Both of you - thanks for the replies. From digging around on their website Tourinsure looks like they'd cover the insurance needs. You'd have thought there would be a UK company who'd do it (and maybe advertising here) but my (admittedly superficial) searches have not come up with anything. AdrianFlux wasn't on the list though so I'll have a look at them later today.

Sourcing bikes for this trip has been a tricky one because of the nature of what we're trying to do. It's not just get a couple of bikes - any bikes - and head south. Summer 2020 is 50 years since we did our first long bike trip - to Morocco from the UK on a 250 Yamaha - and we want to redo it, Ted Simon's Dreaming of Jupiter style. The plan is to use the same model bike (but one each this time) but they are very thin on the ground. It took me a year to find one in the UK and even then it was a wreck, needing a complete rebuild.

There are a few more of them in the US but every east coast one we've chased down so far (5 at the current count) has had something major missing - either mechanical parts, essential paperwork or an owner with a brain. At this point though, with 5 months to go, we need to be picking up on stuff like insurance and shipping in the hope that something suitable turns up. There are alternatives - I have a couple of other bikes that could be used and my US friend also has a couple but they'd be understudies rather than the headline act.

Compared to the logistics of doing the original trip this one is proving to be considerably more complicated. Back then it was virtually one stop shopping for insurance (two actually) both of which were physically local in north London. You'd have thought half a century of 'progress' would have sorted this stuff out but if anything its gone the other way.