Can I really continue with a broken collarbone, or are my doubts going win? Do I have enough guts to travel on after this second crash, and what if another major obstacle crops up/As I lay in the treatment room at Baddeck I once more faced the fact that my trip could be over, at least by motorcycle. Dr Chang and the A& E nurse put me in a halter (my cupless bra) to hold my shoulder in place while it knitted back together.
‘How long before this comes off?’ I asked.
‘At least three weeks.’ He replied.
The nurse rang a local motel and came back smiling.
‘The owner of the Telegraph House Hotel will come and pick you up, he has a motel room he can set aside for a long stay guest,’ she informed me.
That’s when I first met Shawn Dunlop, whose family had owned the hotel since it was originally built. Indeed they had been instrumental in installing telegraph communication to Nova Scotia and were, and remain, personal friends of Alexander Graham Bell then, and his modern day family now.
The Telegraph House Hotel, Baddeck

In my 3 weeks at The Telegraph House Hotel and Motel was a time to heal and think about my situation. My bike was in the next town, there was no taxi service and the bus did not stop in the town. The staff were very kind to me but I could not help wondering what to do next. At least I had my laptop sent over, well that is until I spilt fruit juice into the keyboard!! That all but killed it, as the acid in the fruit juice attacked and shorted out more and more keys. I rinsed it under a tap, tried to isolate the damaged area and eventually levered up the housing to insert bits of cellophane wrapper between the layers of key tracks, but each day the keyboard got worse. In the end I had only half the top and middle row of keys, and had to be very creative in order to get even the most primitive of messages out. Even the password for my email account had to be copied and pasted, letter by letter, out of unrelated letters from saved documents.
Baddeck is a pretty, small town on a lovely lake that saw Osprey floating over it, and yachts scudding to and fro, but time was slipping away, and I knew that any hope of travelling up The Dempster Highway to Inuvik was gone. Indeed I would soon loose the chance of reaching the Rocky Mountains before snow started closing the higher passes.
My bike was sent on from the Ford dealership that had picked it up, to a local motorcycle workshop. Fortunately I had the spare sprockets on board, and the chain was a standard pitch that they had in stock. Another lucky break came as Shawn had to deliver his daughter to the ferry for Prince Edward Islands at about the time my bike would be ready, and offered to take me with them in order to drop me off on the way back. The family car, being looked after by his brother, was a large, comfortable saloon, but had a noisy exhaust, so we stopped on the way back for a new part to be fitted while we had lunch.
At the motorcycle workshop they had not yet started my repairs, but give them due, they pulled out all the stops and fixed it there and then. While they did so, I chose a new crash helmet; mine had a crack in it, and sorted out my gear. The first thing to go would be my off-road spare tyre. There was no way that I would be strong enough to get off-road with a broken collar bone, even if I could reach Dawson City in time, so it was just extra weight. Also the tank bag went, but not the map pocket, and a couple of coats, after all I would be heading away from the cold, they just took up room, and I wanted to get the weight as low as possible. I decided to keep the camping gear as although it would be difficult for me to erect, it gave me an emergency back up if I could find no shelter elsewhere. My camera was missing, the only time I clipped it to the side of the bike and it goes awol!! Probably laying in a ditch at the side of the road.
The bike had been left in the open for three weeks and the Magellan GPS was wet through, so I had no option but to proceed without any way knowing my exact speed. I developed the tactic of following the vehicle in front, or going at a speed so that vehicles behind slowly caught up and overtook. You must remember that traffic on country roads in Canada is very sparse; indeed sometimes it would be over an hour before a vehicle appeared in my rear mirrors. It did not take long before I could judge my speed just by the sound of the engine and the gear I was in.
I said a fond farewell to my host, Shawn Dunlop, and headed off down the road.

Fortunately it was late in the afternoon, so my first ride was only for about an hour, and I called into a motel in Port Hawksbury where I had the most delicious liver and onions, not that the food was bad at the Telegraph Hotel, in fact just the opposite, but liver, onions, mashed potatoes and green beans was just the counterpoint I needed for the delicate tastes of the sea food that predominated at The Telegraph House.

From then on I travelled over 250 miles a day across Nova Scotia to New Brunswick, then into Quebec. I thought to myself that there must be a ferry across the St. Lawrence Seaway, that would allow me to avoid Quebec City, and more or less let me follow my original route across Canada. There was, at Matane, according to my newly purchased Michelin Atlas of North America. A drawback of my Trackmaker computer maps is that they don’t show all of the minor ferry routes. I decided to take to a minor but shorter route to Matane along Highway 190. Oh what a road! It winds through small villages, through pretty countryside but was so broken up that I could look nowhere but 40ft or so in front of me. Then it ended, they had ground away the surface for repairs and left a series of grooves in the road that acted like tramlines, leading me on a slow diagonal towards the deep gravel that littered the verges, causing me to take drastic course changes every hundred yards or so. After about 4 miles of this the road returned to its normal pot holed self. ‘Thank God that’s over,’ I though, nothing could be worse than that!’
I spoke too soon, around the next bend they had removed the surface totally and I spent a nervous few miles on loose gravel that had not even been rolled down yet, and not a workman in sight!

Leaving the Atlantic Provinces behind.

With a sigh of relief I pulled into the ferry terminal at Matane, to be told once more that without a firm booking I might not get on the ferry, but once again the motorcycles managed to be fitted in somewhere. After a few hours I was on land at the point that I would have reached if I had managed to get to Labrador City, Baie-Comeau. The days I had lost with the two accidents and detour, were more than the time I had allowed for the Labrador Highway, but provided that my shoulder did not ache too much, I might at least get to Dawson and be able to follow the Rocky Mountain Route south, but it would be tight.

The next day I travelled along Highway 172, a beautiful road that wound through Quebec mountain valleys to Lac St.Jean along the Saguenay Fjord.

The Saguenay Fjord

Taking a wrong turn at a diversion; Quebec signs are all in French, unlike the dual signs elsewhere in Canada, and by the time I translated ‘The Road Ahead is Blocked’, I was past the sign and not sure which branch to take for Alma. A very pretty 70km later I stopped checked the map at Mont Apica and turned back the way I had come.
By Mont Apica

Travelling to Val d’Or required that I first headed north 240km to Chibougamau then back south another 240km, but I did avoid Quebec City and saw Cache Lake, the lake that inspired my boyhood fascination with the Canadian backwoods.

I was well into reserve by the time I refuelled and breathed a big sigh of relief when I sighted the petrol station just outside of Val d’Or, but noticed a slight wobble on the front wheel as I drove through the town searching for a motel. I was tired and my shoulder hurt so that would have to wait for the morning

In the morning I checked the front wheel and could find nothing wrong with it, but a few miles up the road the wobble was back so I drew into a industrial units driveway to check the tyre pressure on the front wheel. The tyre pressure was low and as I pulled out my pump to put a bit more air in the owner drew up on his way to lunch and told me to go into the workshop and get one of the mechanics to get the airline out for me, I did, and was soon on my way again, but the wobble was still there, but only at low speed. I stopped again at a picnic area and checked again. The front wheel was fine, but the rear bearings were shot!!
What was happening was the weight of my gear was holding the rear wheel rigid, and the front of the bike was floating around it. It had not felt like the back was wobbling at all! I had no option but to keep my fingers crossed and keep going. At a petrol station there was a guy on a Honda Gold Wing refuelling on the other side to the pump, we exchanged pleasantries and I told him that my rear wheel axle seemed to be breaking up. He advised me that there was a good motorcycle dealer in Timmings, where he lived, and that there was a good motel just across the street. Unfortunately he was on a mission of his own but would check back that I was ok. I headed off with a lot of hope but little faith, especially as there are long distances between towns and I didn’t want to be stuck on the hard shoulder miles away from anywhere. I never made it to Timmings but was sure glad that I had made the aquantence of Rick, and later his family.

Sad sight, by the road with no back wheel!!