Where's my tire? Free time...

It's an interesting kind of free time. The free time of being stuck in a town in Newfoundland for five days with nothing to do but wait. That's what you get to experience when one of your tires gets to condition critical way before you had calculated it would, when you're on an island without that many motorcycle tires of the size needed, and it's a long weekend.

There are different levels and colours of notifications that can light up the screen on my motorcycle. When I pulled off the Trans-Canada Highway - which runs east to west from St. John's to Channel-Port aux Basques, a town at the extreme southwestern tip of Newfoundland - to get gas, there was a bright red warning light, and red text on the screen telling me to stop the bike immediately and get off, Tire Pressure had dropped suddenly and was dangerously LOW! " Danger, Will Robinson, danger!! https://youtu.be/OWwOJlOI1nU .

I was travelling east to west, having left the Elliston and Bonavista area earlier that day. I had had a very chill few days there too, waiting for the rainy days to pass. Mostly watching puffins, walking the rugged coast line, visiting the old fishing town of Bonavista for the sites, a great coffee shop (The Lovely Grand Bakeshop), the local cannabis store (Oceanic Cannabis & Coffee, where I bought a joint of homegrown weed!), reading, and staring out into the trees and ocean beyond from the excellent Elliston Municipal Park campground.

It's fortunate that the town I found suddenly found myself in, in desperate need of a tire, Grand Falls-Windsor, had garages, grocery stores, and motels. I would need all these things to get a replacement tire shipped here and installed on my bike, a place to hole up while I waited for the tire to be shipped from somewhere not in Newfoundland, and food (and maybe a few bevies). It being an island and a long weekend to boot, everything is taking a long time. I arrived Wednesday afternoon and will only be able to leave on Tuesday morning. I had been on my way to the Out East Adventure Centre hostel in Rocky Harbour, Gros Morne National Park, where I had stayed a few days at the beginning of my time in Newfoundland. The plan was to stay there two days, do some more hiking in Gros Morne, and then get down to Channel-Port aux Basques to catch the overnight ferry to Nova Scotia on Friday, August 29.

It's good to have plans. It's also good to be able to roll with it, to have a healthy reserve of equanimity, when things go totally sideways, and sideways they did go. I won't go into all the details because it kind of doesn't matter. Once you've accepted your new reality, it's the space you should inhabit. Of course, in the cold light of day, mistakes were made, but I've told the story to a few people in this town, and they get all, “tch tch, that's tough. This was unfair, and so and so shouldn't have done this, or they should have done that..” and so on. I understand why people do that but it can end up feeding your anger and frustration so after a while, I would be the one telling them that it's OK, not that big a deal, just a little fuck up that would cost many hundreds of dollars but I'm ok, I'm fine. My tire could have blown on the highway, which on a motorcycle would have been exponentially worse. Now, it's just another interesting travel story.

Donna, the lovely woman who, along with her husband, owns and runs the motel I'm staying at, Union Street Efficiency Units (terrible name, I know), has shared a few stories of others who are staying at this motel. They are family members and loved ones of people who are at the nearby hospital due to very serious medical issues, life and death stuff. So I'm one of the happier stories here, just a guy stuck in town for a few days waiting for his motorcycle tire, with a lot of free time on his hands. But mama, mama, I'm coming home...eventually.

R.I.P. Ozzy, https://youtu.be/K0siYUjV9UM?si=RA-RUid9-IME1VYORead more