Morning rose gloomy, but not raining, yet. None of us let particularly well I think. Our neighbours had broken camp at 4:30am….they must have loved us talking next door until after midnight. Sorry…..
I popped up to the showers early and was thrilled at the lack of rain, maybe the forecast was off. I was the first one to the showers, perfect…no rush. I heard a woman and her little girl come in, but not a single other shower was taken while I was in the women’s side. I thought I heard a boom while showering, and when I came out discovered that it was raining pretty solidly. Well, wet anyway, though bringing a jacket might have been smart. Back at the tent site I retreated inside until the rain stopped, and then we made coffee and broke camp.
I forgot to start the GPS tracker right away, but only missed a km or so. Hans led us out, thankfully NOT the way we’d come in, and we did a loop on the 464 and it carried us through some beautiful rangeland, allowing us to admire the Rocky Mountains in the distance.
The contrast between the scenes was striking, and the traffic was almost non-existent….except for one woman who was apparently shaking her fist at us as she drove by while we were stopped a the side of the road….a spot at which you could literally see miles in any direction and the road, with us on it, was clearly visible for an equal number of miles. It’s not like it was a hardship to pass us. I didn’t actually witness her ire, I guess I probably had a camera pointed somewhere, but I heard about it.
The open space was beautiful. If nothing else on this trip, the scenery was magnificent and varied from road to road, and even turn to turn. If this photo looked any other direction, it was just a gently rolling landscape with golds and greens and burnt oranges made vibrant by the earlier rain.
Highway 464 brought us into Browning, where we returned to Highway 2, eventually returning to East Glacier. We stopped for some breakfast at a cool old diner, it felt like wandering back into the seventies. I was also glad that we were not heading back under that bright blue painted bridge, because that was the “shortcut” I simply didn’t have an adequate appreciation for yesterday.
After filling our bellies, we geared back up and headed towards West Glacier, with the intent to make it to Libby Montana for the night, where we had booked what was going to be an interesting place to stay. A vrbo property that included a cabin and a treehouse, we hadn’t yet decided who got what and I had a hunch we’d be flipping a coin because I think we probably all might have wanted to sleep in the treehouse.
It started raining along the way and I wasn’t all that disappointed that we were behind a couple on a CanAm who seemed terrified of the corners in the rain….or maybe just the corners period, it was hard to tell. If the weather had been nicer I’m sure we’d have passed them and left them behind pretty quickly. But rain is crappy to ride in, visibility decreases, and my visor fogged up once or twice for added pleasure. I used to be terrified of wet roads and highway speeds. Not so much anymore, besides, I’d walked on the surface the day before, in good weather, and it was grippy and wasn’t anything to be concerned with when wet. But it was nice to not feel rushed.
My pants have a waterproof liner, and I had a bright yellow rain jacket that fit over my jacket. So my body was dry. I’d accepted when we left that I’d get wet feet if it rained, my boots are not waterproof though they hold water at bay for awhile. I’d waffled on gloves when packing; I did bring two pair with me, but I’d opted for two non-waterproof sets and left the waterproof ones at home. I was pretty sure that if we hit rain it would only be for a day and I could dry the second set out along the way.
So there was a bit of dampness, but it was tolerable.
We stopped for fuel at East Gate before heading on towards Libby.
Somewhere along the way we decided we had more time available and not enough road to ride and decided to ride down and around Flathead Lake. We should have turned onto Montana Highway 206 to get to Highway 35, but we went past it…and that turned out to be a good thing, because it involved another long stretch of resurfacing and another pilot car….so missing that was a win.
However, things took a turn anyway.
To back up a bit, I’d smelled that catalytic converter smell once or twice over the past day or two. It had caught my attention slightly, but only because the smell was familiar. I’d sniffed my bike once or twice, but never really ID’d it as coming from the Ninja. Riding through the outskirts of Kalispell, I smelled it again.
The odour niggled at my brain….I remembered the boat having a bad battery once, I’d smelled that smell while we’d been underway and commented on it to Kirk. He’d pulled up a hatch and seen a battery bulging and we’d shut down the boat and done a quick battery swap. But it was that memory that made me start thinking….”Do I have a bad battery?”.
I’d just replaced the battery last year after dying on the ferry back from Nanaimo. It was the original battery, 9 years old at that time, so replacing it wasn’t a shock. But I shouldn’t need a new battery after a year only.
And then everything went wrong…..the red light on my dash came on, all the other dash lights started blinking on and off, my tachometer needle started bouncing between 0 and 10,000 rpm (but the motor didn’t rev), and the display went dead, came back on, went dead again….
“Whoa sweetheart…..WHAT are you DOING?!?!, this is NOT normal behaviour”
I relaxed on the throttle, pulled int he clutch, gently applied the brakes, downshifted, and pulled o the side of the highway and shut the bike off. Kirk pulled in behind me. Hans took a few moments to notice before he pulled over ahead.
I tried to restart the bike.
Nothing.
She was dead.
I’ve ridden his bike for ten years without a hiccup. Well, one hiccup, last summer when the battery died on the ferry…..after a run down Island in the rain….maybe she doesn’t like rain…..she’s a fair-weather bike only?
Hans came back and I explained what had happened. Then I suggested we roll the bikes forward to a nearby driveway. We were not he edge of a fairly busy highway, with farms and large fields on either side. The driveway was long and went to a house set quite far back from eh road, it had a gate that was open.
This did not seem like the place where one marched up to a house in motorcycle gear and asked to use the phone. We pulled the bikes to the side so we wouldn’t impede anyone coming or going, and kept casting an eye over our shoulders at the house behind us. People have guns here, lots of guns, and they aren’t hesitant to use them if one believes the news stories. However, my brother said later, they are just as likely to shoot you as to give you supper…more likely they’d invite you in for supper. Sadly, we felt a bit safer for being white, how shitty is that to think…..it’s a really shitty thing to think….but it’t also sadly true.
We pulled off the seat to find a smoking hot battery that was bulging on one side.
Totally cooked.
Kirk took off with the battery to see if he could find a new one back in Kalispell; Hans whipped out his camp chair and we settled in to wait. Ten or fifteen minutes later a Jeep turned off the highway and pulled in beside us. The fellow rolled down his window and I asked if he lived in the house behind us. No, but his buddy did, and he is a rider and wouldn’t have any issue with us being there. He said he also rides and that he’d driven by and seen us and turned around to see if he could offer any help, that he had a shop in town and was happy to help if the battery didn’t resolve things. He was super kind, gave me his personal cell phone number and his name – JR – and wished us well.
Kirk returned about 30 or 40 minutes later and a new battery was installed. Voila, she was alive again!
….or maybe she wasn’t.
We decided to abandon Flathead lake and headed back to Kalispell for some lunch.
Incidentally…while tar snakes are a common temporary’ish feature in roads, Montana takes them to a whole other level. Usually tar snakes are a couple of inches wide, max. Around Kalispell some were almost a quarter of the width of the lane, or wider! Hard to avoid those!
When we stopped for lunch, Hans came over and told me that I had no headlights. Well that’s not good. We thought perhaps the battery incident and the electrical bump may have popped the fuse, or the bulbs. So after eating we went over to NAPA to check things out and replace bulbs if needed.
Bulbs were needed. They were both blown. The fuses were fine though.
While inside, Hans texted me and said to get some spray contact cleaner and dielectric grease. When we came out he was pulling some things apart and told use he had found a bigger problem. The regulator rectifier was corroded and one of the six pins was broken. It wasn’t doing it’s job regulating the electricity not he bike and that was what was likely causing the battery to overcharge and things to pop. We called a local Kawasaki dealer, but they couldn’t get the part for 7-10 days, and wanted a crazy amount of money for it.
Not one to call it a day at that, Hans did some creative wiring and hot-wired the system to try to keep the bike going. After an hour or so in the lot, the bike was running and the lights were on.
Oh, and one other small disaster. While moving things around, I knocked my helmet off the bike and it fell to the ground and landed oh so perfectly that it broke my face shield. I did not bring a spare….dammit! However, my Maui Jim sunglasses are quite light grey tinted, and can slip into the helmet. It would do.
We figured we could make it to Libby and then on to Cranbrook tomorrow.
But the bike had other ideas. When we landed at a gas station about ten minutes later, I again had no headlights.
The ride was over for the Ninja. Now the question was, how to get her home. We have motorcycle coverage through BCAA, but it only covers a tow for 160km, we had about 220 km to go to get to my brother’s place in Cranbrook, and then another 900+ to get home to Vancouver.
One step at a time.
Sidebar, in that short run I’d been hit in the face by two bugs, I simply do not understand how people ride without a full face helmet. Bugs HURT!
I called BCAA and asked for roadside assistance, explaining where I was. I was transferred to AAA and honestly, they weren’t terribly helpful. I said I wanted a tow to the border and they said they’d call back. While we were waiting for AAA to find us a tow truck, a fellow came into the gas station for something and commented on the bikes, he asked if we’d had a great ride. I said yes, until my bike broke down. He chatted with Kirk and Hans for a bit, before wishing us well and leaving.
Eventually AAA called but said that the driver they had contacted didn’t want to do the tow tonight and could do it at 10 am the next day, would that be ok? I had to re-explain that I was sitting, with a dead motorcycle, at a gas station, in a foreign country, without a hotel…..so no, that wasn’t going to work. The dispatcher was passive aggressive in suggesting that tomorrow morning would work better and that she couldn’t guarantee a driver for this evening. I said, no, I needed assistance this evening.
While I was on the phone, the fellow who’d wished us well returned to the gas station and said that he’ been thinking about us as he’d driven away and came back to offer us some assistance. He was a rider and had a trailer at home, not far away. He offered to go get his trailer and tow us to a hotel if we had a place that we were headed to in Kalispell. Super generous, but we said we didn’t have a hotel and were trying AAA for a tow to the border.
Impatient, Kirk started calling tow truck companies looking for an alternative to see if AAA wasn’t sh=kign the tree hard enough. It took Kirk about five minutes to find a tow truck company that had the paperwork in with AAA for registration as a contract company, and could do the tow if AAA would provide a card to bill to. Back and forth and while we were trying to sort it out, the tow truck arrived, literally five minutes later. When I told the dispatcher that we’d found a driver who would do the tow, she said she’d cancel the assistance request….”NO!” “Please do not do that, because we are still seeking assistance from AAA, we just helped you find a tow truck that you can use.”
In the end Kirk went in circles with AAA and we ended up paying for it ourselves and will try to recoup some of the money once we get things sorted out.
During all of this, I’d also sent my brother a text indicating I might need a rescue at the Roosville border crossing. Once the bike was on the flat bed I let him know we were on our way, and he said he’d leave and meet us there on the Canadian side. The border was almost equivalent-distant between the two of us.
The driver, Richard, was awesome. We loaded up the bike and I asked if he wanted the luggage off. He said if the luggage had survived days on the bike while we were riding at speeds that he probably wouldn’t reach, then they’d be fine on the bike on the back of the truck. He then said “Heck, if you want to put your gear on, I’ll even let you ride on the bike on the back of the truck!”
Wouldn’t that have been something.
I threw my gear into the truck and hopped in with him while Hans and Kirk rode. It was about an hour and a half to the border, and it was a dark and lonely highway. Not much traffic at all. We talked the whole way, another super nice person. We talked about speed limits, about helmet laws … and he said he’d had a CBR900 when he was younger, before he was married and had a family….he also said that one should “ride for the slide”…so I liked him even more, particularly in a state that has no helmet law and we’d seen so many unprotected noggins on this stretch of the trip.
Eventually we arrived at the border and Richard backed the truck up as close to the border as he could. He didn’t have his passport with him, not something he generally carries as trips to the border with dead vehicles aren’t a common occurrence apparently. But he got pretty close and presumably the border guard on the Canada side could see us in the dark.
We debated pushing the bike across or riding it. We figured the 200 or so feet that I needed to travel wouldn’t do any more harm that may already have occurred, so I opted to ride it over. Richard waited and said he didn’t want to leave until I was at the border, he was ready to help push the bike across.
The kindnesses of strangers.
I rode to the border crossing, with no headlights, and pulled up to the guard. I turned off the bike and removed my helmet. The border agent asked me where I was from, where I’d been, and the total value of goods I was bringing across.
“North Vancouver, Cascades Highway across Idaho and through Glacier National Park and back. A bottle of huckleberry honey.”
Any alcohol, tobacco, or firearms?
“Nope”
He handed me my ID back and said “I think there is a truck waiting for you around the corner“
I rode around the corner and there was my brother, waiting at midnight, for his kid sister on a broken motorcycle. Family is awesome.
Kirk and Hans passed through and the bike was loaded and tied down, and then it was an hour and a half trip back to Cranbrook, in the darkness, watching for deer, of which there were many. We got to my brother’s place at about 1:30am and when my brother turned in, we stayed up and wound down (and Kirk and Hans warmed up) until about 3am when we all drifted off for some badly needed sleep.
And thus ended day four.