Written earlier this morning:
And I thought I was going to get off easy. While it seemed difficult at the time hard work and diligence had seemed to pay off as I succeeded in fixing the motorcycle outside of an expensive mechanic’s garage. It started up and I was happy. “Was” is the critical word of that last sentence.
This morning my bike sits in a Honda repair shop. It made it there not on its own power but on the back of an costly tow truck. Oh, and it’s not even in the same town that I type in now.
Yesterday I started the bike up and was thrilled that I had fixed everything properly. I took a little trip down south to St. Augustine, the nation’s oldest city. I never saw the historical part of the town. While waiting in horrible traffic I switched the bike off in order to keep it cool (it was hot outside and the bike heats up quick when idling too long). As traffic finally started to move I turned the key but the dash didn’t light up. I had no power.
I had hoped I connected the new fuse incorrectly and it would be a quick fix. It wasn’t. I tinkered around with my newfound knowledge of the bike and couldn’t find anything to fix. It was a mystery. Plus it was Friday afternoon. I had decisions to make in a hurry. If I spent an hour or two trying to fix the bike on my own it would be too late to get it somewhere that might be able to look at it before the weekend hit. It was all a question of luck and lots of money.
It took well over an hour for the tow truck to make it to my stranded bike. By the time we made it down the road to the Honda shop it was 4:45. Luckily (if I can use the word “luck” in this situation) they didn’t close until 6:00 and could look at it almost immediately.
Unfortunately for me the mechanic seemed to know almost as much about the motorcycle as I did. He was testing places on the bike that even I knew were unrelated to the issue. During his testing he even confused the positive and negative poles on the battery not once but multiple times. I just kept looking at my watch.
6:00 rolled around with the mechanic failing to find the cause of my loss of power. I was going to have to come back the next day, hoping there was another mechanic on duty in the morning that could figure out how to fix a motorcycle. First I had to get back to the Jacksonville area.
I tried to hitchhike with the first guy I had overheard saying he was going to Orange Park, the town south of Jacksonville where I was staying on the boat. He quickly told me he didn’t have time to take me anywhere and sped off. Maybe he was afraid of the helmet I was holding. Getting a ride proved easy enough, though. Three cars passed when a couple stopped for me.
While this story could go on and on I’ll go ahead and stop here. The rest of it includes running around the inside of a news station, multiple trips to a lesbian bar, and finally sleeping on a scratchy blanket on the floor in a new stranger’s apartment. Even after a somewhat decent night’s sleep I’m still exhausted. Plus I still have to find a phone to check on the status of my bike. If all is well and I can get back to St. Augustine I hope to make it down the road to Orlando. I have the fallout of an impending hurricane to think about so I had better prepare.
Trials on the road can be tough. The hardest part is not being able to stop and have a timeout at the end of the day where you can crawl into a bed you truly call your own. But, even when things seem to just get worse, I still can’t shake the sense that I’m living another adventure.
Posted July 9, 2005 04:49 PM @ (GMT - 6)
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