Day 8

Well after last night, we were all feeling very dodgy and tired but we had a long day today so we had to force ourselves to get going, to be honest I don’t think anyone really noticed or remembered the sleeping restrictions we had because we all just passed out. Jeff made us all breakfast which was great and got us ready for a long ride to Bakersfield. Now this morning we were supposed to ride through Yosemite to Lone Pine on the other side but last night we found out that the through pass was closed, so we had to go into the park to see the sights and then come out again and come all the way down the left side of the park to Bakersfield and then come across and go back up, we were not pleased about this as this added about 400 miles to the trip, but there was nothing we could do about it so we got packed and started to ride into the park. Bloody hell it was freezing, so much so that there was snow on the ground, and it was wet and was raining slightly, but this didn’t matter the entrance was free which was good but it got so cold we just did the essentials and headed back out and south to Bakersfield, once we started to lose altitude the weather got better and it warmed up enough for us to lose some layers at our lunch stop Burger King. There was some seriously nice riding today on 49 South and this took us to Fresno where we pulled up for some gas. It was here that I noticed on my bike the back wheel locking up briefly after a closer inspection I was horrified to see that my rear wheel bearing had disintegrated and was in bits. I was so worried and it really hit me that yesterday we were laying the bikes down and blasting round the corners near Groveland with shear drops to the side. At any point on my day the bearing could have locked up my rear wheel. So now we had a huge problem, it was 4 o’clock on a Saturday and I had a major failure. We called the 2 local Harley dealers and they could not help, they did not have the bearings in stock nor could they deal with this until Monday. One of the guys I spoke too though did give me a phone number of a local guy who works for himself at his own Workshop. I called Ray and he was really cool and was able to help me, within 25 minutes he was at the gas station putting my bike on his trailer and driving it to his shop in Fresno, in about an hour he had stripped the rear end off and sourced a wheel bearing a spacer and got his friends over to help him with some welding. The bike was back on the road 2 hours after I had discovered the problem. So I would like to offer my most sincere thanks to Ray Morin at Rayz Motorcycle Towing for getting me back on the road in what seemed like impossible odds. So with a newly repaired bike we thought of staying in Fresno but the place didn’t really look too safe and we decided to push on for an hour, it was 6 ish now and we were all very tired. After about 50 minutes I got the signal to pull over as we were all fighting keeping awake so we pulled over and would you bloody believe it Rob had a flat rear tyre. We stopped at a gas station to see if it was a puncture but we soon discovered it was the valve leaking fast, how this happened we have no idea, but now we was pissed off and tired, we looked for a nearby hotel and there was a Best Western about 3 miles away so we pumped up the tire and Rob rode the bike slowly to the hotel were it went flat again as we pulled in, so now we have to try and get the rental company to sort this out quickly and get us back on track. BUT its Easter weekend and tomorrow is Easter Sunday OMG what will happen next What a day.