Unfortunately the Blue Monster came to a shuddering halt this afternoon 30 miles short of my friends house in Rockville, near Washington. An hour of driving through the rain was too much for it. Fear not dear readers I am in perfectly good shape, rescued by a County Police patrol and a towing company. Though for 15 shivering minutes on the cusp of a turn-off the Interstate I did wonder where and how my day would end.  Guess I was reasonably luck to grind to a halt there, rather than a stretch of desolate motorway where nobody takes a blind bit of notice of a stranded biker.  And lucky again that the cop turned up what in fact was very quickly after the forced stop.  Sometimes, on the motorway/Interstate, you are really glad to see the boys in blue.  As promised I have avoided them in all other respects since the Natchez Trace incident.

Both the cop who stopped for me and the tow truck driver were most helpful and friendly; although, naturally, the latter of the two was being paid.  Ultimately by me. 

Plastic solves everything financial and, though I somewhat dread the bills when I return to Blighty, its only money.  Ha Ha.

I suspect an electrical malfunction, after taking it to the towing company's yard it re-started, though it also failed again a minute later.  Tomorrow is Sunday so we can expect no progress then.  Monday will see attempts to assess the real nature of the problem.

Not too good a day all in all.  First the weather has suddenly changed for the colder and I had to put on all my upper body clothes when I set off from the fairly godforsaken Johnson City.  Discovering as I did so, that a t-shirt is hiding in some hotel/motel back on my path through America.  It was the tattiest of them, but that was scant consolation at 9 a.m. when I needed all the layers I could lay my hands on.  Then my meeting with Amy, Linda and Hall, the Crazy Baker, went pear shaped as they had not received the messages I left about what time I was arriving.  More technically savvy folk than I will know instantly why I made a glorious cock up of the arrangements but from my standpoint I could not understand it.  

I received email notifications of Facebook messages from Amy and Linda about today's arrangements, and replied to those emails with a suggested time for a rendezvous.  But they never got through.  I have, for a long time, loathed Facebook as it always goes wrong and behaves in ways I do not understand.  It seems that email notifications of messages are not something you can reply to, although why I don't understand. Email is simple.  It works.  Its discrete, no-one else can see it.  Why anybody uses Facebook messaging is totally beyond me when emails were set up for just the purpose of passing instant private messages to one another. The thing is I can never get Facebook messages to work simply, the process always seems so cumbersome.  I expect that Mr Luddite had a similar problem a few years back.

So I had taken a 150 mile detour to no avail, having endured cold so bad I had to activate the bike's handgrip warmers, and then it started raining on the approaches to Washington and the ignition failed.  What a day.

At midnight, my hosts here in Washington have still not returned from an evening out with friends that arranged itself at short notice.  Maybe they're staying the night there?  Maybe it will stop raining tomorrow? Maybe I'll give up the romantic dream of biking to the wedding and stick with the lovely smooth hire car I now have?  Maybe maybe maybe.