We woke up and left for the nearby town of Holly Springs, MS to get Damon some engine oil and me some chain lube. Then we hit the highway to go east of town and get back on the trail. Most of the riding was off pavement, and it was a lot of the thick gravel that you have to be really careful on. Eventually, the trail called for us to make a turn onto what was basically a four wheeler mudding trail, which was pretty technical for a heavily laden adventure motorcycle. We were able to squeeze onto the side of most of the muddy areas, but I of course fell into one that was up to almost my knees. Once you start to lose your balance, there is nothing to push against to make yourself upright again, so you just tip over in slow motion.
Anyways, after doing a few of these, I look in one of my mirrors and realize I don’t see Damon or Gary, I wait a while and still don’t see them, so I get off to go check. After walking a couple hundred yards, I see them tearing into Damon’s BMW in the middle of the trail. I get closer to see them trying to remove the battery from the bike, which is all swollen, when a huge puff of steam comes out of the battery. Apparently, Damon’s air-cooled bike was getting warm with all the low-speed technical riding, and his wiring insulation was a little degraded. Those two things together led to the melting of the insulation on his starter wire, which caused the battery to short out and swell up. It also caused one of his fuel injection lines to develop a hole in it. Needless to say, he was dead in the water. Of course, being a BMW, it uses non-traditional sizes for every part. Gary and I rode to town looking for a battery, wiring, etc. We found most of what we needed, but could only find a battery about 1/3 of the size, because every battery in existence was wider than the BMW battery. So the tiny battery we did find would fit in the existing spot, but didn’t have enough amperage to actually turn the bike over. It’s getting dark, so we pushed his bike out of the woods a couple of hundred yards to a highway, then pushed him down a hill to bump start it. We jump on our bikes to catch up with him and find him a mile down the road with his bike turned off, saying that his catalytic converter was glowing red hot so he turned it off. We’re scratching our heads over what to do, as its now dark outside, when a guy drives up and says he saw us push starting the bike up the hill and that he has a truck and a trailer if we need him to take us somewhere. Damon immediately says “YES!”, and next thing we know this guy (Bobby) is back with his rig and we’re heading down the road to a motel in Holly Springs. We get Jason at Pizza Hut to hook us up with a meat lovers pizza even though they are about to close because we are starving. Soon after, we went to bed. It was a long day.
(The map puts into perspective how we didn’t really go anywhere today ha)
