June 26, 2008: 324 miles, from Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada to Edmonton, Alberta, Canada
This morning, we had a quick shower and changed into our last fresh change of clothes. We will need to find a place to do laundry, otherwise we’re going to be starting to re-cycle stinky clothes, which could result in serious olfactory injury to anyone within 50 yards of us. Well, me at least.
I needed to fix the problem with the electrical power to the front of my bike, so I pulled out my tools and started to strip down the front end of the bike, just as the rain started to come down. It seemed to be raining every morning of our trip, but as there was nothing I could do about that, I worked in the rain. Eventually, I found that a single headlamp fuse had blown, but why would this cause a problem with the hand grip heaters and gps power, etc?
Thinking about it a little more, and tracing my wiring back, I finally remembered that I’d wired all the front-end extra power connections through a relay which took it’s signal source off the headlamp wiring. Voila! When the headlamp fuse blew….it killed the power to the headlamp AND it killed the signal to the relay which then could no longer pass any power to all the electrical components in the front. I’d created a dependency for the added electrical stuff on the headlamp working! Not a great design, but hey, at least I knew what the problem was. Replace the headlamp fuse, and I should be back in business, and have GPS power and nice warm hands again!
Only problem was…I’d forgotten to pack a spare fuse, and Mike had fitted different fuses to his bike, so I had to find and buy some at a gas station. We took a walk over the road from the hotel, and I purchases a few fuses and also a nice map book, just in case the GPS conked out from all the rain. (Neither my GPS nor the one on Jaryd’s bike are waterproof models, so we were expecting them to quit any time, after such a drenching)
After fitting the fuse, I was relieved to find that all the power to the rest of the front end of the bike was restored, and so we were ready for the road. We got back onto the Yellowhead Highway (HWY-16), and after an hour or so, we stopped to fill up in Battleford, where I picked up another pair of sunglasses, after I’d lost my new, very expensive bifocal polarized sunglasses soon after leaving Thunder Bay. I believe I hooked the sunglasses on my handlebars when we stopped to don some more clothes layers after the chilly ride out of Thunder Bay.
It was early afternoon when we arrived in the town of Lloydminster, just across the border from Saskatchewan into Alberta. It seemed to be getting quite dark and overcast and we thought there looked to be a chance of a thunderstorm coming through. We were also amazed at the volume and slowness of the traffic in Lloydminster, and decided to stop at a KFC for a quick late lunch before heading out to Edmonton.
As we headed out of town, so we saw that we were heading straight into a distant lightning storm. It looked pretty ominous, but as it seemed quite far off, we thought we’d continue for a while to see if the road veered off to bypass the storm ahead, or perhaps the storm move over to the side of us. We stopped to don our waterproofs just in case, but the sky was getting darker and darker very quickly, and it didn’t look good, up ahead.
It was at this time, that Jaryd noticed that the end cap on his 3” tool tube mounted on the frame ahead of the motor had fallen off, and allowed all of the tools in that location to be lost on the road. Jaryd said to me that he’d heard some “tinkling” noises but wasn’t sure what it was. It was the tools falling out onto the road!
Anyway, we rode on for maybe 10 miles but then the wind picked up dramatically and we had huge lightning strikes on either side of the road ahead of us. It was clear that the storm was a big one, and was coming towards us at a fast pace.
This was enough for Jaryd. It was very clear that he was getting extremely anxious, as were Mike and myself, because unlike inside a car, one is in a very, very dangerous position on a motorcycle, as you are the path through which the electricity flows from ground to sky in a strike. Not a good idea.
I’d encountered such a violent storm only once before while on a motorcycle, and that was in the mountain Kingdom of Lesotho, a tiny country in Southern Africa, when I was on a tour across Southern Africa with a German friend and his girlfriend, back in 1985.
Jaryd shouted to me that he was heading back to Lloydminster to seek shelter, and before Mike and I could even safely turn around on the highway, Jaryd was off at top speed heading back into town. If it wasn’t such a bad spot to be in, it would have been hilarious how Jaryd left us for dead in the race back into town! 
We rode around for a while in that dense and slow traffic in town, until we eventually found a Tim Horton’s to take shelter in. We’d no sooner parked the bikes and ducked inside, when the storm hit in a big way. The wind was tremendously strong, and the rain was drenching while coming down almost horizontal to the ground, and all this with huge lightning strikes all around. We got chatting with a coupla Harley riders who were also sheltering from the storm, and finally, the storm seemed to pass. As we were starting to run a little late, we mounted the bikes and set off again. No sooner were we running down the road, so we realized that the storm had not fully passed, so we headed back to the Tim Horton’s and grabbed a cup of coffee and doughnut for another 30 minutes or so wait.
The pics below show Jaryd not feeling well, from the previous anxiety attack, and Mike looking somewhat more relaxed, and the storm through the window. The camera never seems to catch the bad weather very well, but it was pretty intense at the time.
So, after the second storm waiting, we headed out Westward on the Yellowhead Highway again into an increasingly nice weather late afternoon until we eventually arrived in Edmonton very late. The GPS did it’s usual “Don’t ask me for any information on camp grounds in Western Canada” thing, although it eventually found one supposed campground near the center of town, which we thought a little unusual, but without a lot of alternative, headed off to find this place.
Well, I should have guessed. The GPS routed us directly to the address of the camp ground, to find us looking instead at a brand new large factory, with no campground in sight. Clearly the GPS database was a little “off” even though it’s the latest version of the data available! As it was now 11PM local time, and all campground offices were closed, we again decided to find a cheap hotel.
We stopped off at a Holiday Inn Express somewhere in town, and I’ve no doubt that the sight of three dusty, perhaps a little stinky, “bikers” looking for a single room, was just a little too much for the poor reception desk clerk to handle. Thus, no room was available – despite a half-empty carpark outside.
So, off we went riding around, looking for another hotel. We eventually found a grotty little place that at least were happy to provide a room.
Outside the hotel in Edmonton…
The hotel had a laundry, so we did some much-needed laundry tonight. A good night’s rest will allow us to really enjoy our entry into British Columbia tomorrow! Can’t WAIT!!!