Tuesday, July 17th, 2007

I woke up with optimism. I had a helluva long way to go today. I had a dead battery and probably needed new spark plugs from all the flooding.

The first thing I did was go online and started looking for bike shops that could look at my battery situation. If needed I could just get a new one and that would solve the problem. Unfortunately, after about an hour of hunting and phoning, there was not a single bike shop between Cranbrook and Calgary that was willing to see me. “Too busy”….damn it, sell me a new battery and stick it in…that’s a five minute job! Too busy my ass.

I decided just to ride all the way home with the battery I had.   I could keep the bike running, which would help the situation with getting the bike started, but every 200 or so I would need to fill up with gas. This would require turning off the engine.

So, I had a plan. Throughout the 900km, 11 hour journey, I stopped for gas 4 times. Every single time I hunted for a station on street or driveway with an incline. This way, all I had to do was coast down the decline and kick Silver into second gear and the bike would start. Sound good?

Well it was. And it worked perfectly.

The ride home was damn long. By far the longest day of the whole trip. I left Invermere at about 11am- it was nearly 2:00 by the time I got to Canmore to stop for gas. I bypassed Calgary and went through Cochrane, Airdrie, and then on to Drumheller for more gas (I know Drumheller is longer but I wanted to see the badlands). Then I headed north through Hannah and Castor to Provost where I got gas for the last time.

By this time it was 10:00pm and dark. The ride from Provost into Saskatchewan and through Unity, Wilkie, and onto the Battlefords was one of the longest legs of the day. It was thoroughly dark out, and there was a lot of wildlife on the road. In addition, my ipod conked out so I had no tunes. Around midnight I was back in North Battleford.