Honestly, I am having the most difficult time writing right now. No, I don't have writer's block; it is just that about every 30 seconds or so, I hear another bike go by on the highway and I have to stop myself from running out the door and joining in on the fun. That's because I am sitting at the kitchen counter of our rental house in Spearfish, SD, with my laptop, hunting and pecking at the keys (there goes another bike). Spearfish is a short ride from Sturgis (where all of the craziness is going on) and a short jaunt from some of the most amazing landmarks and places of interest in the entire country.
From the front door of our rental house we are less than an hour from Devil's Tower, Wyoming, Mount Rushmore, and the famous Wild West town of Deadwood, SD. We are also within minutes of one of my favorite spots to ride, Spearfish Canyon. In fact, so many of these tree-lined two-lane roads in this part of the country are ideal for taking a leisurely motorcycle ride that you could spend the entire week up here during the Black Hills Rally and rarely take a road with more than two lanes.
The journey up was pretty amazing as well. I was relegated to driving the chase truck with my bike, all of the tools, and everyone's luggage aboard, and it is a good thing we had it, because Ernie's Uncle Vic spun a primary bearing when his stator took a crap and boiled the oil in his primary. So we ended up loading his bike in the bed of the chase truck and towing it into the Harley-Davidson dealer in Grand Junction, CO. One of the techs there, Hank, really knows his stuff, and within a couple of hours of having the parts in his hands, he had us back on the road in plenty of time to catch the rest of the group as we all dropped down into Estes Park, CO.
In Estes Park, we picked up Todd Matteson from Billet 4-U and Matt Hotch from Matt Hotch Designs, who joined us out on the back porch of our rooms for some of the funniest road stories any of us have ever heard. That was all of the reassurance I needed to restate a point that I have made several times in the past: What we do with these motorcycles has more to do with the people than the bikes themselves. It is more about the nights spent sitting in plastic deck chairs talking about how there was this baby moose in the road and it just wouldn't move out of the way, and the memories of the friends we have all made on the road. Because if it was just about the motorcycles and not the people who own them, then we could all just go sit in a big garage full of bikes all by ourselves and get the same level of satisfaction that we get when we pull into a parking lot of a hotel 1,000 miles from home, only to find it is full of friends from all across the country.
And speaking of friends, I think I just heard another one go by. I think I am gonna run outside and check just to be sure. So until next month, keep the rubber side down and the shiny side up.
Courtney