The drive to Pink Mountain was pretty bad again with the construction and due to rooms not being available it was necessary for us to stay in the same hotel I stayed in last year.
It turns out, the guy who is running it just bought it and has only been working on it for three weeks. He has made some improvements but it still has a long way to go. He knows it too. He said he’s trying to do as much as he can as quickly as he can but there is a lot of work ahead of him. At least now they had wi-fi even if it was only in the restaurant and the lobby. The last guy didn’t have it at all.
When we started out from Pink Mountain the next morning the weather was cold. In fact, I might as well say it’s been either cool or cold every day. I’ve worn my jacket with its liner every day and I’ve worn my waterproof riding pants with their liner every day also. Some days I had to put on my electric jacket and electric gloves but I feel pretty confident in saying that there has not been a warm day since we started this trip. But the warm days are ahead of us for sure when we get back to the states!
This morning I tried a little troubleshooting on my engine missing problem. I took out the new plugs and replaced them with the two old ones that were in the engine back when I started having the “missing under load” problem which turned out to be a bad fuel filter (after only about 15k miles). They hadn’t fixed that problem at the time and I now wanted to eliminate them as a possibility for the “missing when cold” problem.
It had rained last night so the bike was wet all over. When I tried to start the bike with the old plugs in it, it almost wouldn’t start at all. When it did finally start, it ran so bad I had to keep the throttle twisted in order for the engine to run. Pretty bad!
But, that did eliminate the plugs as a source of this new missing problem, which was the goal. So, I put the new plugs back in and started the engine and let it warm up for quite a while. It wasn’t running well at all either. When we finally hit the road, the engine was missing pretty badly and missed off and on for at least fifty miles. This is one puzzle. It has missed all the way from around twenty miles on the highway to up to one hundred miles on the highway. I can’t see this being either a temperature or humidity problem. But! What could it be?
After about fifty miles the engine started running fine and ran fine for the rest of the day. This problem is going to be a difficult one to fix, for sure. And when I get it fixed, I’m going to add the title of “Master BMW Mechanic” to my business card! Plus, I’m going to be fixing it without the umpteen thousand dollar BMW computer that the guy in Anchorage was using to try and fix mine.
Today we did Pink Mountain in British Columbia to Whitecourt in Alberta Canada. This is a pretty area going through a lot of forests, which in this case, has suffered through a forest fire in the not-to-distant past. This area reminds me a little of Colorado when navigating the foothills. Not real tall mountains but a lot of up and down. And of course, the normal northern road construction areas. You have to experience these areas to really understand them.
A motorcycle rider in the far frozen North (at least THIS motorcycle rider) begins to get a slightly elevated blood pressure reading just seeing a sign up ahead saying “ROAD CONSTRUCTION”. Because you never know exactly what you’re going to find there. And since we met the guy at Toad River riding the new BMW GS650 that he had crashed and smashed up the body work on his bike, I think about “what was it that caused him to crash”? “Is it something that would cause me to crash”? You just never know for sure. I’ve been riding around up here in 2008 and now 2009 and I’ve seen a lot of construction and I’ve been REALLY close to dumping the bike over more than once but I still wonder if I’ve seen the worst of it or just the beginning. So, every time I see a construction sign, I start the thinking process all over again. Maybe that never goes away.
We arrived in Whitecourt fairly early and found a nice motel which was probably the best motel we’ve stayed in since leaving the “lower forty-eight”. It was a Quality Inn and they let us have rooms for $80 plus tax, which made the total around $87 Canadian or about $115 U.S. A person needs a lot of money to travel through Canada!
The restaurant at the Quality Inn was run by a Greek guy from Texas. He had a lot of stories to tell and he wanted us to know just how much he loved the U.S. He carried on for the whole time we were there having supper about how much he liked living in the U.S. and how many Greeks there were in the U.S.
Tomorrow we make a run for the border. We should be able to make it into the U.S. by days end.
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