As some of you know, Doris & Boris are our beloved XT’s.  They entered our lives in August 2006, not as new bikes, but ones that hadn’t been ridden very much.  At £2,200 each and with little more than 2,000 miles on the clock, they were a bargain.  Buying the equivalent bikes in Spain would have set us back more than 5,000 euro each.

Since bringing them back Spain, they haven’t been nurtured as well as they should have been, mainly due to lack of time and money.  They’ve never really let us down which is probably just as well because finding a good mechanic out here is like finding hens teeth.  After years of being the work horses they were built to be, both Doris & Boris started complaining and as soon as we fixed one thing, something else would go wrong.  So we reached a crossroads with them and had to make a decision on whether to trade them in, or keep them.  I’ve had other bikes in the past, but for me, there’s a special bond between Doris and I and we’ll be together to the end – whichever one of us expires first.

Here’s an account for both bikes – a ledger detailing the problems, the mileages and the cost to fix them.  Up until now, we’ve only had a few problems which we’ve easily overcome.  Interestingly, we’ve encountered similar problems with both bikes at the same time.   But now we’ve found a good mechanic, hopefully this will be the beginning of a long, happy and lasting friendship we will all have together .

Some prices are in in GBP and some in Euros depending on where we bought the parts.  You can find a full list of where we source XT600 parts in Spain here.

Doris

Boris