I visited Louisiana and Mississippi with the best of intentions: Do a travel story about the great places you can visit on the outskirts of New Orleans, and maybe encourage readers to go and spend some money in a place that dearly needs it right now. But you know what they say about the best intentions..
Highway 59 between New Orleans and Jackson runs straight as an arrow past farmers selling sweet potatoes from the back of pickup trucks, strip-mall towns with rows of small houses sporting neat yards and open-sided garages, and green pastures stretched out in front of weathered barns.
I rode this piece of road on a cool, overcast day, with dark clouds above promising a wet Mississippi night. Early in the evening, with the light of day fading, the Road King beneath me developed a bit of a wobble.
I pulled over to investigate the problem near a weather-beaten fruit stand and a restaurant called Shady Acres. The rear tire was flat, bulging sadly in the gathering gloom of a rainy night.
While I waited for Mark Frederick, my companion on the trip, to figure out that I'd been waylaid, I walked over to check out the restaurant, dreaming of hot coffee and a homebuilt hamburger. The faint scent of peaches, home-baked bread, and French fries made my stomach growl, but the sign on the front door told me Shady Acres closed at 6 p.m. My watch read 6:20; the place was dark and locked up tight.
Mark showed up a few minutes later."Flat tire," I said, pointing to the rear of the bike."You're kidding," he groaned. Then he glanced at the caf. "At least we can get something to eat.""No such luck," I answered, pointing to the sign.
Mark looked up at the dark clouds and back at my tire, and then shut off his bike. His Dyna's starter had been erratic all day, so we'd probably have to push-start it to move on.
Then it started to rain, a widely spaced spatter of heavy drops bearing the promise of a deluge."Is it just today?" Mark asked. "Or is it the trip?"
We had flown into New Orleans to take in some warm Southern weather, eat some touffe and jambalaya, and get a break from the Minnesota winter. We had timed our trip to coincide with the early part of Mardi Gras and had managed to locate a couple of bikes to borrow and a cheap hotel with a vacancy.
This was our first planned day of riding, and it had been a long one.
The problems started early on. Mark's Dyna sputtered and died about 30 miles into the ride. We rolled up an onramp and pushed the bike onto the shoulder of the adjoining road. Gas was just barely sloshing in the tank, so we checked for spark. The plug gave off a fat, blue arc, so that wasn't the issue. Next, we pulled the fuel line to see if gas was flowing. It wasn't. Off I went down the road to buy a gas can and a gallon of gas.
We gassed the bike up, cranked it over and...the starter began to make terminal noises. It cranked the engine one or two revolutions, then made a sound akin to a tin can full of BBs rolling down the street.
After 10 minutes of this drill, the starter caught and the bike fired. Down the road we went, to fuel up the bikes and grab a snack.
At the gas station, Mark's starter again did its tin-can-BB act. Just down the road was a nice, big hill. We strained to push the bike up the hill and after a hard push down, the big bike bump-started to life.
This was about 4 in the afternoon, and we had another 150 miles in mind for the day. We decided to hump it to Jackson, Mississippi, on the freeway since we'd burned so much daylight, then explore some of the back roads we'd come to sample the following day.
Fifty miles later, the back tire of my Road King went flat.
As the rain fell, we tried to figure out how to fix the tire. Our first thought was to see if it would take air. Could be a slow leak, right? A drywall screw protruding from the tread told us otherwise.