The travel plan was pretty simple.

• Day 1: Travel to New York to visit family.
• Day 2: Travel to Massachusetts.
• Day 3: Pre-rally preparation.
• Day 4: Travel to Maine and rally setup.

Day 1

We set out with Amy on The Teal Kestrel, and me in the car. I also ride, but for logistical reasons (we were transporting a number of bulky items for the rally), the car seemed the better choice.

We got on the road around 3:00pm; a little later than planned, but well ahead of the worst of rush hour. We got to our hotel in New York around 10:30pm with plans to meet up with family the following morning.

Day 2

We woke around 7, packed up the few things we’d brought in, and prepared to roll out. The plan was to meet Amy’s sisters for brunch, and then arrive in Massachusetts in the early evening.

There’s a memorable scene in Evan Almighty (a re-telling of Noah’s Ark) where Evan (played by Steve Carell) starts to tell God (played by Morgan Freeman) about his plans. God laughs.

When Amy pushed her motorcycle’s starter button, the bike made one of the scariest sounds possible.

click

She tried again

click

The first thought was perhaps the battery had died. We had been down that road before with a previous battery, so we pushed the bike up the hill and made several attempts at popstarting it. We did get the engine to make noises as though it was trying to engage, but didn’t succeed in getting it fully started.

Amy’s sisters brought a portable jump-start kit to the hotel. Although that didn’t get get the bike to start, it did tell us the battery was fully charged. This was beginning to sound expensive.

After a call to Amy’s friends at Bob’s Motorcycles, they seconded her suspicion that the starter may have gone bad (the failure at popstarting may been a simple lack of practice as we try not to have dead batteries). Amy had been told this was a possibility as the bike still had the original OEM starter — which is known to fail without warning — and she had already bought a replacement. Unfortunately, the replacement starter was in Maryland, nearly 300 miles away.

After weighing our options, we decided that the best course of action would be for Amy to take the car and continue on to Massachusetts where people were counting on her. Meanwhile, I would rent a truck and take the motorcycle back to Maryland.

U-Haul came through around 1:00pm with a 15 foot truck with both a low-deck, and a loading ramp.

Friends, even after removing the luggage, a 1993 BMW R 100R weighs more than 400 pounds. Despite parking on the low end of a hill with the ramp facing uphill, we were unable to push the motorcycle up the ramp and into the truck. It might have been possible if the ramp had been wider — at 26 inches wide, that’s not enough space for both a motorcycle and someone to stand next to it.

Amy recruited a couple people from the hotel staff to assist with the pushing, but not before I did something incredibly stupid and tried rolling down the hill in neutral with the idea of coasting up the ramp. Long story short, I ran out of momentum near the top, had no place to put my feet down, and consider myself blessed that the bike didn’t land on top of me.

With the bike secured in the back of the U-Haul, we departed around 5:00pm; Amy to spend the night at her sister’s house, and me to head back to Maryland.

Around midnight, I pulled into a rest stop in Maryland. I likely could have made it the rest of the way, but our neighborhood’s streets tend to be jam-packed full of cars overnight and I was nervous about trying to navigate a large truck through the sea of cars and opted to sleep in the truck instead.

Day 3

The cab of a U-Haul truck is not the most comfortable place to sleep (though still better than the cold metal floor of the cargo area), but I still managed to get a few hours rest.

I awoke around 7:00am and after confirming the bike was still in place (I checked this several times during the previous evening’s drive as well), I headed off on the next leg of the journey.

Breakfast was two orders of hashbrowns at a Sheetz store in Northern Frederick, and I arrived at Bob’s Motorcyles in Jessup, Maryland just as they were opening for the day. This would, of course, have to wait in line with all the other repairs that were already scheduled, but mission accomplished, the bike had been delivered without any further incident.

By 1:30 I had turned the truck in at the local U-Haul center and after a late lunch with a friend, returned home at 2:30 and started looking for the replacement starter Amy had bought “just in case.”

Around 3:30, I returned to Bob’s with the new starter, and saw that Amy’s bike was up on the lift with the seat off. I learned that my timing was perfect, and just a few minutes earlier Steve (the lead technician) had confirmed that the starter had indeed gone bad. It was late in their day, so he might not finish it on Saturday, but it would almost certainly be done on Tuesday. (Not a concern, it would another week before we’d be back in Maryland.)

That night, I slept in my own bed. It had been a long day and I slept like a rock.

Day 4

I woke around 7:30. Not as early as I’d wanted, but also not as late as I wanted.

This was the rally’s “arrival day” and getting to Poland, Maine was going to take more than nine hours (particularly since I wanted to avoid the traffic in Philadelphia and New York City).

I threw my dirty clothes in the hamper (I’d left most of the clean ones with Amy) and put the rest of my necessary “travel kit” in the back seat of the Fiat. And at 9:01am, I let Amy know I was en route

• 10:22am Stopped in Dillsburg, Pennsylvania
• 2:19pm Stopped in Port Jervis, New York
• 4:14pm Plantsville, Connecticut
• 6:28pm Marlborough, Massachusetts

Finally, at 9:58pm, after driving more than 600 miles in 13 hours, I arrived at Agassiz Village in Poland, Maine.

And that was only the beginning of a week filled with memories.