We knocked on the door of a house next to Shady Acres, hoping to use a phone book to find a place that could repair the tire. Howard, a friendly 60-something gentleman, answered the bell.
"You boys are in trouble," he said. "Not much would be open 'round here this late in the day.
He thought for a moment, and said, "Have you tried Fix-A-Flat?"
We hadn't.
Howard gave us directions to a nearby convenience store he thought might carry the stuff, and we thanked him.
Now we had to start the Dyna.Just for the hell of it, Mark thumbed the starter, and the bike rumbled to life. A pleasant surprise on a day filled with surprises of the other kind.
It was pitch black out by the time Mark returned with the Fix-A-Flat. And it was still raining off and on.
I spent 10 minutes digging through saddlebags for the Cruz Tools set I had packed. After opening every single compartment in the bags at least twice, I found it, complete with a flashlight-one I had neglected to put batteries in.
But wait, I had packed new batteries-somewhere. After another 10 minutes of digging, I found them.
Then I couldn't figure out how to turn the light on. I pushed the button on the back of the light, turned the beam, took it apart, but nothing happened.
"Dude, this isn't like you," Mark said, looking on. "You are always prepared."
We maneuvered a concrete block under the bike and strained to lift the heavily loaded Road King onto it.
We put a full can of Fix-A-Flat into that tire and...nothing. This leak was not going to be plugged with canned goo.
We called every service station in the area, but, not surprisingly, no one was willing to come out and fix a tire at 8 o'clock on a Friday night.
So we rolled the Road King into Howard's garage for the night and loaded all the gear and the both of us onto the Dyna to head up the road to find a place to stay. The result was a heaped mess of a bike draped with bags bungee-corded on every possible space. I had so little room behind me, I had to wear my camera backpack backward, the heavy bag protruding from my stomach, pushing Mark up onto the tank. We were quite a sight.
We rode into nearby Hattiesburg to look for a hotel and maybe a shop to fix the tire. A lowered Honda Accord packed with young guys slowed down to point and laugh as they drove past our loaded-down circus show.
Thankfully, we had some friends back in New Orleans. One took pity and agreed to haul us and the bikes to a dealership in Jackson. So instead of riding scenic back roads, we spent the next day loading bikes and riding in a truck.
The good folks at Harley-Davidson of Jackson were able to fix both the tire and the starter in short order, and we started out again the next morning-now three days into our four-day trip-in search of at least a taste of those winding roads we'd heard were waiting but had yet to see.
Our luck hadn't changed, however, and by midday the weather in Mississippi had taken a turn for the worse. The temperature had dropped well below 40, with rain dripping heavily from ever-blackening skies. This wasn't the scene we'd had in mind when we planned this trip, so like a couple of dogs that had missed the fox, we decided to drag ourselves back to New Orleans.
Of course, we had trouble finding the freeway onramp, which would have made our approach painless, and ended up sitting in traffic on a stoplight-lined boulevard in Jackson. Once through that, we found a winding road that led back to the freeway. That one road turned out to be the best part of the Mississippi ride. It wound past shaded homes and an oak-draped river valley. Too little, too late, but at least it was something.
Soon enough we were on the freeway again, burning our way back to the Big Easy. The rain picked up, and I started to realize my decision to leave my riding boots and jacket liner at home was a huge mistake. I had an Aerostich jacket and pants on, which kept my upper body and legs dry, but was also wearing a pair of light hiking shoes that soaked up water like a sponge. Worse yet, the canted floorboards of the Road King angled my legs forward, making a perfect funnel for rainwater to run down my socks.
I was so cold and miserable we stopped at a Wal-Mart, where I bought the cheapest pair of rain boots I could find-a calf-high pair of black rubber units that had a lovely red stripe around the top. We used to call these "pig boots" when I was a kid due to the fact that the local farmers used them to walk around in pig pens. I also bought two pairs of wool socks and a half-dozen packets of chemical hand warmers.