Day 12

I was due to have the bike back after 14 days, which left now left me with two days of riding to cover about 350 miles. No problem. My plan was to ride to Salerno on this day and stay at the nice hotel I stayed in on the way down, then ride the incredible Amalfi coast on the way home the next day. Unfortunately it was clouding up that morning and rain was coming. Domenico tried to talk me into staying until the weather passed, but at $100 per day I really wanted to get the bike back and I’ve already ridden in so much rain, what’s a little more? So I said goodbye and he told me to at least stay near the coast because it could be snowing inland in the mountains. Sure enough, within 5 minutes of departing the rain started to fall. I rode less than an hour before the rain started coming down really hard and I decided to stop and get some food and give it a chance to subside a bit, I hoped. I found a small restaurant and walked in soaking wet. There were only a couple people in there so I didn’t worry about it too much. Fortunately they had a good hand dryer in the bathroom and I was able to at least dry out my facemask. The pizza (it never gets old here) was hot and good. I chatted a little with the cook and the waiter and they also mentioned la neve, snow. Fortunately the rain actually let up while I was eating so it wasn’t too bad when I got back on the road. The problem now was that the highway was in the mountains where the snow was, so I was forced to stick to the much slower and longer coast road. After a short break, the rain came back pretty hard again. I had made it just past Cosenza, maybe 60 miles since last stop, and I was soaked to the bone again. So I stopped at a roadside bar, ordered some hot tea and hit the hand dryer again. Once I felt better I decided to go on, however, the poor old bike had other ideas and refused to start. It was the same thing that happened on my first day when it got water logged, so I looked at the fuses and they were fine. Then I started checking every electrical connection on the bike, pulled apart the starter button and whatever I could find with a wire running to it. Nothing. So I decided to try push-starting it. There was a slight hill there so I pushed the bike up a ways, got a good long run, jumped on and threw it in gear….nothing. Sometimes it takes a few tries so I did it until I was too tired to push it anymore. Nothing. Meanwhile the weather is clearing up. Then I located where I could by-pass the starter by touching to points together with a piece of metal. Sparks flew while the motor finally turned over, but it still refused to start! After about two hours I nearly gave up, when I realized that perhaps something had sent a bad signal to the computer and told it not to start, they do have minds of their own you know. So I disconnected the battery in order to maybe clear any bad memories from the computer and reset it. I reconnected it, hit the starter button…..and it started! Good thinking Joe, bravo. Then I realized that the first day I had this problem I actually removed the fuses, which essentially cut power to the computer and fixed it without me really knowing what I’d done. At any rate I was ready to go again, but now I’d lost two precious hours and the sun was going to be down soon. No way I would be making my destination today. I rode on until it was dark and the weather got real bad again before I found a nice hotel in a small town called Scalea, about half as far as I’d wanted to go that day. The kid at the desk was a motorcycle fanatic and was happy to see an American riding a Ducati even in the rain, so he set me up with a room and even let me park the bike in the storage garage so it could get dry, he was real cool. The hotel also served dinner so I didn’t have to go back outside to get food. It was good and there were about 40 small kids on a field trip or something also in there eating at the same time, so it was pretty noisy. I felt good to be inside though and have a nice hot meal. When I returned to my room I took a look out the sliding glass door that lead to a balcony overlooking the sea that was just a stone‘s throw away. This could be a beautiful sight on another day, but all I saw was a raging sea with waves crashing off the rocks, rain, and tremendous wind that was trying to knock everything over, nice.