After we came home yesterday afternoon and having had engine troubles the morning was occupied with finding a workshop willing to take in a Harley Davidson motorcycle to inspect and perhaps to repair. As HD is only maintaining one (1)! dealership per province in East Canada anymore, my nearest dealerships would be Halifax, NS or Moncton, NB, or St. John’s in NL. NL is definitely out of the picture, and the other two are not really an option if we want to go forward with our plans. I finally get lucky with Cabot Powersports in Sydney, NS here on Cape Breton. They once had been a HD dealership but fell victim to the corporate cut down. I limp with my bike to Sydney, having on that 15 mile trip the expected engine hick-ups and all the "exploding" noises with it. Our camp site neighbor Jim Power from St. John's in NL travels with me to give me a ride back. We drop off the bike in the trusted hands of the service manager Paul and his team, just to get a couple of hours later a call from Paul to come down to the shop as he has to show me the damage and talk my options. The bad news is already visible in Paul's face when I enter the shop, and he tells me in short, lifters, cam and who knows what else are gone, metal shavings are covering the shifting sensor. He doesn't has any parts and repair could take weeks, perhaps even longer. We may even have to change the engine if it is real bad. He offers me to store the bike for a couple of days that I can make arrangements in any way I needed. Out of wheels, Jim drives me to a car rental, just to learn that because of shortages in rental cars, border crossings with rentals are not permitted. Even going out of the province was already a challenge, but I managed to persuade the girl behind the counter to get a car cleared to leave the province to go to Moncton, NB one way.
But then the real fun started. Having HOG-Ultra Plus Road America assistance, the service which helped us already a couple of times, I felt pretty confident of getting the bike transported to where I needed it to be. But this was far away from reality as I ended up in wherever the call center was/is and the girl on the other end hardly speaking proper English had no idea that a Harley-Davidson is a motorcycle and not a passenger car, repeatably asking me how many doors the vehicle had, that Cape Breton respectively Nova Scotia is in Canada, that you can load a motor cycle on a tow truck, and that my contract with them states to have the bike transported free of charge to the next nearest HD dealership. After a really long, exhausting, and frustrating conversation, and in order to shorten the process in me agreeing to pay upfront the $3,500 for the bike transport we came to an agreement to get the bike towed to Moncton, NB. All I needed was to confirm through the link in the e-mail she will send me the towing pick-up and destination. Having a bad feeling about this whole thing, I made several other phone calls and found a U-Haul truck in Antigonish, NS which was free to cross the border into the US (also here the same restrictions as for passenger rentals). Now I felt more confident since I had control of the situation again, booked the truck and picked it up in Antigonish, NS and drove it back up to Sydney, NS to load the bike. The cancelation of the Road America towing assistance on the other hand went pretty easy, the guy spoke proper English, clear and understandable, and did the cancelation without a fuss. The e-mail btw for the towing she had promised never arrived, but she had precautionary already thousand times said she was sorry for the troubles I was having. Perhaps my experience with her was included in her sorry.
Today is Saturday. Just one week ago we started our trip to Newfoundland and Labrador, and today, seven days later we are loading the bike into a truck and turn our heading back to the US border. It is an unfortunate ending to a trip we had for so long anticipated and were looking so much forward to. But machines too have their personalities and regardless of how good you take care of it, bad things may happen. This year was not meant to be the year for us to reach Newfoundland, so we will try again next year or the year after. The positive side of all this is that we met very helpful people and made new friends and received invitations to visit. And that is another strong and good reason to visit Newfoundland. With mixed feelings and sunshine we leave the camp ground and turn onto Rt. 4 to go South along the Bras d'Or lake to Port Hawkesbury, NS, cross the Canso causeway to Antigonish, NS, continue on Hwy-104 to Truro, NS over to Moncton, NB and head towards the border in St. Stephen, NB / Calais, ME to drop South to Bangor, ME on Rt. 9 and then the usual way via the Interstates I-95, I-495, I-90, and I-91 back home.
"Each machine has its own, unique personality which probably could be defined as the intuitive sum total of everything you know and feel about it. This personality constantly changes, usually for the worse, but sometimes surprisingly for the better, and it is this personality that is the real object of motorcycle maintenance." - Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
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