It's not a race course.

Right. So in the prior post I mentioned how we dawdled a little while getting our coffee and ended up having to run back to the car since the ferry was loading and we were actually impeding traffic. That was awesome.
We finagled our way out of Nanaimo and headed for Port Alberni, planning to have lunch there. Port Alberni is a weird place. They have a pulp mill right on the river there and the whole place smells like... well, a pulp mill. It's a bit of a sad/rough and tumble kind of place with a crappy boardwalk and a lack of funding.
We had lunch at Pescadores there. I had the quinoa salad which was excellent. On the menu they put in brackets "pronounced keen-wa", just in case there was any doubt. I was the only person that ordered the keen-wa salad. Michael had some sandwich that involved bacon and cheese and I silently cursed him for not having to run a full marathon the next day like I was scheduled to do.
Back in the car. Heading to Ucluelet on a very winding highway and some rice rockets blow by us. The last one to pass me wasn't a crotch rocket, but an older Moto Guzzi that was struggling to keep up with the Japanese bikes. I noticed as they were going around a corner that the Moto Guzzi seemed to be leaning into the turns harder than the other bikes and I had a bad feeling about the road and the speed of the drivers.
Probably five minutes later we came across the Moto Guzzi driver on the side of the road near his bike. A couple of elderly women were trying to help him and so we pulled over and jumped out. No cell reception. The guy didn't seem to be critically injured but he was in shock. More people were pulling over to help so I flagged a car down and told him to call for help when he could get reception and then we got back into the car and drove down the highway trying to find a house to pull in to to use their phone.
Naturally no such thing existed and we ended up at a zip line place with a satellite phone and ten very frustrating minutes later we were able to arrange for help. It was a good thing this guy wasn't bleeding profusely from the head because it took a terrifyingly long time for the ambulance service to figure out where we were. I've never had to give telephone pole numbers as a point of reference before.
Back into the car. Some emergency vehicles eventually went screaming past us en route to the accident scene which made us feel a lot better.
Yeah. That whole auspicious start thing I was talking about.