.
Route:
paved and unpaved, marked and unmarked roads, dirt paths, water, sand, rocks,
grassy knolls, foot and animal trails using motorcycles, feet, and ferries and
sustained by cholesterol and alcohol
Distance: 2,230 miles for Mongo, OneEye, and
Walrus and 1,901 miles for Spiderman, who left a day later because he did not
want to be part of any disturbance on The Cat caused by a hung-over pilot who
insisted on driving the high-speed fairy – er, ferry
Well,
we are not all there for day one (or any other day really); Mongo, OneEye, and
Walrus rode their bikes from
The
three of them blast up Route 101 to I-95 to
In
town, they park the three HD scooters on the main drag and Mongo eyes some
sunglasses in a store front window and says, “OneEye, those like yours. How
much you pay for them?” When One Eye answers, Mongo says, “Mongo like. Mongo
gonna buy those.” They walk into another store to ask a cute young girl where
to go and get some cold beer; she says The Thirsty Whale, where all the locals
go. Garth Brooks on the juke box and toothless locals making fools of themselves.
They decide one beer is enough here and head up the street, where they stumble
upon a great little place with too many names, “Highway 66”, “Dinky’s Cab,” and
something like “Fred’s.” The place is decked out with memorabilia and a train
track that circles the place high above the eating area. The meal is great.
Mongo asks to watch the train run as they leave and the place obliges before
they exit. Mongo stops by the store and purchases new Oakley sunglasses and
walks around in the dark with them on. Doesn’t make much difference, however;
he’s perpetually in the dark anyway, the glasses just make it more obvious. One
last stop at a convenience store for beer for Mongo and instant coffee for One
Eye, who does not wake up without coffee… gallons of coffee. Spiderman is in
awe of this and counts the cups One Eye drinks. Total for the trip: 1,328, not
bad for nine days, but well below One Eye’s record set on the Sturgis trip the
year before.
So,
no one gets into trouble that day or night. It is amazing that nothing and no
one pissed off Mongo for a whole day. He is the official arbiter of courtesy
and civility and is very sensitive to any violations of either. I mean, to
believe that no one in
I
hear that the ride on The Cat was pretty impressive, and that standing outside
was better than standing inside when it came to avoiding the vibrations from
the four 9,700 horsepower turbines that lift the boat 9 centimeters off the
water and shove it at 55 mph over the Bay of Fundy to Yarmouth.
One
Eye, Mongo, and Walrus relate that they arrive at the ferry at
The
highlight of the ferry ride, without a doubt, was Mongo’s hour-long visit to
the bridge with the captain. The captain tells Mongo all about how the ship
runs and about the months’ long training he had in
The
Cat runs the Bar Harbour-to-Yarmouth route in the summer and then sails for 16
days—about 60 hours of actual sailing—to
The
three FTC boys debark The Cat in Yarmouth, almost sail through customs(weapons
and all) but OneEye gets stopped and searched, then head for the Mermaid Motel,
a few miles away, to spend the night and wait for me to arrive in the a.m.
aboard the slow ferry. (Okay, OneEye, I hear what you are thinking: slow,
overnight ferry for the Yamaha, high-speed modern one for the Harleys. Or am I
misjudging you?) A little sightseeing trip to
That
night, they tell me, Mongo showed off at the bar down the street from the
Mermaid at some video trivia game. He spent the rest of the trip looking for a
bar with the game, but never found one. I don’t know what the game was all
about—perhaps OneEye can shed some light on it here—but Mongo caught shit from
Walrus and OneEye about it being a old man’s game, and worse, for the next few
days. Wherever we went, Walrus would walk into a bar and check it out and tell
Mongo that they didn’t have the game and Mongo would say something like, “You
fucking guys!” But that did not mean much; Mongo said, “You fucking guys” about
once an hour on the trip, and he followed that with, “You never listen to me”
or “No one ever listens to me” about half of the time. But, hell, none of us
paid any attention. Note: Mongo was always nice to me, though, and I never gave
him any shit whatsoever, because I respected his age and experience and his
Buddha-like demeanor and he respected my, well, my . . .
Shit, I cannot lie. Mongo was
mean to me and I was like the Buddha, placid through it all, whole trip, swear
on my Yamaha engine!
I
arrive via the Portland-to-Yarmouth ferry—the 11-hour one—after watching my son
hit a home run in the town’s Little League baseball championship and then
watching my daughter dance in a recital and then riding to Portland from NH in
less than two hours (OneEye will tell you he could have done on the Ultra in a
lot less time, and he probably could have). I had a couple of cold Magic Hat
Number 9’s at Three Dollar Dewey’s down the street from the ferry, and I met a
real nice couple on a Royal Star (aren’t they all?) from MA and we all headed
on board about an hour before sailing. Very few passengers and an uneventful
ferry trip. The ship was carrying a load of old and older folks driving
restored Bentleys and Rolls Royces who would at different times cross paths
with the FTC on our trip. Seemed like okay folks—for people whose cars leak oil
and other fluids and who seem to need the car to establish an identity and are
pretty much unable to talk about anything else or with anyone but their
antique-driving friends.
Walrus
met me at the ferry after Mongo woke him up about a half hour before it
arrived. A recurring theme on the trip: Walrus can sleep and can stay asleep
beyond all reason. He hears nothing and wakes only when directly accosted by
someone. He was my roomie on the whole trip and his
ability to sleep was awesome. Out in seconds. It was pretty impressive, no,
very impressive. And he never fell asleep riding.
We
ride to the Mermaid and, with Mongo and OneEye, head down the road one block to
find breakfast, which we do at Kelly’s, a restaurant next to the bar where
Mongo found his calling as a video trivia game player. We are the only
customers and the meal is the first of many great breakfasts we had throughout
the trip—until we came closer to the U.S., when they began to suck again.
We
start out riding that day into a foggy and then foggier morning on some back
roads, but Walrus decides, “What the fuck, why ride back roads when we can’t
see anything? Let’s take the highway till it lightens up,” and we de for an
hour or two until the fog lifted. Still wasn’t a sunny day, but we strike out
for the Lighthouse Trail anyway. At a gas stop, we notice that OneEye’s bike is leaking some fluid around the crankcase
and we decide to head for the nearest Harley dealer to have it fixed. That
meant our destination for the day was Dartmouth, NS, outside Halifax. The leak
isn’t bad and OneEye has plenty of oil and transmission fluid when he checks
them. The front of my Yamaha was shaking pretty bad when I took one or both of
my hands off, so we decide to ask the Harley place to look at it as well. Of
course, there’s a chance they might not want to, so we decide to look for a
Yamaha dealer as well. (I would say here that a Harley that does not leak
something is not a true Harley, but I can’t say that when there was something
wrong with my Yamaha as well, can I?
We
stop for lunch at a place in Hubbards, NS, called Hubbards something or other, a little upscale restaurant
with nauseating background music but good food. Mongo is pretty quiet but sings
a bit. Already there are two couples who seemed to be related to each other. We
strike up a conversation, Mongo or Walrus in the lead, and find out that one
couple has just bought a house literally across the street. She is a beauty, he
is a dork. She keeps restarting the conversation with us even though we are
ugly and dirty and covered in black leather and not really pursuing it. She
says I look like Peter Fonda, the older version of Peter Fonda, but only with
my sunglasses on. I put them back on. She works in a upscale restaurant in
Halifax, he works at impressing us. One thing leads to another until hubby
invites us to their house to drink with them and to spend the night. We do not,
but the rest of the ride we sort of regret it. Mongo and OneEye and Walrus (not
me, I am civility itself) would have taught him a lesson, I’m sure, about
inviting strangers into your house to drink your booze only to have them wind
up fondling your wife. The guy never quits; even when we are ready to leave and
are saddled up to head toward Halifax, he comes out of his house and waves us
over. We figured later this was a way to impress his wife; we expect the
marriage is doomed, he is too much like a little boy who somehow convinced the
class beauty to marry him and then has to spend the rest of his life trying to
impress her that she made the right choice. The FTC could have brought the
marriage to a quick close, I guess, but we are too uninterested to make the
effort. We must have looked to them like a walk on the wild side; turns out the
motel they recommend in Bedford, NS, is a dump, with rooms probably rentable by
the hour and that may have said more about their real view of us than the
invitation to come to their house. The FTC as entertainment? Fuck them, eh?
On
to Dartmouth, which proves harder to locate than we figured. We stop to check
out our direction when a little boy runs up and asks, “Are you the Hell’s
Angels?” He couldn’t have been more than 5 or 6, and I kind of wonder about his
family life. We say yes, we are the Angels (we will probably get our assed
kicked when some computer-literate Angel types in “Hell’s Angels” into a search
engine and this story turns up) and as we get ready to leave, he yells, “Burn
rubber!” or “Peel out!” or something like that. Weird little 10-second event.
We
ride around in what felt to me at the time like a big circle until we spot the
Star Dust Motel in Bedford, NS, the one our friends from Hubbards
recommended. We consider staying and Mongo is already off the bike and almost
moving in when we decide that, despite its location next to a restaurant and
rooms on the first floor, it is just too skanky
looking to leave the bikes outside. We head back down the street to the
Maritime Motel, about a half block away, and OneEye and Walrus like the look of
the young girl behind the counter and we stay. A few words about the motel: hot
water that could cook a lobster, a view that looks down on the tin roof of the
business below and across the street to a pizza place, train whistles at night,
air conditioners that looked like breeding grounds for legionnaire’s disease,
and beds that could have been recycled from a variety of flop houses. It’s late
on a Sunday, almost dark, and we say, fuck it, and register. We lock up the
bikes.
We
walk to the restaurant, a Greek place next to the Star Dust Motel. We eat, have
beer or two, walk back and crash. Mongo watched TV. Another recurring theme:
Mongo watched TV everywhere we went, turned it on as soon as he entered his
room. Weather channel, most of the time, until he found Channel 23 in St.
Stephen, New Brunswick, a titty channel. We had to
find the Harley dealer early in the a.m. so we didn’t lose too much time
staying awake. Of course, that “we” is Walrus and me; we were always good boys,
in bed early, blah, blah, blah. The fun guys were next door, with the booze and
the cigarettes.
We
head out early to find the Harley place and do, without too much trouble, as I
recall. Just some lefts and rights. But it is not just a Harley dealer: Pro
Cycle sells and services Harleys, Buells, Ducatis, Hondas, Kawasakis, Suzukis, and Yamahas, and four-wheelers. And the guys there
save our trip. Steve Anderson, the service manager, takes OneEye and me right
away, and assigns us to service guys, who pretty much get to work on the bikes
within the hour. Turns out that OneEye’s bike is
leaking transmission fluid but can be fixed. On the way to the shop that
morning, his speedometer stops working—only goes to about 30 mph. They also can
fix that, they think. Ralph, the tire guy, checks my front wheel. A half hour
later, Steve walks over and waits a second or two to tell me my wheel is
properly balanced and the head is fine; the rim is bent, out of true side to
side, but he says they might be able to get one in a day. Turns out they can’t;
there’s not even a rim like it in the warehouse they use. Ralph agrees to give
it an hour’s labor to see if he can true the wheel by adjusting the spokes. He
does and he does—straight and true at 75 on the highway and no shaking.
That’s
the short story of our stay at Pro Cycle. The longer version is that OneEye is
not content to sit and wait; he has to keep moving, so he and Mongo walk to
find some food. Walrus and I follow, but we lose them after they pass a Ford
dealership, so we head to a Tim Horton’s, a chain like Dunkin’ Donuts, but with
more and better food. Walrus and I are sitting there with muffins and drinks,
me facing the window, wondering where Mongo and OneEye went, when they show up
in a 2002 Ford Explorer from Enterprise. Walrus chokes, and I mean literally,
and coughs and about explodes with laughter right in the middle of swallowing
when he turns around to see them in the SUV. We all get in and OneEye drives us
around looking for a bank to change our money. We come upon the HSBC, which
stands for Hot Sexy Banker Chicks, we are told by two tellers who gave us lots
more Canadian dollars than we give them in American dollars. They are funny and
cheerful, and that’s another theme for this trip: The consistently friendly,
outgoing people we met throughout Canada. The first words from their mouths are
not “I” and “me” and “we,” but almost always questions about us, where we are
from, where we are going. The people we met in Nova Scotia, Cape Breton, PEI,
and New Brunswick made this trip, as much as the roads, and the views, and the
weather.
We
are told by the Banker Chicks to head across the street to a motel where the
breakfasts are good and inexpensive. They are right. Kathy, the waitress, is
also a treat, who gives back as good as she gets from us, and the food is
outstanding, again.
Back
at Pro Cycle, we wait and wait some more and buy T-shirts and other stuff and
talk with Bob, the sales guy, and Steve and a young girl who’s from Texas and
is heading back there after she finishes school or something and who rides a
’94 CBR or FCR or something. Walrus then has a close encounter of historical
proportions when he sees a guy walking out of Pro Cycle and says aloud, “I know
that guy. I met him last year at Laconia.” He stops the man and asks whether he
was at Laconia last year, the man says yes, and Walrus asks him some questions
about himself. Turns out he is the same man, Peter ______________, a former
RCMP, who had just got back from Laconia this year. Now this is fucking weird
(later it gets weirder, with the waitress in Pictou,
NS): Walrus finds a guy he met a year earlier on the side of the road during a
ride at Laconia during bike week in a motorcycle dealership in Nova Scotia
hundreds of miles away that he is at only by circumstance on the same day the
guy shows up to buy something. The chances of that occurring . . .
fuck it, there are no odds on that. This is a trip that is marked by
good fortune, it seems, and this is just a sign.
When
OneEye’s bike is finished and we’re ready to go, the
rain we were expecting to get arrives—the exact second we leave Pro Cycle’s
parking lot. We wonder about our luck just then, but put on rain gear and head
north. It’s about 1:00 or 1:30 p.m. and we’ve lost about half a day of riding.
(We could have lost more time if the girl who rented the car to OneEye had also
been the one to bring him back to Pro Cycle; instead it was a nice man who did
the driving. Maybe the girl was not just cute, but smart, eh?) We race up the
highway north heading to Cape Breton. It is fucking awful rain and it gets
worse as we ride. We stop, cleared our glasses, etc., and start again. The road
is a gray path in the rain, no definition, hardly any way to see the shoulders.
When we can’t see cars right ahead of us, we pull off into New Glasgow, NS, and
park the bikes under an entranceway at the Comfort Inn. We are soaked. Mongo
goes to get coffee and we discuss just how bad visibility was and whether to
wait it out there for an hour or two. OneEye finds out that there are two rooms
with double beds left in the hotel. We take them and call it a day around 4:30.
At 6:00, it is sunny.
The
two clerks behind the registration desk offer to put all our wet clothes in
their dryer. These people are incredibly nice. That would absolutely never
happen in the states; oh, we could dry our clothes at a U.S. motel all right,
but we’d do it ourselves and pay for it and would have to ask someone about
dryers first since they’d never offer to tell us. The women at the Comfort Inn
are funny and considerate, and this is a CHAIN motel, for God’s sake! It’s not
making too much of it to say that there are few people left on earth as nice as
the people we met on this trip. Well, okay, maybe not on earth, just in the
industrialized world.
Mongo
wakes up after the coffee and some scotch. Then he comes to visit Walrus and
me—with the infamous Sturgis squirt gun. He starts shooting and laughing and
shooting, mostly at Walrus. It escalates. Mongo says, “If I didn’t want this
drink, I’d let you have it.” He does, scotch and ice on the Walrus. Mongo runs
away, Walrus licks his fingers with the scotch on them. He’s sticky and gets
stickier when he spills coke on himself or Mongo throws Coke on him or
something. He cannot get Mongo without being obvious, so he springs a surprise
attack on OneEye, Mongo’s roommate and a noisy partner in Mongo’s act. He dives
onto OneEye like a cat—and off again like a tossed cat, as OneEye just rolls with
Walrus’s dive on him and throws him over his head, onto the floor, where he
hits his head on the air conditioner. Nothing but pride hurt, Walrus says he’s
not as quick as he used to be. A few minutes later, he takes a coke and ice and
when Mongo leaves, he chases him to his room next door, but even Mongo is
quicker and shuts the door before Walrus can toss the drink. Walrus will wait
and be patient for the entire trip to avenge Mongo’s sneak attack. The eighth
grade class trip is off to a rousing start.
It
gets more rousing that night. We cross the highway to the Highland Square Mall,
innocuous-sounding as can be, to a bar called the Ranch House Restaurant. There
we meet Pam, the long-legged waitress and barkeep. We order some beers and
food, and talk about Pam and the length of her legs and other large and
inviting parts of her body and her smile. She looks like the highlight of the
trip so far until we call over to a guy and the woman with him to sit with us.
Bill and Jenny Stewart are their names; he looks like a biker, and is one, and
so is she. They are at the bar while they try to get in touch with a guy who is
selling Jenny an ’84 special edition Midnight Special Virago. She’s owned a
1200 Sportster and at least one other bike. Bill’s
owned a lot of do-it-yourself bikes, choppers with high-performance Japanese
engines in hard-tail frames, but sold his last one to make mortgage payments on
their trailer and land (135 acres of land!) in Hopewell, NS. Bill’s got a pony
tail, long red beard, with two braids in it, one down each side, that he just
had trimmed and he wants to make the hair that was cut off into earrings. He
says he is known as the Biking Viking. He met Jenny at a party and liked her
and her bike, took his woman home and came back to see Jenny. They seem to be a
match made in a biker’s dream. She has long grey hair and is quite the quipper, can give it out pretty well in a quiet sort of
way. We tease her and she zings us back. Bill talks about being out of work and
now logging for a living and Jenny does leather work.
This
is how I remember the rest of the night. We get to drinking with Bill and Jenny
and then share some Tequila shots with them. Mongo goes up to the bar and
starts a conversation there. We get loud and louder. Walrus has seen enough of
the way this is going and disappears into the mall. We call him about 10:30 or
so; he is back at the room. He comes back to the bar and sees us and sees what
a mess alcohol can make of humans’ lives. We are having a great time. Bill and
Jenny want us to drive to their place and keep drinking. Jenny invites us to
spend the night and then, when we don’t seem that interested, to come for
breakfast. I get their numbers—home and businesses—on a napkin, but we are not
going anywhere on the bikes tonight. We will be happy and lucky to find the
motel.
Dean
and Tim, two very big fucking guys at the bar, talk with Mongo. Later
Mongo breaks down in the bathroom,
remembering his experiences in Vietnam and the loss of his best friend. Seems
like that was the conversation he was having with Dean. Dean is pretty upset
and talks on about how bad he feels for Mongo and for everyone else who went
over there; he is much too young to have gone and keeps apologizing for it.
Things
lighten up when Justine arrives. Pam has asked Walrus and OneEye to make a
serious fuss over her, get into it about who was talking to her first. Pam
expects Justine to get freaked and she does, looking sort of she’s asking
herself what circus just rolled into this bar and why am I in the center ring,
as Walrus pulls on one arm and OneEye on the other in a fight over her. She
seems totally unnerved until they tell her what they are doing and who put them
up to it. Mongo says, “Wherever we go, it’s like the clown circus rolled into
town and everyone wants in on the act.” He’s right, although no one ever
listens to him and he has to say this about seven times before I remembered it
and put it into the Hog Log journal about this trip.
We
depart the bar after Walrus drives OneEye around the bar in a shopping cart.
Jenny gets her bike, we look at it, and Bill, with a blood alcohol level about
2.0, gets on it to drive it home, no license plate or registration. Mongo asks
Jenny for a ride on the hood of her car to the motel across the street, but
Walrus sees an accident in the making and gets Mongo to get off. Bill and Jenny
are gone, and we walk to the motel. Good thing there’s no traffic; we are
unlikely to stop when we cross the street.
Mongo’s
not finished. He calls our room. We let it ring and ring; I mean, I let it ring
and ring, Walrus is out of it as soon as he hits the bed, not drunk, just
immediately comatose. I’m not answering the phone; I figure it is either Mongo,
who will just give me shit, or Jenny and Bill and we ain’t
gonna see them again this night.
This
is a day to remember and we are not even to Cape Breton. We’ve seen a lot of
sights, but not the natural wonders we came for, not just yet.
I
get up and run the next morning; it is the first and last exercise on this
trip. Wasted some good storage space bringing those sneakers but the run
works—I no longer taste the tequila and Keith’s, and I’m getting hungry.
We
pack again, and get the stuff on the bikes. I’m last—another theme on this
trip: I’m pretty much always last, getting packed, riding, etc. I cannot even
say things first; I just repeat what Mongo says. “Pete and Repeat,” he calls
us. But I’m glad I’m along ’cause this is already the motorcycle trip of a
lifetime for me. For Mongo, Walrus, and OneEye, it is a chance to finish a trip
together. Last year’s Sturgis trip for them was broken up by a crash and a
mechanical problem; they want to finish this trip together.
We
head off today under sunny skies, a little cool. Bill Stewart suggested last
night that we take the Sunrise Trail north; it starts about 10 minutes up the
highway from where we are. We do and it is beautiful. No traffic—there rarely
is up here—and we have some really nice views of the water on our left. We stop
at the LBR restaurant for breakfast. It is literally home-cooked food made in a
kitchen we can see. The bread alone is a meal, thick, tasty, and satisfying.
The place is a small restaurant/hardware store/grocery store/video store on a
two-lane road that runs along the northwest coast of NS.
An
older fellow at the restaurant says we should take the road to
OneEye
turns back before us to get a shot of his bike on a grassy knoll and we come
upon him just as he’s jumping off before it hits the dirt. His U-turn buried
his front wheel in the sand and down he went. We rush to help—naw, we don’t. Walrus takes a picture of OneEye and his
bike on the ground first, then offers to help him get it upright. They do and
OneEye decides this may not be the best spot to take the shot. We leave, but
this little stretch of road off the path, suggested by someone we met along the
way, is the kind of spot that made this trip worth the miles and the weather.
It is the first time we get close to the water and the first, I think, that
Mongo says, “It’s so quiet here.” Sounds like an obvious thing to say about a
place like NS, which has so few people living there, but the quiet in so many
places we stopped caught our attention almost immediately. The dock where we
stopped, even with a noisy truck hauling up marker buoys just a hundred feet
way, was also peaceful. It wasn’t silent, but quiet, and there is a difference.
We
roll back onto the Sunrise Trail and head for
We
cross the the Canso
Causeway that links lower NS with Cape Breton somewhere around early afternoon.
Hands go up and we feel like we have arrived. OneEye, the leader for most of
the ride, takes the first right across the causeway and we head out to new and
beautiful scenes—of an industrial par, big StoraEnso
wood plant on the right, empty land on the left; big ocean-going ship on the
right, empty land on the left. Big dead-end straight ahead, industrial dirt
road on the left. We stop. Not only is the road a dead-end, the surface is as
bumpy as cellulite on a fat man’s legs; we spend the five minutes it takes to
get back to the main road trying to negotiate a flat route. Mongo not happy.
Oh,
yeah, and we piss while we are stopped. This is something we do just about
every time we stop. We piss all over NS—from roadsides to gas station bathrooms
to roadsides, mostly roadsides actually. They are convenient, to say the least.
We drink lots and lots of water, that’s why we piss so much. Not the only
reason we piss so much, though.
OneEye
and Walrus discuss directions at the dead-end and decide to take the Fleur-de-Lis Trail, which looks okay on a map. It is not; it is
flanked most of the way by trees and is also very bumpy. We look for deer.
Mongo’s joints are being tortured by the miserable suspension on his Wide Boy
or Fat Glide or whatever his customized Harley has become. He has a Fat Boy
front on a Wide Glide frame, which looks cool, but apparently is not meant for
bouncing along back roads that have been patched a dozen times and have an
unending succession of cracks along the right side that are filled with tar and
that jerk the bike around for mile after mile. My Yamaha, on the other hand,
does just fine; you never hear me complain about the ride.
We
stop again about an hour later when we have not yet seen the end of this road
or the next one we want to take. We piss. Mongo is hot and tired and hungry. It
is mid afternoon and we have not eaten since the LBR Restaurant. We alternate
great times and not so great times on this ride; this is not a great time. But
there are no really bad times, even in the rain.
We
find our way to Route 4 and we stop about 3:30 in St. Peter’s for lunch. Mongo
finds a leaky hose connecting the Ram Air kit and after we eat Mongo and OneEye
find a replacement hose and fix it. St. Peter’s like a nice enough place, but
we are there and gone in an hour or so.
We
head toward Sydney, hoping to avoid it altogether, along Route 4, which runs
along the east side of Bras d’Or Lake. We see the
lake once or twice on the ride, but we want to get to the scenic part of Cape
Breton, or damn close to it, today and stop only for gas on this stretch. At
Sydney, we consider whether we can get to the Harley dealer before it closes at
5:30; not knowing where it is, and having about a half hour to get there, we
decide not to try. One cool thing about owning a Harley: you can show off where
you have been just by getting a shirt from the local Harley dealer. Even a
rice-burner owner like me appreciates that and I think nothing of dropping cash
on these souvenirs, the only ones I want on this ride.
Riding
in a city after the miles of countryside is downright unpleasant and even
nasty, so we head back out of Sydney the way we came and look for the turn to
North Sydney and Sydney Mines. We miss it and OneEye, Mongo, and Walrus take a
left, while I take a right onto what turns out to be the correct ramp. I back
down in the dirt and wait for Sydney’s rush hour traffic to clear and meet them
a block away. We retrace our steps and take the right exit and aim for Route
105, which will take us to Victoria County and the Cape Breton we came for, the
one the Cabot Trail . We stop for gas and a piss. Almost as we arrive at the
station, an older gent tools up on a scooter and gets into a conversation with
OneEye. He says he used to have a ‘37 Harley and OneEye can’t quite tear
himself away immediately from the man. We do leave with a hearty wave from the
gent and head for the Cabot Trail. We consider stopping at Big Bras d’Or to satisfy our curiousity,
but don’t.
Around
6:00 or 6:30 we cross onto the Cabot Trail at South St. Ann’s and proceed to
have a helluva fun ride to Ingonish,
where we spend the night. From South St. Ann’s to Ingonish
the road weaves and turns for what seems to be 20 miles, but probably is not.
We speed down this road, looking for smooth lines and flat pavement and seeing
no other cars or vehicles. We are alone. We ride staggered as usual, each
finding his own way along the uneven pavement. It is getting darker or seems to
be behind the sunglasses. We lock onto the route and don’t stop until we come
to a T. This kind of ride is why there is no explaining to anyone else why
motorcycling is unmatched by any other experience. It’s just one rider, one
machine, no passengers, no back seat drivers, your choice, your willingness to
test what you can do, your decisions. The road goes where it goes and you just
try to follow it at a speed that makes everything else irrelevant. You take in
things that your eyes process and brain may remember somewhere, but all you can
recall is doing it right.
At
the T, right near North River Bridge, the Cabot Trail turns left. The road is
much the same, up and down, right and left until it starts to rise straight up
in Cape Smokey Provincial Park, right before descending into Ingonish. Here is where OneEye rediscovers his groove or
gets back in touch with his skills or whatever he said. He leaves Walrus,
Mongo, and me far behind as he takes the sharp turns up the hill and down much
faster than us. He leans the Ultra like it was a sport bike, or seems to. As
Walrus said, “I kept up until I felt I was uncomfortable,” and I felt the same.
OneEye just flew up and around turns that had no visibility like he was on a
Hot Wheels track, and he loved it. “These are nothing like the turns you’ll see
tomorrow on the Trail,” he says when we regroup. Turns out he is right.
We
roll into Ingonish at just about 8:30, hunt around
for a place to stay with a restaurant close by and find the Sea Breeze Cottages
where we rent “chalets” for the night. They are really just small houses, with
kitchens and two bedrooms and a fireplace. And they have heat, which is great
because we are cold. Across the street is the Seascapes Restaurant that
surprises all of us with its food. It was only been open for three weeks and
the owner used to run a fast-food place nearby, but the food is the best we eat
on the trip. Our waiter, Al, is a nice kid who only started working there after
helping to build the restaurant. The owner liked him and offered him a job. He
is friendly and puts up with some joshing from the FTC. What the hell, everyone
we meet puts up with some shit from us. Al even takes our picture, which is
funny only because this is an upscale place and we look and probably smell like
anything but. It is refined, intentionally nice, and we will look like black
tar on a white suit in the photo.
We
are loud nonetheless and OneEye and Mongo order wine, and OneEye orders one
cold vodka after another. And Al lets OneEye stack all the empty shot glasses
for the chilled vodka on the table in front of him. We figure the noise and the
conversation, with various references to fucking this and fucking that, drive
the professor and his daughters Mary Ann and Ginger away; they look insulted
even when they are just sitting there. Mongo speaks to the professor when the prof walks by on his way and he ignores Mongo, a very bad
idea. Mongo hates discourteous people. Mary Ann makes some snide remark and
Ginger says nothing as they leave. Good riddance.
The
remaining patrons are a couple that OneEye figures are not married, at least
not to each other, and they never actually deny it when he suggests that to
them. Maybe they are married to each other and like the idea that they’re not
and will head home to busy fantasy-spiked sex. Or maybe they really are
sneaking around an empty resort town before the season and will have busy
illicit sex later. They enjoy our conversation, that’s for sure, and laugh
pretty hard when we dig at each other. Of course, not me. I never dig.
Walrus
wants to see the guy who goes right off the dock of the restaurant to catch the
mussels and he gets to, when the restaurant owner/chef comes out with a snorkel
mask on his face. We crack up and so does he, so does Al. We like this guy
immediately, and we give Al a big tip, although he seems to have few expenses;
he says he camps out all summer in a tent behind the restaurant on a little
knoll that overlooks the water. Oh, yeah, the restaurant and the chalets look
directly onto a small cove. This is a spectacular site for both. We are lucky
again.
We
drag ourselves back to the chalets and crash. Tomorrow we need to rise early to
make it around the Cabot Trail without rushing.
This
is the day and the place we rode 800 miles or more to get to. We eat breakfast
at a restaurant down the road from our chalets and then head north. The sun is
out and it is going to be warm.
We
run out of Ingonish and into the Cape Breton
Highlands National Park, which we go into and out of until we reach Petit Etang, about 120 km from Ingonish.
The CT skirts the ocean from Ingonish through Lakie’s Head and past Green Cove and Black Brook Cove.
Along the way we stop to watch dozens of lobster boats picking up their traps
and putting in fresh bait. They spin in circles from trap to trap, avoiding
each other while doing their work. We take some photos and ride on to Neil’s
Harbor. We stop also at one spot overlooking the ocean and OneEye and I descend
from a turnout down a steep, grassy hill toward the water. I take some photos,
including one of OneEye standing on the rocks near the water. He asks for his
camera and I bring it down; he goes around a knoll to shoot some shots of the
cliffs north of us. The grass is long and slippery and there are also patches
of early raspberries here and there. Mongo and Walrus wait above.
We
ride on to Neil’s Harbour, a small fishing village.
The Trail takes a sharp turn here and heads inland to Cape North, the
northernmost spot on the Trail and the farthest north on this planet that I
have ever been. Walrus has bicycled the Trail before and OneEye has ridden it,
too, on a motorcycle. This is all new to me, however, and looking at where we
are on a map now is just about unbelievable. I ask Walrus whether there is any
place in the U.S. that is this far north. He says, “I don’t think so. We are pretty
fucking far north.” And we sure are.
OneEye
is right: the twists and turns up the hills last night can’t touch the ones
today. After Cape North, the road climbs almost immediately to the top of North
Mountain, about 1450 feet high (445 meters). We stop at the first turnout on
the way up, a left-side turnout on a right turn up a steep hill, a spot that
overlooks a rift in the earth with a creek running through it. A sign explains
just how this came to be—tectonic plates shifting and all that—and Mongo points
across the road to the cliff that was exposed when the road was cut. The layers
and layers of rock deposited at about a 60 degree angle on top of one another
over the millennia are clearly seen. We take photos of each other and the vista
and the trees and move on. We continue to climb, in lower gears around the
sharp curves. This is definitely fun riding, not fast, but with lots of
leaning.
We
stop again after climbing to another turnout. Parking the bikes is problematic
at times because the turnouts tend to be angled down toward the edge and the
kickstands don’t always hold the bikes. More spectacular views. Not a lot of
jokes going on now, we are pretty much in awe of the road we’re on and the
views that unfold around every turn. Mongo is anxious to get going and is not
interested in stopping every place Walrus, OneEye, and I do. He seems
interested in speed today. The three of us tend to stop often over the 117 km
through the national park.
We
descend North Mountain into Pleasant Bay, and the Trail takes a left-hand turn
south along the Gulf of St. Lawrence, which we follow now till we leave Cape
Breton. We soon climb again, up to the top of Mackenzie Mountain, about 1100
feet high and stay on a plateau for about 7 miles. I see a golden eagle soaring
over valley on my right and stop to check out French Lake, a pond the plateau,
where I hoped to see moose. No such luck, however. Just standing near French
Lake is another of those peaceful, incredibly quiet moments on this ride.
Nothing is moving. The sun is out and bright. We have seen lobster boats, lots
of them earlier, spinning circles in the ocean to grab their traps. We have
seen mountain roads that curve around blind corners. We have seen other people
and a few motorcyclists, but nothing to distract us. We’ve seen miles of trees
broken by open areas that make you look at them to search for wildlife. This is
a magnificent place, unique because it is both mountainous and bordered by the
ocean. Just riding on the road makes you feel a part of it. We never do see a
moose, and that may be just as well, if it’s a moose in the road.
Mongo
is gone now, off on his own at his own pace. Seems that we make too many stops
to hold his interest. He does, however, say often, “Do you believe how fucking
quiet this place is?”
When
the Trail descends from the plateau, we are treated to one spectacular view of
the ocean running into high cliffs. It’s one of those turns that comes around a
bend and just surprises you so much that you want to stop right where you are
to take it in. We do stop at the next turnout to photograph it; not exactly
what we saw on the way downhill, but close. The road rises and falls along here
for the next several miles, but stays right along the water the whole way. It’s
amazing to see.
OneEye,
Walrus, and I turn off the Trail onto a dirt road that leads to a dead end at a
picnic area. OneEye and I turn around the circle at the end, but Walrus rides
right up onto a five-foot rise in the middle, where he parks the Road King and
proceeds to get photographed. OneEye takes some shots of the Ultra with the
cliffs we have just passed in the background. He takes one of me next to the
Yamaha with the ocean in the background. We piss again. Ain’t
nature great?
OneEye
has this idea for a great photo, Walrus and I riding side by side up the dirt
road with the ocean in the background. He goes to the end and we ride slowly
together toward him. He takes a look at the shot in his digital camera, and
says, “Fucking awesome!”
We
ride out of the park, but not before stopping one more time for a view of the
ocean and the cliffs. A park ranger asks if we have come through the National
Park. We say yes, and he asks for our passes. The night before, the entrance
was closed and the guy there said we could not get passes then. We tell the
ranger this and, like almost everyone we met here, he’s relaxed about it. He
says we get a free ride this time and walks away to question some other guests.
I guess we have to come back sometime and pay. My guess is, we will.
Just
a short ways down the road, there is a rockfall on
the left, maybe 90 to 100 feet of stones angled down from a cliff that rises
another 75-80 feet. We decide to stop to get a picture of the three of us and
our bikes in front of the fall with the steep cliff behind. An eagle soaring at
the top of the cliff would make it perfect; no eagle, only mosquitoes and other
biting bugs. We endure some bug bites to get the shot, with OneEye using a
self-timer to make the photo. Again, OneEye looks into the LCD on his digital
camera and declares the photo a winner. Too bad Mongo isn’t here.
Walrus
says, “This is the kind of place that Mad Dog would climb up and tumble down on
his back and ass and laugh the whole way down.” Mad Dog rode with Mongo,
Walrus, and OneEye to Sturgis last year, and did stunts like the one Walrus
described enough times to earn his nickname.
A
few minutes down the road, we catch up with Mongo in small town at a store
where he has been waiting. He seems to have burned off his need for speed. He’s
already eaten lunch and is ready to go. We get some water and eat some of the
home-baked bread OneEye bought yesterday. It is hot and sunny and we’ve just
ridden through some of the most dramatic scenery on the planet, so we sit and
talk. Maybe this is when Mongo tells us he knows how to speak crow, I can’t
remember but it was during lunch somewhere. Anyway, he tells us that “caw, caw,
caw” means “come over here,” and that “caaawww, caaawww, caaawww” means “now come
over here.” He says “caaaaawwwww, caaaaawwwww”
means “hey, one of our buddies is in trouble” and “caawwwwwww,
caawwwwwww, caawwwwwww”
means “I found some food.” Mongo learned crow from a 45 rpm record he bought
and he says the calls work. “I call crows and then I shoot them.” Mongo hates
crows. He calls to some crows across the street, but he must have told them to
go away.
We
mount up and head south to Chéticamp, or Shittycamp, as OneEye calls it. We see a lighthouse there
way out on a point and decide we have to get there. We have directions from a
guy who chatted us up at the store, another Harley biker missing a bunch of
teeth. (No surprise there.) In FTC fashion, we aim to follow his directions,
but take a wrong turn down one dirt road that ends in front of a small house
where a woman comes out and asks if we are looking for someone. (In the U.S.,
she’d either be calling the police or pointing a gun at us.) Walrus and OneEye
venture about 50 yards down a dirt track past her house; it’s mostly sand. They
come to a big puddle across the entire path. OneEye judges it and asks Walrus
whether he thinks they can cross it. They turn around.
The
lady tells me and Mongo that the track dead-ends. We ask her how to get to the
lighthouse. She tells us. We turn around, head back where we came, and dead-end
again near a farm. We missed another turn. Mongo and I turn around and he asks
people at a camping area how to get to the lighthouse. They tell him, but we
have lost Walrus and OneEye. Yet another dirt path, this time a real path, a
walking path that goes up and over a hill, catches their eye and off they go,
to the other side, over boulders and down dips. They return eventually and
declare it a fine detour. We head to the lighthouse and see a sign saying
“Lighthouse Point Rd.” The sign coming from the other direction is missing. I
tell Mongo this and this time it’s Tim and Repeat. He says exactly what I say
and makes clear how stupid he thinks it is. Fuck Mongo. He’ll get his.
We
turn down Lighthouse Point Rd., a nice dirt path till it crosses a cattle
bridge and become a nice all-gravel path. A hand-painted sign on a telephone
pole just after the bridge says, “Beware of Bull. The Management.” Makes sense
a minute or so later when Mongo stops to let a herd of cattle cross the road,
followed by the bull. He takes a photo or two, tries to herd the cattle out of
his way. They oblige but stare at us as if to say, “Who the fuck are these
idiots?” Another mile or two of gravel clanking off the bells on our bikes and
shooting out of the fenders brings us to the lighthouse. The lighthouses up
here are not cylinders, but four-sided affairs that are wider at the bottom
than the top and are painted white on the walls and red on the top. The light
inside is green. Mongo dismounts, takes a piss, and then walks a few feet down
the chain link fence to get a better view of the lighthouse. He walks toward
the chain link fence to get closer and bumps right into an electrified fence
that gives his nuts a jolt they won’t soon forget. He swears and swears and
it’s not funny in a way, but pretty goddamn funny in another way. We warn
OneEye and Walrus about the fence. We all piss, but away from the wire. “I once
told my younger brother to piss on a cattle fence and he did it,” OneEye says.
Now, that’s mean.
OneEye
rides his bike up a little knoll on the way back to get a photo of it with the
ocean in the background. He’s good; he rides down a shallow gulch to get there
and back without incident. We head back to the main road, 45 minutes to an hour
after we started for the lighthouse. FTC also means Fuck The Clock, which is
pretty much the way we make this ride.
Heading
south, we ride to just below Inverness and stop at Glenora
Distillery, where they make great scotch and, it turns out, great rum. Kind of
an odd resort, a distillery with rooms to stay in and even chalets up a
hillside. I guess if you really love single-malt scotch, this is heaven. We are
the only guests for lunch. We are really hot and kind of beat from the sun and
talk only in grunts and complaints. Mongo falls asleep in his chair, or seems
to behind his blue glasses. We order from a cute woman who asks if we are
bikers because she recognizes a dew rag like the one her brother wears. The
food is okay, but OneEye devours the 500 mussels they bring him and enjoys the
scotch. He and Mongo get some carry-out booze at the gift shop on the way out.
Not much excitement about mounting the bikes again in the heat, but we do and
stop only once between the distillery and Canso
Causeway, to piss. Two minutes later we are off Cape Breton and headed to Pictou, NS, for the ferry to PEI. We take the highway,
Route 104, this time, to get there fast.
We
reach the ferry in Caribou just north of Pictou in
time for the 8:00 departure. But our timing is bad. If we take the ferry, we get
there after 9:00 and we hear that the restaurants close at 9:00. We also cannot
get a definitive answer about where we can stay; no one around the ferry is
sure about places to stay that are close to the ferry. Walrus reminds us that
we had one rule on the trip: not to ride at night. Too many big animals. We
gnaw around the edges before making a decision to head back to Pictou for the night. On the way back to Pictou, we get Mongo what he’s wanted since the trip
started: a picture of him sitting in lupine. The stuff grows along every
roadside in NS, PEI, NB, and northern Maine. OneEye picks a spot, Mongo plops
down with his Captain America helmet still on, and we take several photos of
Mongo in Lupine, then head into Pictou.
Ten
minutes later and several trips around the blocks in downtown Pictou, we end up at a brick customs house that’s been
converted to a B&B. Mongo hates B&Bs and doesn’t want to stay in one.
The owner of this one doesn’t have room for us, but helps us get rooms in the
W.H. Davies House B&B a block away. Mongo and OneEye get the room with a
bath that’s got a toilet area and shower big enough for one of Mongo’s legs but
not the rest of him. Mongo also gets to sleep on a day bed. Walrus and I get
the room with the community bathroom and it’s a sauna—one window that opens and
no fan. We will sweat out several days of beer and food this night. Mongo is
right to hate B&Bs. We park the bikes on a hill and drag our shit inside
and our asses out and down the block for food. We pass a softball game with
some unique rules, like the one that says touch home plate and you’re out. We
watch a guy hit a home run and be called out at the plate for breaking that
rule. Who says these people don’t know how to have fun?
We
pick a restaurant that serves lobster dinners; Mongo craves lobster. They have
two left. He takes them both. The restaurant sits at the edge of the water, has
few customers (we discourage two from sitting near us; hey, it wasn’t
intentional, they just saw us, listened to us—“fuck” is a useful and versatile word—and made their choice), and another
attractive waitress whose name I cannot remember. She used to work—for nine
years—at the Ranch House in New Glasgow where we met Bill and Jenny, knows Pam
and Sasha, a woman we did not see at the Ranch House
but heard about. The coincidences on this trip seem to never end. Our waitress
says Sasha is famous for taking shit from no one from
the first day she started, throwing out some guys who were being rude or
something. Our waitress possesses some long legs and a great smile and Mongo
falls in love or something. Walrus tells her he is looking for a wife or
someone who can introduce him to one when she asks what we are doing on our
ride. Our waitress shows her years of experience with her answer: “Well, maybe
you are looking in the wrong part of the city.” Zing!
But
the lobsters are chickens again. Mongo finishes them both and declares himself
full. The rest of us pretty much cannot move from food and beer. Mongo leaves
the place with his bib on and we walk down the street past a bar with live
music. Walrus, OneEye, and I are pretty much ready to call it a night; Mongo
says, “There’s not a fighter pilot in the bunch. Fuckin’
pussies.” He’s not tired and he’s not ready for sleeping. He takes off his bib
finally when he stops to piss by a front end loader and rags on us all the way
back to the B&B. Walrus and I hit the sauna and go out. Heat and a 400-mile
riding day must have done us in. Mongo watches TV and has some rum.
Walrus
and I get up early, which is not hard when you don’t sleep too well. Walrus
looks worse than he did when we got here. He’d rather be up and outside than in
the room. We are ready, for once, before OneEye and Mongo. Mongo starts in on
OneEye for leaving a glass of rum unfinished the night before. OneEye drinks it
in the a.m. Walrus is ready to go from the moment he gets up. No more B&Bs
this trip or ever, I guess.
The
ferry leaves at 8:30; we are there before 8:00. We eat breakfast that’s not as
good as the others we had, but not bad. We get to see a big, fat, bald-headed,
sandaled man order food for his family, who are behind OneEye in line, and take
about ten minutes to get all the shit they order. The cook and waitress behind
the counter apologizes to OneEye. Hey, the guy is wearing a Rolls Royce owner’s
T-shirt. He’s not old, but he fits the profile: arrogant prick. He never
apologizes for yelling past OneEye and for taking ten minutes to order food for
his wife and kids and some old guy. Mongo swears he going to go outside and ask
the Rolls and Bentley folks what they think of his motorcycle, just to annoy
them.
We
load ourselves onto the boat and get right up front. The ride is beautiful: sun
all the way again, no threat of rain, and clear air. We see some minke whales on the way to PEI, which is about 75 minutes
away. 14 miles, 75 minutes, or less than 12 miles an hour. No rushing for these
folks. We check potential routes on the way and see the East Point Lighthouse
on the far northeast corner as a destination. We won’t get there, however.
PEI
looks clean and beautiful in the morning sun. Red soil, high cliffs all around
the perimeter, open spaces alternating with woods along the shore line. We
debark and take the first right heading to East Point. The road, Route 4,
passes neat and well-cared-for houses and land for mile after mile, with the
ocean on the right. We stop at a fishing dock and processing plant, where Mongo
and OneEye talk with lobstermen bringing in their catch and loading bait for
the next morning. Turns out no lobsterman can plant more than 300 pots and that
the season is over in a week. These guys must work other jobs.
We
head out off the dock and pick up Route 18 at Murray Harbor. The road turns
inland becomes Route 17 in Murray River. The road is flanked all the way by
neat houses and land. We pass through Montague and are glad we stayed in Pictou: Montague would have been a long ride in the dark
last night, but was one place we were told we could find rooms. After Montague,
I lead along Route 3 looking for 311. We stop in Georgetown, and things go
downhill from there. I miss the turn—twice—for 342 and we are inland now, not
where we want to be, and making progress that will get us to East Point in time
for dinner if we are lucky. We come to a crossroads, and I hem and haw and take
a right, not the dirt road straight ahead that would cut off some time. Walrus
follows, but OneEye and Mongo say, fuck it, and head down the dirt road. Walrus
and I wait, I go back, find them gone, and we both head down the dirt road,
where we find Mongo at the end sitting in some flowers at the edge. OneEye has
gone the long route to find us. He comes back in minutes. Walrus seems unhappy
that they have gone off without us and haven’t followed me, and says as much.
When we get ready to leave, OneEye says, “Take the lead,” but I say, “Nope, I’m
through leading.” Walrus says, “I’ll lead” and speeds off. We have given up
reaching East Point in favor of getting to the PEI Harley dealer near Charlottetown
and then crossing the Confederation Bridge to New Brunswick in the evening.
Seeing the lighthouse is a good idea that just don’t fit into the plans
anymore.
We
basically race back to Route 4 and don’t stop till we are past the ferry
landing and only because we have to piss. Mongo is starved—it’s six or seven
hours since breakfast. We look for a place to eat.
Next
stop is lunch at a small restaurant/store/gift shop. The food here sucks, at
least mine did; grey cole slaw doesn’t appeal to me.
In the gift shop, Mongo spots a painting of a boy pulling a sled past some cows
in the snow and he’s accompanied by a Border Collie. He says the boy and the
dog look exactly like him and his dog when he was that age and he wants to buy
it, but it’s too big to carry home. We convince him to buy it and mail it home.
He remembers a painting of an eagle he saw during a trip to Alaska that was
just like a dream he had many times. He bought that one and has it at home.
This boy and his dog painting seems like no coincidence to him—he says he
almost makes him cry—and he goes ahead and buys it and drops it off a couple
miles up the road at the Canada Post. Probably has it hanging in his den right
now. He thanks us. This is a guy that be as tough as nails one minute and as
sensitive as a teenager in love another and unpredictably hysterically funny
the next. He’s a rare man; he makes the trip memorable. Of course, we don’t
stop giving him shit because he’s rare; it also makes him an easy target. “You
guys never listen to me,” heard again and again, does kind of get to us after
while. But we just ignore him.
The
big fat guy with the ice cream cone outside the restaurant warns us not to
drink all the beer in the Charlottetown bars. “Why not?” we ask. “Because you gotta save some for me,” he yells. Looks to me like he
already had his share.
We
reach Charlottetown, PEI, and get a bit lost looking for Route 2 south to Winsloe, where the one and only Harley dealer on PEI is
located. We eventually find it and pull in to get the mandatory T-shirt. Here,
Mongo gets screwed: Walrus buys the shirt he wants and OneEye buys the belt he
wants and there are gloves like the ones he wants. Three strikes. He settles
for another black T-shirt and learns to love it.
Riding
to the bridge. We get passed on the right at a stop light by someone in a
full-face helmet who speeds up the right-turn only lane and zooms in front of
us. I say something fucking innocuous like, “You shouldn’t do that,” which he,
of course, ignores. I go after him, but it’s stupid. I learn then and there
from Walrus to either get into his face right then and there or fucking forget
it. Mongo simply says again and again, “Stop being pissed off. Forget it.
Either do something or forget about it.. Stop bitching. Let it go.” I’m more
pissed off at me than at the guy. They are right. I forget about it.
We
have another brief offroad adventure on the way to
the bridge when Joe takes a right down a sandy road to try to reach the cliffs
that we have been seeing all along the way, but only from a distance. The road
is marked “private,” but he does not see that part of the sign. He takes a left
down a second private road, only turn make a U-turn in their lawn just before
the owners come down their driveway in a pickup. Mongo and I stop before going
down the second private road. Turning around, I drop the Yamaha in the sand,
back wheel eaten. Mongo, gentleman that he is, helps me get it upright. No real
harm done but the rear brake pedal is pushed in to where I can’t reach it.
OneEye muscles it back out and off we go. Of course, dropping the bike while
BACKING UP really seems lame to OneEye; at least he was going forward. Lesson
number two: if you are going to drop the bike, be doing something.
We
leave heading northwest toward the Confederation Bridge, the longest bridge
spanning ice in the world. It is about 9 miles long, 200 feet high at the high
point, and it takes 12 minutes to cross. We pay the $14.75 fee and stop to take
photos before we ride across. On the way across, OneEye pulls out his digital
camera and takes an assortment of shots while we are moving, individual and
group. We stop on the other side in NB to piss and plot the next stop. We are
about 2 hours from Moncton, but don’t want to ride
through the city. We choose to ride to as far as we can before dusk.
We
spend the next hour and half watching for deer as we go 60-65 mph down Route 2,
the main highway toward Moncton, NB. The road runs
right alongside woods for most of the way. OneEye hangs behind a semi for about
half an hour, figuring at this time of day it’s better to let the truck run
interference for deer. He waves at the driver when we split and the driver
honks back. Another pit stop and we decide to head to Moncton
or thereabouts for the night. Back onto 2 and another hour or so of watching
for deer along this pretty but pretty empty road. Walrus and OneEye realize at
the next pit stop that we will never have to pass through Moncton
at all on 2 and decide to head back one exit to a Keddy’s
Motel and Restaurant. It is 8:00 p.m.
We
have only an hour to eat and drink, we are told, before the restaurant and the
bar close. We park and lock the bikes, and make it to the restaurant by 8:20.
Tina is the waitress and beer server and we know right away that we will make sure
she is going to be working past 9:00. She seems agreeable enough when we kid
her about keeping her late. We do, with slow eating and orders for lots of
beers and such. Mongo is not very hungry but is thirsty and we order some beer
to take back to the room after we eat. We are again the only patrons in the bar
area. We wonder, “Did people phone ahead to let them know we were coming?” We
take beer back to the rooms. Mongo yells into the indoor pool area, “Hey, keep
it down in here!” We laugh; the pool now probably has piss in it from all the
little kids Mongo scared.
We
crash hard again.
Well,
you can’t say we don’t try to avoid cities on this trip. We get directions to
get out of Moncton the easy and we follow them, sort
of, but end up with a brief tour of the commercial area and downtown Moncton before we ask for new directions and get them and
find the bridge out of town. Destination: Fundy National Park. Along the way,
all the way from just outside Moncton to Fundy, we
see extraordinary evidence of just how massive the tide is. It reaches for
miles, dozens of miles inland, and there are deep ravines—10, 15, 20 feet
deep—all along the ride along the shore line. Walrus later tells OneEye, “I saw
you eyeing a couple of those ravines for a possible ride.” If it were not
almost pure mud (that’s what they all look like from the road), I can see
OneEye descending them to get a great shot of the Ultra in another unusual
place.
South
down Route 114 takes us to Hopewell Rocks, where the highest tides in the world
are supposed to occur. We hit it just about perfectly. The tide is just
starting to turn but we get some spectacular photos of the cliffs and
shoreline.
We
hike down to the Flower Pot area, a place where we can literally walk on the
ocean floor. Mongo is getting his exercise finally but it is perhaps too much
too soon. He passes on the trip down several flights of stairs to the ocean
floor. The flower pots are free-standing towers left after tides have eroded
all the soil around them. They are about 80-90 feet high. There are also arches
carved by the tide. The tide is rising—10 inches in 4 minutes, says one man—and
little markers such as piles of stones built by visitors are quickly engulfed.
Guards watch for people wandering away from the viewing area and there are
signs in many places warning people to stay out of the shallow caves. As OneEye
says, “No one reads signs, and that’s why they need the guards.” Actually, we,
like lots of folks, ignored the sign at the top of the stairway that says to be
safe, we need to leave the beach area by 10:26 a.m. We did not start down until
well after that and people are still headed down at 11:15 when we come up.
OneEye has to shoo some family out of a place that’s ideal for a photo since
they seem unaware that anyone else might not want them in their photos. Mongo
calls down to us and we yell back. He has made some friends from Texas (Mongo
wishes only disaster and pestilence for Texans; it’s a personal thing) up top.
We choose the tram for a ride back up to the info center to please Mongo; this
must be quite a sight, four men in black leather, jeans, motorcycle boots, and
assorted pins and stickers on their clothes, climbing in the back of a
Disneyworld-like open-sided, four-car train to ride back. The Texans talk among
themselves, laughing. I yell, “Au revoir. Au revoir” to them as we leave. We give the rear wheels some
major traction.
In
the gift shop, Mongo has another spasm of remembering his youth and breaks out
into some French clogging while a CD of jigs and reels plays. I keep time with
some lupine seed packets, and the customers get a laugh or two. We buy NB pins
and some other souvenirs and photos and Mongo buys four CDs of jigs and reels,
maritime shanties, and folk music or something. “I put this kind of music on
down in the wood shop and get all energized to work,” he says. Must be quite a
sight.
We
leave after about an hour and ride south to Fundy National Park, where we
immediately go to an explanatory sign and piss over the edge of a hill. Mongo
puts on his red jacket, the same one he was wearing when he was out west on the
way to Stugis. This is the first time he’s worn it
since then, and that time he had to take it off and hide it after some good
citizen phoned the police to report some speeding bikers. I say, “Look out for
cops,” and sure enough we see ’em pull out ahead of us on the way through Fundy
National Park. They pull off at the very spot where we watered the hillside
plants and I expect them to follow us, but they do not. We get family rates
into the park ($7.00) and ride a beautiful, twisty road through the park to a
couple of viewing spots. In the time it takes to get here from Hopewell Rocks,
the tide is well in. There is nothing interesting to see and we make one other
stop, at Herring Cove, before riding out. Walrus, who’s ridden the park by
bike, says the best views require a hike from a parking area but we’ve already
done all the hiking we will do today, and we are kind of in a hurry since the
weather looks like it is deteriorating. The park is really isolated, remote
land. We look closely for deer and moose and expect to see them at any time,
but don’t. It takes about 45 minutes to get out the park and some 20 minutes
more to get back to the main road. We meet with some nice people who decide to
pass us in a construction area and when they do, their wheels throw up some
good-size rocks that strike Mongo and the rest of us. Mongo lets them know how
inconsiderate and discourteous they are—but in a nice way, as usual. I see a
mouse do a dozen barrel rolls as he tries to cross the road next to a semi.
Tough little bastard, eh.
We
get gas and ask for a good place to eat. The Bluebird Restaurant, next exit, we
are told and we are there. Good choice. Walrus asks the waitress if she
remembers us from the last time we were here seven years ago. “No,” she says,
“I only started working here four years ago and I was just 10 years old seven
years ago.” Nice kid. We order and get some good food. While we are eating,
three bikers from Quebec come in. They have just ridden to Cape Breton and back
in four days and are headed home. They spend a lot of their lunch time on cell
phones. The Harley guy and OneEye talk outside for a bit, and then we take off
for the ferry at St. George that will take us to Deer Island and another ferry
at the other end that will take us to Campobello in Maine.
We
get on and stay on Route 1 to the ferry. It’s a long way off the road and we
follow the signs right to is. We are about third in line. The tide is back on
the way in, but is still low and the ramp down to the ferry is steep and the
deck is wet and there is heavy fog. This will be fun. It is about 6:00. The
ferry comes and we brake our way down onto the deck. The fog makes everything
wet. A couple on a brand-new Voyager talk with us for a bit. They see us going
by and decide to take a ride around Deer Island. They warn us that the road is
paved right up to some houses and steps abut the road and dogs abound. Sounds
like fun. Mongo, meanwhile, strikes up a conversation with a Deer Islander, who
gives us some really useful information: the ferry at the other end does not
start until Monday, June 25. We either get right back on this ferry and head
overland to Maine or we spend the weekend on Deer Island. We get off on the
island, ride a quarter mile and get back in line. The ferry guys won’t let us
stay on; too many cars lined up, they say. They are wrong; half the cars in
line are parked and empty. We ride back down a slipperier ramp and repark the bikes. The fog is dense, but we still see a minke whale surfacing and diving across the path of the
ferry. The fog wets everything. Walrus says in sunshine the ferry ride is
beautiful, with lots of small islands everywhere. Next trip, I guess.
Now,
off on the same side we started on, we decide to ride to St. George, but skip
right on to St. Stephen, where we hole up in the St. Stephen Inn. Finally, a
decent place with heat and only two blocks from four bars. Unload again, some
scotch and rum for the boys next door and a warm Keith’s for me and we are off
to the Celtic Crossing Restaurant, down an alley. A band is expected, blues and
jazz, in about an hour and we get past the doorman without paying the cover
since there is no band yet. There we meet Sandy (not Sandra), a cute, petite
woman with a nice body who is just our speed: sassy and good-natured. Walrus
immediately tells her he’s looking for a wife and asks her if she wants to run
away with him. Sandy says she is married, but lets on that she hates it when he
husband calls her Sandra, which he always does. Walrus asks her each time back
to the table (and there are many because of the multiple drink and food orders)
if she won’t consider his offer. He finally gives up when she says that she does
love her husband. She brings us the bill, but says to pay the other waitress
because she is off. We say, nope, we are paying you, and we do. When I give her
the card, she says the tally was too high. “We’ll just give you the difference
in the tip,” I say and we also dump all our Canadian change on the table. Total
tip probably approaches half the meal price. She is touched and thanks us
several times. The boys give her hugs and kisses and when I come back to try
and buy a T-shirt she grabs my coat sleeve to say thanks again. We blew her
away. It was worth the tip to see her face—even though she would not leave with
Walrus.
We
head up to a pool parlor—Dooly’s—to shoot for a
while. OneEye and I are outmatched again and again by Walrus and Mongo. Mongo
swears that he sucks, I do suck, OneEye competes with Walrus, but the whole
thing breaks up in about an hour and half when Walrus starts shooting
one-handed, something he did as a 15-year-old to earn some money. He makes six
or seven shots in a row and we call it a night there, but head back to Celtic
Crossing for a nightcap. There OneEye unveils a couple or bar magic tricks, but
is completely outclassed by Tim, the bartender, whose got quite a look going,
as Walrus says earlier: shaved head, devil’s horns as goatees, pieced eyebrows,
long-sleeve black T-shirt with flames of hell on the chest and sleeves. He’s
right there, three feet in front of us and we still can’t figure out how the
tears the cards, makes the cards into the numbers we want, and more. We are impressed,
but Mongo cannot see and Walrus is ready to expire. He leaves, we stay while
OneEye matches Tim for a free-drink game and wins. We shake hands and thank him
and head back to the inn.
Walrus
and I are just about out when OneEye knocks on the door to say that Mongo has
found a titty channel—23—on the TV. We check it out;
it’s mostly naked women preening and touching their tits and rubbing
themselves. We lose interest when it goes nowhere. So much for New Brunswick
porn. We are out in seconds. Mongo keeps tapping on our air conditioner—I
assume it was him—but we ignore him. No one listens to Mongo.
We
eat at the inn restaurant—it sucks: tasteless food and bad bread and
uninterested service; looks like we are almost home—and then dress up for rain.
It has started and stopped but the forecast is poor. We slide through U.S.
Customs at Calais, ME—“Bringing anything back?” “Nope.”—ride one hundred feet
for OneEye to get some U.S. smokes—the Players hit the road somewhere on the
way home—and we head down Route 9 to Bangor. Fog, fog, some rain, and more fog.
Bad along the whole road: good day for deer and moose to move, and we spend
lots of time tensed up because of really bad visibility—perhaps a quarter of a
mile in the worst spots—and the danger of some large animal trying to cross the
two-lane road through our bikes. It is tiring riding and I feel sore for the
first time.
We
stop for gas and water and a piss about an hour along and head out again into
some bad but better weather. We hit Bangor, go through it and stop at a parking
lot near the Air Force Station. A C-17 takes off while we are there, climbing
so slowly that it hardly seem to move and we expect it to fall directly down at
almost any time. We piss in the lot and take off down Route 2 to New Hampshire.
Just about every place we stop, someone says, “Bad day for riding, huh?” as if
we will answer in the negative. People are either stupid or unimaginative
beyond belief at times.
We eat at Mom’s, a roadside place with okay food where OneEye gets more fried
chicken than he can handle. We are full but clearly back in the U.S.: fill ’em
up, head ’em out. It’s the bulk theory of restaurant fare: no one cares about
taste if they are full. We are ahead of or behind the rain now, but no clear
skies. We head for one of the most interesting and twisty roads on the journey:
Route 113 through ME and NH. We pick it up at Gilead, ME, just inside the White
Mountain National Forest. The first 15 or 20 miles we chase a red pickup and
another truck through the forest on a twisty, narrow, two-lane road that, the
sign says, is not cleared for winter driving. The other car or pickup or
whatever gets off to let us by. The red pickup is just ahead of OneEye and seems
to know the road well. We go up, OneEye in the lead, Mongo, Walrus, and me—the
same order for nearly all the trip—and snake at 40-45 mph around turns that
rise and rise some more until we are high enough to see another mountain
through the trees on our right. It is sunny but the road is shaded and so still
wet. Then we head down, where the pickup leaves for a while, putting distance
between us and him or her. We slow a bit and brake more often on the way down:
the wet road and a couple of 90-degree turns take a way our momentum a bit. We
hit some straightaways and catch up again with the
pickup. The game is on again until the pickup goes left on 113B or something
like that and we stay on 113. We raise the speed again and fly along in valley.
It is just about like our ride into Ingonish. When we
stop for gas, OneEye says, “I would have gone faster but the road was wet.”
“How much faster?” I ask. “A lot faster,” he says. “”60 mph,” I ask. “Yeah,” he
says. “You’d be waiting for me at the bottom,” I say. I’m just not that good
and I know it. He, on the other hand, is. Bigger bike, but way more experience.
Gotta respect that.
We
cruise a few miles before it looks seriously like rain. We are near Gorham, NH,
and Conway. We make through both and figure the best route now is the fastest
route and we head for Route 25 to Route 104 to Interstate 93. All is fine till
104, when rains is dumped on us, fogging up our glasses and making it
impossible to see. We pull off into an abandoned business, dry off, defog, piss.
The rain all but stops. Mongo says highway, we debate, but he says it will not
rain again. We gas up, and head for 93 South. Mongo, for once, is right. Dry to
home. We wrap up the last 40 miles with some speed down the highway, through
Manchester to 101, where we slow behind traffic. We pull into the Bagel Shop
parking lot at around 7:30. An 11 hour day that feels like three. No day seemed
long no matter how many miles we rode.
Hugs
all around and some satisfaction for Mongo, Walrus, and OneEye, who
finish
a ride together. We split up quickly and head for home, but not
before
Walrus squirts his bottle of water on Mongo's head. Justice at last!
We
will get together to see the photos and relive the trip, for sure.
What
does it all mean? Nothing more than that the ride is the reason. Where you go
is less important than that you go and go on two wheels. There is no denying
the beauty of what we saw and the fun we had together and with the people we
met, but this is a trip that only had meaning because it was done on two
wheels.