The morning of day two Chris's bike had a dead battery and Andrew lost a glove after a photo shoot near REI with Lawson's friend, I'll spare you the details, it was for a project. The good news is she found the glove, the bad news is we had ridden back 5 miles to look for it, called her, and then figured it had been picked up, so hopefully she'll be able to ship it to us. The hills I-5 cuts through south of Eugene were beautiful and tested the power of our loaded-down 650's.
Near Rice Hill my bike started randomly dieing. It would run for nearly a minute and then die. We managed to make it to the exit at Rice Hill. I called Ran Sill, a friend of my dads. He's been working on motorcycles and snowmobiles for nearly 40 years and could name every nut and bolt on my bike. He talked me through a number of things to check on the bike. I ended up taking off the tank, replacing the spark plug, taking apart the carb, none of which made a difference. We decided we'd see if we could make it another 11 miles to a Kawasaki dealership(actually ended up being in Roseburg, another 30 miles). I filled the gas tank and took it for another test drive. Low and behold the problem had been in the gas, something in the bottom of the tank was fouling up the carb.
We were back on the road but by this time we had only traveled 50 miles or so and it was already 3pm again! Talk about disheartening. We decided we would try and make it to a contact Andrew had in Medford. With the air temperature dropping nearly 20 degrees after sunset there was no way to ride more than an hour into the night. We made it to Medford around 6 and called it a night. We were all ready for California Sunshine, little did we know...
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