After getting home, and waiting long enough for everything to calm down, I had another thought about how I could have handled the breakdown in Alaska.
At the time, my list of options (as I saw it), were:
1) Fly home right away, and have the bike shipped before/after it was fixed.
2) Fly home right away, and fly back to get the bike. ie: Split the trip into two parts.
3) Sit in a hotel room at $150/night waiting on the bike to be fixed.
or
4) Trade in my broken bike for an already fixed used bike.
Given those options, and the assorted costs around them, I think my decision to trade in was reasonably rational, though significantly influenced by the desire to just “fix it” that came from a lot of stress and fear associated with being stuck so far from home. Pretty much all of those options centered around escaping the damage and getting back in control of the situation.
Another option, which I think was superior, didn’t occur to me because I just wasn’t in the right place to see it. Because I let the stress control me too much.
5) Rent a bike and bomb around Alaska for an extra week or two while mine got fixed.
This option should have occurred to me pretty quickly, since I’d investigated doing that before leaving home. I wanted to travel up to the Artic circle, but my bike wasn’t suited for that much off road. I’d discarded this before leaving, because it would just add too much time to the trip. This was especially true, since the only rental shops I could find were in Anchorage, not Fairbanks (which is near the Artic circle).
Well…. if my trip was being extended for me, and I was having to wait in Anchorage, I should have just gone with it. The bike rental would have been less than the Anchorage hotel costs, and less than the cost of swapping bikes. Instead I was too focussed on getting back in control, which was too tied to having “my” bike running.
Oh well, live and learn.