I wasn't actually serious about it at the time.....

Two years ago today, with very little warning, I suddenly regained my freedom, was granted early parole, had my sentence commuted by the governor. I had begun to despair that I would ever get free of that store, that I was trapped by circumstances, timing, and a bulletproof commercial real estate lease with my name and personal guarantee all over it. I grabbed that Get Out Of Jail Free card, ran like hell, and I haven't looked back. That kinda explains how I got myself into the situation I'm in now.

Every Monday night in the spring, summer, and fall, weather permitting, I get together with a group of friends for a motorcycle ride. We meet at the appointed time and place, usually the Timmies in Blackburn Hamlet, and after a lively and spirited debate over where we're going to go and what route to take, we climb aboard our bikes, depart at a dangerous and high rate of speed, winding up several hours later at another Timmies. It's at that point that a number of stories and lies are told as we exchange various versions of "No shit, there I was, thought I was gonna die", and speculating about potential rides we might take at some unspecified time in the future. I didn't think it through before making the comment, but it was during one of these bullshit sessions that I suggested shipping our bikes to the west coast, flying out, and then riding them back by as convoluted a route as possible. "It would be Epic! Do all our research before we go, and hit every single major tourist attraction and motorcycle road between there and here on our way back! A once in a lifetime trip! Epic I tell you!" I wasn't really serious about the idea and thought everybody realized it. My mistake. Several months later Ray turned to me one night just as the group broke up and said "I checked with my wife and she said she's okay with us going on that trip, now all I have to do is get some extra time off work." Fat chance of that, Ray works longer hours than I did when I had the store, there wasn't a snowballs chance in hell he'd get the time off. But it turned out his boss was retiring, didn't much care what happened after he left, and he granted Ray's request.

Well, it was my idea, I couldn't very well back out now. Which explains why, as you read this, 2 years to the day after I regained my freedom, Ray and I are in an airliner somewhere between Ottawa and my sisters house in Surrey B.C. The bikes left town last Thursday safely loaded into the trailer of a motorcycle shipping specialist, and will be delivered to my sisters driveway by mid-morning tomorrow. Around noon we should be in line at the US border, headed for the Pacific Coast Highway and points south. And east, and north, and everywhere in between. Or not. The truth is we don't actually have a plan once we cross the border. We've got a lot of maps with a lot of points of interest marked on them, things like Mount Rushmore, Antelope Valley, Mt. St. Helens, the Giant Redwoods, the Ozarks, and too many other places to even list. I even found a company called Butler that makes special motorcycle touring maps with all the most entertaining roads marked on them. Basically, our plan is to go as quickly as we can in no specific direction, doing our best to stay away from bad weather, and to return at the absolute latest before the beginning of June which is when Ray must return to work. He figures we can do this all in 2 1/2 weeks, I'm not so confident.

But however this plays out, I know one thing for sure:
It's gonna' be EPIC!