Twenty years ago this month - February 3rd, to be precise - I officially became a Harley owner. I'd been riding motorcycles since 1978 when I bought one out of necessity, but I'd never owned a Harley-Davidson. I came up through Japanese bikes, having owned Hondas and Suzukis along the way. but I'd always wanted a Harley. And then in December of 2002 my loving wife Gina came to me and told me that she was planning a surprise Christmas present for me, but "didn't want to spend that much money" without talking to me about it first.
That's when she told me that she was in the process of buying a Harley-Davidson for me for Christmas.
Needless to say, I was absolutely blown away. She told me that she was already talking to Williams Harley-Davidson in Lebanon, New Jersey about the purchase, and that the bike she was looking at was a 2003 100th Anniversary Edition Heritage Softail Classic in silver and black. (That's the bike shown above, along with Gina's matching Low Rider that we bought for her in April of 2003.) Long story short, in the middle of January we drove down to Williams H-D which was about an hour away where I saw the bike I would later name "Traveller" sitting on the showroom floor. It was absolutely the most beautiful motorcycle I'd ever seen, and I instantly fell in love with it. The dealership had done about $3K worth of customizing to it, chroming out the entire front end and really making the bike look sharp. I met the salesman Gina had been working with, and after talking a little bit we got down to business and filled out the loan application.
I gotta tell ya, the 20 minutes it took for the loan approval to come through were the longest, most stressful 20 minutes of my entire life. I'd never wanted a loan for anything as badly as I wanted this one, and having just come through a divorce my credit was sort of shot to hell and I was afraid that would prevent me from getting the loan. But the credit and loan gods were smiling on me that day, and I was approved for the loan. I picked the bike up on February 3rd, two days after it had just snowed. The roads were clear but it was still cold as hell, but I was smiling all the way as I rode the bike away from the dealership and to my father in law's house in Bergenfield where the bike was to be stored until the spring.
As I mentioned earlier, in April of that year we bought Gina a matching 2003 Low Rider, and over the course of the next few years we rode those bikes all over New Jersey, Pennsylvania, New York, and many of places in between. Every time the weather was good we were on the bikes, and since we lived in the foothills of the Pocono Mountains in Wantage, NJ at the time we had some absolutely beautiful scenery to ride through. If there was a Harley-Davidson within 50 miles of our house, we rode t6 it and came away with a t-shirt. By the time the summer was over I had about fifteen Harley-Davidson t-shirts stacked up in my dresser!
But the thing that stands out in my mind the most was the first long distance road trip we ever made together. One day in June of 2003 out of the clear blue nowhere Gina told me that she wanted to go to Biketoberfest in Daytona, Florida. I was all for the idea, so we sat down and started planning out the trip. We were both members of an online forum called the "H-D Forums" and were planning on meeting several of the forum members there, all of whom had been to Daytona before. When we got to the part where we planned out the actual ride itself, I asked Gina how far she wanted to ride on the first day. It was about 1,200 miles one way, and I was more than surprised when she pointed to the map of the East Coast I had pulled up on the computer and her finger came to rest on Dillon, South Carolina.
"I wanna ride to there the first day!" she said, grinning from ear to ear. I took one look at the distance and tried to talk her out of it, but she was adamant. So we set our sights on Dillon, SC for the first day's ride, and in the third week of October when we lit out for Biketoberfest at 7 in the morning, we didn't stop until we were in Dillon, South Carolina.
THIRTEEN HOURS LATER.
The trip itself was a blast, and to this day it's my favorite vacation with Gina.
Over the next few years those two Harleys took us anywhere and everywhere. We went to the Open House at the York H-D factory in 2004, and that summer the two of us with one of Gina's friends named Rick rode down to Virginia Beach for a vacation. From there we rode to the Outer Banks in North Carolina, and I finally got to see Kitty Hawk and the spot where man first took to the air. In 2005 Gina traded in her Low Rider for a Road King Classic, riding that one just as much and just as far as she had the Low Rider.
The move to South Carolina in 2006 kind of put a damper on our riding, as our financial situation wasn't the best in the world. I went to work for Thunder Tower Harley-Davidson in April of 2007 as a motorcycle sales associate, and ended up buying a 2008 Nightster that I fell in love with as soon as it hit the showroom floor. It was silver and black, just like "Traveller," so I promptly named it "Junior."
In late 2008 the economy took a dump, and in 2009 our financial situation caused us to have to sell first Gina's Road King and then my Heritage, leaving Gina without a bike to ride. I still had the Nightster so I was still riding, but I missed my riding partner something awful. Then in 2012 Gina bought a 2008 Road King from Thunder Tower, so we were both back on the road again! I picked up a 2003 100th Anniversary Edition Road King Classic in White Pearl in the summer of 2014, trading in my Nightster (which was paid off by then) and ending up only paying $5K for the Road King. We rode those two bikes until 2016 when Gina took a fall that scared her. She wasn't hurt, but it really spooked her to the point where she no longer felt it was safe to ride. We kept her Road King for the next 18 months with me riding it to keep it running, and finally sold it to a friend of mine.
But I'm still on "Casper" (my white Road King), riding every chance I get. I rode "Casper" down to Florida in 2018 to visit with my son and his family, taking in Panama City Bike Week along the way. I've ridden it up to see my family in North Carolina more times than I can remember, and I've even had the chance to ride with my son a few times along the way. He started out on a Harley but is now on an Indian, but that doesn't matter to me. Brand names never got in the way of who I rode with, and they never will.
I've seen a lot of beautiful country and met a ton of great people thanks to my Harley, and I'm determined to ride until the day I die. It's as much a part of me as Gina is, and I just can't see life without either of them. (Maybe one day Gina will want to ride again, we'll see!)
In the sixties Honda had this slogan that went something like, "You meet the nicest people on a Honda!" Well, that may be true, but I'm here to tell you that you meet the most fantastic people on a Harley!
Deo Vindice!
IHC
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