Death to an old friend

Finally the tow truck arrives, slowly but surely my bike is loaded on to the bed and strapped down. I asked the driver if I could ride in back next to the bike, I know it's an unreasonable request but I was always told that "you'll never know unless you ask", funny part is I think the driver considered it for a moment. My wife and I climbed into the cab of the truck and I don't remember the next 60 miles.

After an hour or so the truck pulled into a dealership in Price/Helper, Utah the bike was unloaded and I began talking with the mechanic. OK, it was more like begging to see if there was anyway he could get my ride fixed and get me on the road say within a day? The mechanic tried, he called all over Utah trying to find a casing but to no avail. After hours of his searching he broke the news to me. It would be a week before he could have the bike fixed. The rally would be over and my wife and I would be stuck in Utah waiting.

I huddled the group together and we talked about what to do now. There isn't an airport in Price so somehow we would have to get to Salt Lake City to fly home. Staying in Utah was not an option and we had already cost the group another day of travel time. We couldn't handicap them any longer and we certainly didn't want to ruin their trip. We had decided that the best option for us was to go home and come back to Utah in a week with a truck to haul my bike home.

Kathi, a lovely lady who is like a sister to my wife, and at times one of the wisest people that I have ever known came up to me and told me to stop talking bullshit this whole thing is about the journey it's never been about the destination. This is part of it and if there's a way to continue on we should find it. I became, somewhat inspired and slightly uplifted - I'm still in morning for my bike so don't expect a huge sigh here ok :)

Option after option was explored we looked in the darkest recesses that we could find trying to discover an option to salvage our trip that we hadn't thought of; we called the Harley Dealers and rental shops trying to get a bike to rent for a week. Now I don't know if you have ever tried to rent a motorcycle a day or two prior to the start of the Sturgis Rally but I might as well have been trying to capture lightning in a bottle. I talked to the owner about trading in my bike for one that he had on his showroom floor - not even one that I was remotely interested in other than it could get me to my destination. Understand this, my bike, the one with the hole in the engine, was a year old and had over $5,000 in accessories not to mention the price of the bike. It had under 5,000 miles on it and had been pampered beyond belief. The shop owner offered me $2K for the bike as a trade in. The freekin' paint job was worth 2K!! I politely explained all of this to him and he said that he was going to have to repair my bike in order to sell it - I offered to take care of the repairs (they were covered by my insurance), it was still a 2K offer from this idiot. I went and spoke to the mechanic, gave him authorization to fix my bike and told him I would be back in two weeks to pick it up. It would be a cold day in hell before I sold my bike to the crook that owned that shop.

Once again we huddled as a group. I had slowly shot down anything that looked like a reasonable option and we were running out of ideas. I don't remember who, but it was suggested that we get a room for the night, get something to eat and find a Harley dealer in Salt Lake City in the morning - I didn't wait, I started calling immediately; found a dealer in Orem, Utah made an appointment...


The group re-huddles.....

Motorcycle traveling