Journey Notes

This morning was a perfect bike ride. There was a little bit of a tail wind, the road was generally pretty good, interesting and had few hills. I felt like I had some really good power and got to our meeting point more than an hour sooner than I had expected. Good thing too as Rochelle was hit bit a thunderstorm as she came up to meet me. That thunderstorm passed over us as we were eating and was drying up by the time I was back on the road.

I noticed that in this area many people sell things on their front lawns. It is mostly cars but there are lots of other things. This was one of the more unusual things that I've seen for sale on a front lawn:

Our Mattawamkeag Wilderness County Park Campground sounded like an interesting campground about 12 km east of Mattawamkeag. When we looked at the road closely, we saw that it might be gravel and a lot of up hill. Given that it was not actually part of the bike route, we decided to meet at the turn off and drive together to the campground. The road turned out to be much rougher that we had expected. More of a 4X4 road.

We were almost at the campground when VanGo started to sputter and died on a hill. We got him started again but there was no power to get up the hill. There was no cell reception on any of our phones or data devices (AT&T, T-Mobile, Verizon) so we had to try to get VanGo out under his own steam or ride our bikes out. There were a number of "kids" in the area and I felt that if we had to leave VanGo there for any time, there wouldn't be much left of him by the time we got back.

After much trial and error, we managed to find a technique that would allow us to climb very slowly and with much lurching up the hills that we needed to climb to get out of the area. We had to back down hills many times and take another run at them. My past experience with off-road driving with my Jeep came in pretty handy today.

We were both really happy to see pavement again! We have had some issues over the last couple of days with loosing power and we had originally thought that it was bad gas but I am now thinking that there is an issue with the fuel pickup in the fuel tank. It seems to work much better when the fuel level is above 3/4 full but when we hit 3/4, VanGo starts to loose power. I think that the rough access road just made the problem worse.

We will have to look into this more tomorrow. Tonight, we found another campground, a little further out of our way but is it very nice and had a great pool to help soothe our nerves.