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Prompt: What is your preferred mode of travel?
Today is day 14 of the WordPress #Bloganuary challenge.
Holding Pattern
Standing flatfooted with my face pressed to the window, I could see the highway in the sky as we circled above Chicago. My mom loaded me and my sister up to go spend a weekend with my dad -where he was attending Northwestern University. I can not locate the memories of that trip except for that dark flight there.
Just below my little feet, fog, and clouds passed in a blur. The lights of the city below provided a glow that would appear in focus when moving out of the clouds. Eye level and just above the soup I could clearly see the 9:00 traffic jamb forming.
Seemed that the little boy always preferred aviation for transportation after spending nearly twenty years moving and fueling corporate airplanes. That aviation career would end up providing the means to my preferred mode of travel.
Pedal Power
My dad successfully graduated from Northwestern and had a very rewarding orthotic and prosthetic career. I learned to ride a bicycle at a very young age and I would receive a brand new one each year on my birthday.
If I was going somewhere -I was pedaling!
There wasn’t anywhere I wouldn’t go or anything I wouldn’t jump. My bicycle and I were one and there wasn’t anything I enjoyed more.
I lived with the dream of someday placing my feet on the pegs and rotating the throttle. Seemed so much easier than expanding the energy on pedaling. Each and every time I brought this dream to the attention of my dad, I somehow always became his assistant in the fitting room. It was always the same -me, my dad, and someone standing there with a missing limb. My dad always introduced me as his assistant and I was never the wiser. Looking back now he and the patient were in on it all along. I can not tell you how many times I heard my dad ask the person receiving the new prosthetic -“how did it happen?” The answer was always exactly the same -“motorcycle.”
As you can guess, my dream of launching a motorcycle from a ramp never came true while living under my dad’s roof.
Knees In The Breeze
Thirty-Three trips around the sun and living on my own, I bought my first motorcycle.
Both wheels stayed on the pavement and I never left a ramp with exhilaration. If the sun was shining though -I was riding.
My wife would ride right along and it wasn’t long till she was wanting to ride something a little smoother. It was rather easy to completely agree with her -a new Harley! The little twelve hundred was eventually replaced with a Road King Classic.
To this day -the combination of riding that Road King along the Blue Ridge Parkway is hands down the best mode of transportation I’ve ever experienced.
