Out of the parking garage today by 8:30, but that's only because the staff at the fancy shmancy Holiday Inn Downtown was way short staffed (like they didn't know how many guests they had) and breakfast took like 45 mins.
Our plan for today was to head down Highway 61 into Mississippi and then the Great River Road, which never really does come within view of the river due to its winding course and penchant for overflowing. Taking the older route put us at The Crossroads of song, in Clarksdale, and then of course we had to head down to Rosedale, with my rider by my side. Everything in between was cotton fields.
It was just after pulling out of the gas station in Rosedale (there's one on either side of the 4-way stop sign) that Donna's bike had a brief seizure, which she thought was weird, but kind of shrugged off after a few miles. 40 mins later, in Greenville, MS, as I pulled into a drugstore to replenish some eye drops and Tylenol, the thing goes completely haywire on her and it barely makes it off the road under its own power. I park and shut off my bike, and look over at her wondering why she's forgotten where the kill switch is.
"I got problems," she says, but everything appears fine to me.
One thing about my Donna is she's not a typical girl, and one place where that shows up is she's very in tune with machines. She knows when things just ain't right, and her ability to describe and theorize issues has helped solved, and helped stem, many a problem. So I listened, and went to take it for a ride to see for myself.
This took all of 2 feet to confirm: we had a problem, and it was serious. We were in a town, which was better than in the middle of the hundred miles of cotton fields, but we were an hour from a H-D shop and it was Labor Day. Out come the tools.
One nice thing about our situation is that we have the exact same bike 1 model year apart, so aside from a few rear suspension and brake parts, everything is the same, and we can swap parts across - which has happened more times than you'd like to think it would. We got it to run again, but we were not able to prove that it was a result of anything I'd done. Random intermittent electrical problems are the worst.
We've now lost almost 2 hours, and are still not sure what's going to happen next. We decide to stick to what passes for main highways and head to the next sizeable town (Vicksburg) and call it quits early enough that we won't end up sleeping in the grass alongside the road.
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