Saturday was a stressful day. I woke up in Kat’s apartment on a scratchy blanket, my head resting on an old bean bag. It was too hot in the room to lay under the blanket and I was glad to stop trying to sleep around 9am. Besides being uncomfortable I was ready to get rolling on my motorcycle. It was at the Honda shop down the road in St Augustine and they were surely waiting on my consent before working on it. Hopefully they had established what the problem was by now. I had little faith in congenial but, at best, overwhelmingly inept mechanic that I was paying a shop labor rate of $70 an hour for.

My poor motorcycle on the tow truck

Once Kat woke up around 11am I finally was able to call the shop. The bike needed a new starter solenoid (I had obviously done it in when working on the bike the day before) and they couldn’t get one until Tuesday or Wednesday. I told them I’d find one today and get it to them ASAP.

I quickly I rifled through the phonebook, calling every Honda service department in the yellow pages. When I finally located an after-market part around 30 miles away in Middleburg Kat immediately offered to take me out to get it and then to my bike in St Augustine. Almost two hours and $85 later we arrived at the shop with the requested part.

With a new solenoid in place the bike still wasn’t getting juice. I now needed a new ignition switch. Ironically I had finally got a new copy of the key the day before. It was used for the first and only time in the doomed starter. Of course the shop didn’t have another one but they agreed to show me how to hotwire it. $4.86 at the auto parts store down the road bought me a little switch that bypasses the key. While I had always assumed it would be fairly easy I really didn’t expect it to be so simple to hotwire a motorcycle.

After paying a whopping $186 to the Honda shop for 2.4 hours of “labor” I was finally on my way back to Robert’s boat Candide in Orange Park. Less than 24 hours prior I had hoped to head out of town earlier in the day. I was hoping to get to Orlando before the expectedly turbulent weather from Hurricane Dennis came through the northern part of the state. Too late. By the time I got back to the boat the wind had picked up enough to keep me off the bike.

Even though I’d hit rain the entire 130 miles to Orlando the next day I was glad to spend one more night at Whitney’s Marina in Orange Park. I had never been on a sailboat before and it was a truly great privilege to be a guest on one. Contrary to what I would have imagined a week earlier I loved the rough, windy nights the best. Sleeping away on a boat rocked by turbulent waters was so much more relaxing than I ever would have thought possible before. I loved it.

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Posted July 11, 2005 09:57 AM @ (GMT - 6)