MACH.19 - Saguaro Country, Day 15: Alternate Mother's Day

Saguaro Country, Day 15
Alternative Mother's Day
Sunday, May 12, 2019

It rained overnight in Gila Bend but the morning is crisp, clean and cloudless.  We pack up and as we start to load out I use the key fob to open the trunk. Nothing happens.  Dead fob battery?

But when I turn the ignition key,  I'm met with stone cold silence. No familiar GPS screen booting up, no dash lights, not anything.

We head to the restaurant for breakfast while I post something to a Facebook Gold Wing group I belong to. When we get back to the hotel room I pull the side panel to expose the battery. Fuses seem ok. Then I carefully strike a jumper across the terminals and again I'm met with stone cold silence.  This battery is toast.  Last night it was fine, this morning it isn't.

There's not a lot happening in Gila Bend on Mother's Day. The nearest store that's open on Sunday is 40 miles away. I find a Walmart in Goodyear that has a battery in stock, but there's no taxi service in Gila Bend and i can't find anyone who can take me to Goodyear. I call Rescue Plus and even AAA (where we have Premier membership); I can easily get a tow from either of these but no battery service for motorcycles.

I consider having the bike transported to Goodyear AZ to the Walmart, but deem that too risky: They may not have correct battery after all, but more importantly, what if the charging system caused the battery failure and it will toast the new one as soon as Ip start it up? Then I'd be stuck at a Walmart instead of a nice motel with a restaurant.

I get many suggestions from Facebook, and call the GWRRA members listed in my Gold Book for the area, but get no response. It's Mother's Day (around noon by now) so that may explain why nobody picks up.

In the end, we decide to stand down, book another night for this hotel, and try more local options tomorrow.  There's a NAPA store here in Gila Bend so we'll try that first.  Even if it's not a Gold Wing battery, as long as it fits it will suffice for a temporary solution. I get a message from a Facebook reader who says he can bring me a battery today, but among the hundreds of messages I don't see it until too late for today. 

So we spend the rest of the day cancelling hotel reservations and scheming for alternative routes. This is complicated by uncertainty about when we'll be able to travel again; Honda motorcycle shops are almost universally closed on Monday, so if the bike needs service, it may be Tuesday before we can have the rig transported to a dealer in Phoenix.

This is certainly not the day we'd planned but we are at a good place with a bed and a restaurant, and we look forward to seeing how this can be resolved.