Day 6 The Mail Lady only knocks once

Once again slow out of the blocks this morning, Her Majesties Revenues and Customs sent me a menacing reminder that my VAT return was due and I panicked and tried to submit one a month early. They and I should really chill out.

Linda was my Uber host on the way in, I’d like to give her a tip, courtesy of Jim Morrison, “keep your eyes on the road and your hands upon the wheeeeal”, it was my fault, I found a mobile phone on the rear seat as I got in and that was a big distraction.

I arrived at the diner too late to catch Joe but not to late to engage with Ben in conversation about the NRA, the Muslims and the threat that the Democrats present to the United States, I just had a coffee. Vernon arrived and we talked a lot about WW2 naval battles.

Joe was hard at work on the ‘cafe racer’ and I addressed an issue, perhaps mentioned earlier where the left hand foot peg would tighten to far, thus restricting the gear lever movement (perhaps contributing to spring failure) by dropping a grease nipple down the blind hole to restrict how far the peg would screw in. I then fell back on polishing and preparing things for the imminent arrival of the Mail Lady.

The bike that Joe was working on started but barely and I felt the pipes to see which was not firing correctly, pipe 4 cold, pipe 3 cold, pipe 2 second degree burns, off to the fridge to grasp an icy bottle of water, thankfully at the time of writing only the smallest of blisters. Casey had crossed the plug leads, I blame myself, high tech laser thermometers are common nobody, but me, needs to be touching exhaust pipes.

Lunch time came around and we decamped to the diner to eat with ‘Uncle Ed’, Jim (a gent) and other good folk whose names escape me but I might come back and edit it. Chicken and rice soup and an egg salad sandwich is all my brain and body needs, not forgetting the sweet cold tea. Keeping a weather eye out for the Mail Lady who is due around 1pm.

Sadly when the mail lady came there were no packages for me so I engaged with Mark from Guzzi Classics from California who had passed his gearbox parts to a nice man called Shaun who could find some gears but had the impression that they were of three different ‘pitches’, let’s hope it isn’t that complicated, I sent him pictures of my broke gear.

Having had to remove the gear to take pictures it struck me that, despite not being selected by the fork this gear is always driven and so the missing tooth is going to be a problem. The first, knee jerk reaction was to think of grinding off the remaining teeth so that it would not engage and not cause a problem. Closer inspection revealed that if I wasn’t going to engage the gear it might be possible to remove it, and its selector fork and the collar, this I expected to leave me with a second neutral where fifth gear used to be.

This seemed like a plan and I re-assembled the gearbox, sans spring, to check it out and it seemed to work. USPS reported the my delivery was on its way at 4pm but nothing showed by end of day except a sad biker with a flat battery that I helped with the Guzzi’s beefy, bulky, redundant item.

Back to the motel with Roberto, it was Cassandra yesterday, both fluent in English and Spanish, a point that resonated when I met Francisco, a landscape gardener from Puerto Rico out the back of the Hotel, where I smoke and watch out for the infrequent trains, and my Duolingo Spanish failed me completely.

I had settled for a four speed trip, perhaps picking up a 5th on the way, when Roberto Sotello of Spare Parts Co (http://sparepartsco.us/ shameless plug) emailed me to say that he had a gear and that if I got off my arse I could go see him in Philadelphia.

That is now the plan, I’ll get up early, see Joe at the diner to let him know then Uber into Lancaster and get the Amtrak to Philly and back for about the price of overnight shipping with the bonus of seeing the city.