrow morning without anything else going tits-up in the process.