So my story starts in 2006. I had ridden some dirt bikes and a friend’s Honda for a while. But in February 2006 I bought my first bike, a Softail Standard. I dropped it the day I got it from the dealer on the way home about 2 miles away. I had all the motor work, pipes, etc… done to it and just about finished all the chrome when I got rid of it. My wife would ride on it with me on short rides but because of 5 knee surgeries and it being a cruiser, she couldn’t go on long rides.
I’m a career Firefighter and I took my first trip with some coworkers out west in September. We belong to a motor group through our union. A group of 37 of us, in small groups of 6 to 10, rode to the first rally in Sturgis. From there we rode to Colorado Springs to a memorial where two of our brothers ‘names were going up on the wall who died in the line of duty. This ride went from Maryland, west to include Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, South Dakota, Wyoming, and Colorado. Besides riding past all the corn and hay fields, we rode all of the stuff in the Black Hills area; plus the Badlands and Devils Tower. Now the one thing I learned was pictures DOES NOT do this county Justice. I saw things in real life I never dreamed of, like standing next to a Buffalo or an ever green that was over 100 feet tall; to ride for hours toward the Rockies and not even get close. You all have heard this time and time again I’m sure. Anyway on the ride home in Columbus OH, a car cuts us off and then slams on her breaks in front of me and my room mate. He clips her and does a high side, when I get to him he is in real bad shape and not breathing right. We got him to a hospital and the short story is he walked out that night.
I know the one thing that crushed me on this trip was the fact I didn’t get to spend this with my soul mate, my wife. So when I got home and after 15,000 miles on that sled, I got rid of it and got a 2008 Street Glide. The next May our big group was to go to the 2nd rally in Arkansas. That was the spring that Arkansas and Mississippi got all the flooding. So our small group of 6 went our own way. This was the first time my friend, who had the crash, was back on a bike up to that point and he came along. I put on the tour pack and did some up grades to this bike and my wife went with us. We rode 8 states, totaling 3600 miles. We left with no rules, no agenda, and no pressure. We rode. We rode until we got tired. If we wanted to see something, we saw it and if not, we just rode. States to include WV, VA, NC, SC, GA, FL, AL, and TN. We went down the coast, across the pan handle of Florida along the Gulf, and back up the mountains home. We rode the Dragon and we rode in some of the worst rain ever, we are still drying out. So over the next couple years my wife and I went on long weekend trips and she even took the class and learned to ride. I got her and 883 and that bike was way too under size for her cause she picked up riding so well that she rides better than me.
Shannon and I planed a trip to the tip of Maine for the summer of 2009. To include NJ, NY, CN, RI, MA, MN, NH, VR. We rode up north for 10 days. After seeing her family for a day, the agenda was no agenda again. We saw New York City and we ran up the coast on US Route 1. We saw Cape Cod, Hyanna's Port, Downtown Boston, Bar Harbor, and Acadia National Park. We rode to the end of US Route 1 in Fort Kent, Maine and looked across the river into Canada. We rode the White Mountains National Forest and saw Mt. Washington. We rode up through Lake Champlain, crossed over into New York and rode up to Lake Placid in the Adirondacks. We rode south and stayed in Lake George and then rode the Catskill Mountains, and even saw Woodstock.
Now here is the payoff and where the CVO comes in. After a lot of thinking about up grading the SG, adding a lot of chrome, paint, motor work, blah blah you know the drill, I saw a dealer nearby had my CVO. I picked it up on Tuesday and left that Thursday for the Maine trip. The pay off was not only getting to see my wife enjoy some of things I had all this time, the way WE ALL do, but while on Acadia we were riding around the road that follows the shore line. Shannon starts tapping real fast on the back and tells me to look left over the head set. There was a bald eagle flying along beside us at eye level as if we could all most reach out and touch it. It flew there for a couple of miles with us as if he were racing us. To see the joy in my wife’s eyes and to know she finally “got it” was… is worth EVERY PENNY that CVO cost me.
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Topic: My CVO story long read hope you are bored… (Read 3802 times)