My wife and I have been married for 51 years. Yes that does put a few years on us. We married when I was 19 and she was 18. When we were 22 we had college educations, two sons and I was the pastor of a church (for 30 years). Life was taking place at a fast pace. We both grew up in Alabama and we attended the same high school. We got married the weekend after Dereatha graduated, and we attended Auburn University together.
Since we lived so fast we did not have time to get established financially before we married. Many would say that is not a good way to begin life, but we found that it was a good teacher. We learned to enjoy the simple things in life instead of wanting to accumulate a lot of stuff. Vacations were tent camping, cars were used (used up), houses were simple, and clothes were not designer. As a result we loved our family, our church, and our God.
After our children graduated college I told Dereatha that I had wanted a Harley since I was eight years old and she said, “Well we are 58 and if we are going to get one now is the time.” In about a week we found the one that we wanted and right after Christmas we had an 07 electra glide classic.
I was surprised at how much she loved riding on that bike. We were able to ride it over 110,000 miles over the next seven years. We rode from our home in NC during the summers, because we both taught school. Many of our trips ranged from a week to 40 days or more. We rode to and in every state except Hawaii. We rode through 9 provinces of Canada, and we rode to Alaska and back (my favorite trip).
At age 65 we decided that we needed to sell our loved Harley. We had ridden safely and didn’t want to push the envelope at our age. So we did and soon bought a pontoon boat. This new form of transportation was much safer, but a lot less adventurous. The urge to ride soon began to stir within me. I was able to put it off for a few years. But one day when visiting a new church in our area we met a group of Harley riders who had a group in the church. They were going on a ride after early church and they were extremely friendly to us. They asked us to ride with them and join their group, even if we had to go along in our car. What can I say, within about 10 days we had a new 2017 Ultra. We have now had it for a little over a year and have taken one trip to Wyoming which lasted about 3 weeks. We felt right at home on the bike and have been riding with our church group, and have gained some great new friends.
For all of our rides we have written a blog. But due to blogspot changing, and becoming blogger, we decided to start blogging on wordpress. We will continue posting about all of our future trips as we travel. In the mean time I will put all of our old posts on this new blog. Leather up and travel with us.