We'd planned to get here early yesterday afternoon, visit Catfish Row and maybe the old courthouse, Civil War battlefield, and maybe even the wreck of the Cairo before continuing downriver to Natchez. Instead, we found a Best Western, thanked our lucky stars that we made it here at all, and pondered our next move.
Our immediate next move was to order a pizza and do a motel parking lot / garbage can bike wash, which got rid of the crud from the rain, and made us feel marginally better. We do this all the time, to the point where it's a completely norma l routine for us. When there's two garbage cans in the room, it's awesome. We can be pretty close to done by the time the pizza guy comes.
For the hard question, we decided to detour to Jackson (there are only 4 H-D dealers in the state of Mississippi) and replace an ignition coil, just to say we'd done something. This would put us, best case, in Natchez MS 4-6 hours after we'd planned to leave there. As it turned out, the dealer did not have a coil on hand, but they did hook it up to the diagnostic tool and the service mgr seemed to agree with my assessment that the performance tuner add on that I'd taken out of the loop was in fact the likely culprit. We'd gone well over 100 miles from the scene of the crime at that point, and through 2 heat cycles, and we were doing fine. So we bought a poker chip and some T-shirts, loaded the bags back on, and headed out. They didn't even charge a dime for the actual service. Southern hospitality.
All we had time for in Natchez was lunch, where we ran into a group of 4 Brits who were touring the US on rental bikes. We traded some road stories and best wishes, and left with a bunch of unfulfilled plans, but with optimism that our trouble were behind us and our asses would be in New Orleans that night as planned.
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