Ride report

As some of ya'll know, I headed off to Alabama over the weekend. Hit some nice roads on the way. If you look in the right places, Louisiana offers some nice backroads. Good views of the Mississippi River in places, too. It still gave me a reasonably direct route to Natchez, where I picked up the Natchez Trace Parkway. That took me a relaxed 320 miles northeast and into Alabama. From there it was a short higher speed run over to Huntsville. I hope to hit the Smokies this weekend.

Along the way, I met a few interesting folks. One couple from Dallas out for a vacation on the Natchez Trace with him on a Harley with a trailer, and her on a triked 'Wing. Several guys who just wanted to talk motorcycles. Quite a few motorcycles on the Trace this time (as opposed to last year, when I did the same section of the Trace, and saw only two besides mine). Out of ~30 bikes, I saw two Valkyries. All going the other way, so I just waved and moved on my way.

Some of ya'll know me and AlternatorEater (the nickname my new Valkyrie seems to be picking up) well enough to ask whether I had a mechanical failure. Well, there's bad news and there's good news, and there's better news. The bad news is I had to deal with an alternator failure. The good news (for me) is that it wasn't mine. The better news is that we got the "victim" back home. Before I left Louisiana, I came across a Wing on the side of the road, facing the opposite direction. Turns out he had been heading to ~Galveston (just past where I had recently left) when his alternator quit. He was only 30 miles from home, so it was probably dead when he left, he just didn't notice till the battery died. Anyway, his battery wouldn't fit in mine, and we didn't have any way of repairing the alternator on the road, so I loaned him my cell phone to call for help, and he told me to go on my way. Then I realized that I did have a solution. In preparation for what I (at the time) regarded as the inevitable failure of my own alternator on the road, I (at the suggestion of a friend) had prepared for a last ditch option: Hooking up a larger battery in parallel with mine and running till it died, then charging both. Lather, rinse, repeat. Anyway, in prep for that, I had purchased some heavy guage cables. So, we pulled my (fully charged) battery, put it in his Wing, pulled his (nearly dead) battery, put it on my backseat, with the large cables, and rode like that back to his house. When we got there, we switched back, and I went on my merry way. He said he could repair his alternator in his garage, and would be back up and running in no time.
So, a happy(ish) ending to a potentially bad day.

Mark