The Motorcycle Inn

IN THE MODERN ERA of over-populated cities, the decimation of forests and the emphasis on computers and working in offices, there is a man who takes the opportunity to begin a new life with his ten-year-old son when he inherits his uncle’s property on the largest freshwater island in the world on the Canada-US border. Having been abused by an intolerant father and in adult life crippled by insecurity and shyness, Kurt Legge is a computer programmer in Detroit who avoids people and engaging in life to the point where he works from home and watches the world go by. But when his wife leaves him for another man and dies months later in San Francisco, Legge follows his aunt to Manitoulin Island where he falls in love with the old family estate. But moving from Detroit and beginning a new life on a windswept island in the middle of the Great Lakes is not an easy proposition.
Having never been told of his family’s past on this remote and isolated island, Legge soon discovers his family’s hidden past, not a history within the law but rather one of outlaws who worked with Al Capone during Prohibition. His grandfather was a whiskey-runner who sold his wares to the thirsty Americans by leaving hidden caches of booze on the southern islands of the Manitoulin Island chain where Americans would pick up the booze in boats and bring them across Lake Huron to Michigan. But not only does Legge learn of his family’s past, he meets a wide array of characters who live on the Island that has fast become a motorcycling haven for enthusiasts. With his five-bedroom home, Legge decides to run a bread and breakfast for Motorcyclists, a niche market that he quickly discovers has legs.
When he overcomes his fears of riding the motorcycle left to him by his uncle, he finds a whole new world he never knew existed, one that gives him legs and initializes his own path to recovery from his own crippling afflictions. He is able to bond with his son and find his footing to have the courage to fall in love and begin a life he never thought possible.
With each step in his new life on the Island Legge encounters characters who bring out the dormant traits that had defined his forefathers, ushering in a life of risk, danger fulfillment and meaning. It is a journey not only for himself and his son, it is a journey they take into a world untouched by the hand of time to a country life full of wonder, nature, wild animals and eccentrics that only serve to bring out his own eccentricities that appear mild in contrast to the many Islanders who test him, observe him and then finally accept them into their family on one of the most beautiful places in the world.