Tuesday August 21, 2007
We woke up Tuesday morning and had a casual breakfast. Ron on the yellow GS went his own way the previous day back to Prince Edward Island.
Here's a shot of the bikes.
I think it was around ten that we decided to pack the bikes up and head to Halifax. We were going to do some sight seeing and Bob again graciously offered Paul and I am place to stay. He lives in Halifax. We got the bikes all packed, mounted up and started down the road. Then I noticed Paul wasn't following. I circled back and he said his bike wasn't starting. It turned out his battery was dead.
We managed to jump start it and got it running. As soon as he put the seat on it stalled. Well that's different. We took the seat back off and noticed he had some alligator clips for a battery tender attached to the battery. The seat on his GS has metal bar that runs across it. I think it shorted out the battery. You could see where the clips were arcing on the bar. At first we thought perhaps it blew a fuse. So I got a crash course in taking the body work of a R1200GS trying to find fuses. I did find some underneath the gas tank in an impossible position. We checked them all and they looked good. So we decided it must be the battery and that possibly it shorted out. The problem is that in Larry's River motorcycle shops aren't around every corner. In fact the nearest one was an hour away. We tried to see if they battery from Bob's ATV would work in the GS. The posts were facing the wrong way and it was a little small. We gave it a shot though in the hope it would get him to Halifax. We played around with it for probably about an hour trying to get it to fit. We managed to get it in there but the bike still wouldn't start. So we tried jumping it again and it got running. However we became worried about what would happen if the bike stalled on the road. So we decided to bite the bullet and take the hour trek to get a battery. Bob made some phone calls and located a battery in Antigonish at a Honda Dealer.
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Truthfully for a while I was thinking of heading out to Halifax on my own and just camping somewhere since I had to catch the Cat Ferry on Thursday and I still had some things I wanted to do while I was up there since Bob was still with him. However, I decided that would be really bad Karma to leave a fellow motorcyclist stranded so I stayed with the guys.
So onto Antigonish we went to fetch a battery. The dealer checked Paul's old battery and it showed zero volts. It must have shorted a plate dead or something. Battery in hand we started the trek back to Larry's River and stopped to get lunch at a place called Mrs Webbs I think it was called? I am not positive. All three of us got the ribs and they were pretty good I have to say and decently priced.
We arrived back in Larry's River and installed the battery. The GS started right up and ran great! We were all very releived. We quickly packed up and hit the road. It was a long trek to Halifax from Larry's river. There is just no quick way to go as you can see on the map below. We just took the highway. It was probably the most boring ride I had of the trip. I was thankful for the XM on the GPS.
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I think we arrived in Halifax around 8ish. We had a couple beers and talked then we all kind of just crashed.
Bob had to return to work the next morning, Paul had to get down to Yarmouth to catch that ferry, and I wanted to do some sight seeing around Halifax the next day. This wasn't what I had in mind for the day but it was a relaxing day and it was nice having a small break from all the riding I'd been doing.
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