Let The Ride Begin.

We head out for our annual vacation ride this evening.  And all I can say is THANK GOD!  After two days of making absolutely nothing, doing laundry, cleaning, taking care of loose ends, I'm about to lose it!  It's time to get the hell out of here for a few days.  The planning of this ride has been nothing less than a complete pain in the ass from the very beginning.  Note to self: DON'T DO THAT AGAIN!  I don't do well with plans.  It's so much better to just jump on and go!  But, it has finally arrived and by tonight I'll be in full on relax mode.

We did get our Street Glide back on Saturday.  This is our driveway now.  :)

After MONTHS of getting jerked around either by our insurance company or the Harley dealership we had fix the bike.  (It had a mishap with a milk truck back in April, thank GOD the Big White Guy wasn't on it).  If you ever find a business that actually provides great customer service please let me know.  It seems to be a lost art these days.  It's all about people collecting their money and not caring about the quality of work they are getting paid to do.  We opted to keep all the banged up parts and I did get a giggle out of this ...

That's half a Harley Davidson in the back of my Montero.  The only time I can say I couldn't ride it but still took it with me.  The Montero was packed!  Even the passenger seat was loaded.  Other than some pretty serious blind spots it made for a nice riding companion.

We did decide to make a few little changes.  New pipes!  And they are LOUD!

I love the look of the Big Radius pipes on a bagger.  It's not something you see everyday.   I guess we will see if I'm going to hate the added noise this weekend, but I'm guessing no.  There's something pretty soothing about that rumble as you're going down the road.

Even Shorty is pretty happy to have the bike home.  She wanted to wash the Street Glide last night.  We had her start with the Sporty for practice.  I don't care who you are, this is freaking CUTE!  It was a great family night washing the bikes in the driveway.

She's always been pretty fascinated with the bikes.  She's the only little girl I've ever seen that would watch Biker Build Off and Orange County Choppers alone.  She's loved them ever since the first one came home.  :)

So here we are.  The day has finally arrived.  And after all the bullshit we WILL be on the road.  That's the payoff.  I'm praying like hell we don't have any issues with the bike.  There's already been a few little things that the dealership screwed up on, which pisses me right off given the fact that it was near a $10,000 repair bill, but hopefully we won't run into anything serious.

It's hard to say if I will be motivated enough to post anything while we are away.  Usually I have a hard time even taking pics.  I get so lost in the moment I don't even think about stuff like that.  I AM going to make more of an effort to take photos though.  We need better logs of our rides, just for future purposes.

Everyone have a great 4th of July weekend!  I'll be back by Monday, hopefully with some pretty good "tales from the road" and lots of inspiration for new jewelry.  :)