The motorcycles had been sitting in Portland since the previous October — ten months, and most of a Maine winter — and the plan for them now is to work south down the east coast. Before that, though, there was a corner of the map left over. Trip #8 had reached Quebec and stopped. This one went to the far end of it: New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island, Nova Scotia, and back.
Four people and two bikes. Ray and Aimee, Jerry and Robin; Justin and Tiffany could not make it. Everybody arrived separately on the Thursday — Jerry and Robin a couple of hours ahead, Ray from Austin, and Aimee on a flight from Idaho Falls, where she had been visiting her parents. Jerry's bike needed a service before it could be taken anywhere. Ray's had been serviced at the end of the previous trip precisely so that it would not, and wanted a battery reconnected and nothing else.
The first two days were the good weather. Small roads up the Maine coast to Belfast, then east to Lubec, over the bridge onto Campobello Island, and two ferries — Campobello to Deer Island, Deer Island to the mainland — to get into New Brunswick the interesting way. They were the first ferries Ray had ever ridden a motorcycle onto. There were four before the trip finished.
After Saint John the weather closed in and stayed. September had been chosen on the assumption it would be the best month of the year up there; instead a low pressure system parked over the Maritimes and produced three cold, wet days in a row. The worst of them was the run to Charlottetown, which finished with eight miles of the Confederation Bridge in gusts of thirty miles an hour.
The day after that produced the closest thing to an accident the club has had since the bear. A stretch of road on Prince Edward Island that ought to have been paved turned out to be red clay, three days of rain deep in it and roadworks on top. Half a mile of it was genuinely dangerous. Aimee and Robin got off and walked; Ray and Jerry took the Road Kings through at walking pace and got both out the other end upright, which Ray puts down more to luck than to skill.
Then the plan broke. The high-speed ferry booked from Yarmouth across to Bar Harbor was cancelled for high winds, which removed the whole south-western end of Nova Scotia from the trip. Instead we cut across the province to Digby and took the Bay of Fundy crossing to Saint John — two hours on the water, and the fourth ferry — and ran the last day up the highway to Portland.
Both bikes went back into the same unit they had come out of nine days earlier, for another winter. Trip #10 is likely to be New Hampshire and Vermont. After that, at last, the club turns south.
