As some of you may well have heard.. I bought a Harley.

1989 Harley Sportster 883

Today, I have had the bike for about 2 weeks and done all the practical things one would do with a motorcycle. BUT, today is Saturday! And a warm 55 degrees it was!

So, after and exciting and intriguing morning of filling out insurance forms, sending in rebates, and reading about tax software, I went riding around town. Normally this isn't much of a problem, as I have somewhere to go. This isn't much of a problem for many other people, as Route 66 does not run directly through their city. So, in keeping in tradition of what every Harley owner decides to do, I hit the road.

The bike handles quite well at 45mph. In fact, it's a blast. 55mph is a different story. Things start to shake, the wind really starts to blow you around, and Bernoulli over my helmet starts to lift me off the ground. But I press on, thinking , "St. Louis ... good place for a break before Chicago."

The city of Strafford is about 5-10 miles out. It's one of those small cities with run down bars with signs that proclaim they serve "the king of beers" before the title. The kind of place that caters to drifters, where you best be drinking what the locals drink, and accept the fact that karaoke night is every wednesday. The city is like many others dotted across the midwest.

But Strafford does make a good reference point, as it was about 7 miles past that my bike began to spit and choke and die.

It was time to add some of those cliche route 66 moments into my life, like, say, running out of gas. I cruised into the very first turn off, the gravel parking lot of an abandoned junk yard. Rusty car parts piled up everywhere around a metal shack, which someone had so nicely pained "Smile your on candid camera" on the front along with an erie blue and yellow smiley face in a faded, post apocalyptic "free smilies" popup ad kind of way. There was really no reason to stick around, nobody there, and no reason to try to fashion a Mcgyver like device to siphon gas from some old car. The harley is a primitive beast. It's not like a car. It's loud and angry, most everything on it is shiny and meant to be seen. It also (not unlike my 4 wheeler) has a reserve tank. I promptly switched to it and turned back around.

This is what a reserve tank is for, no? To get you to the nearest gas station. It became painfully obvious this bike was built to be ridden in a city where there is a gas station no more than 3 miles away. It once again started to spit and die on a long straight stretch where you can see the air boil off the road. When the bike dies you just hold in the clutch and coast. It's just about all you can do, coast in silence.. That and make sure there is nobody else behind you, try to restart, try pumping the gas, try looking for a place to stop. It's a silent kind of panic. No shoulder to park on, a hill on the side. I don't have any paper to write, "Not an accident, Ill be right back". as a note to anyone on the highway who might happen to see a motorcycle laying sideways on the side of the road. As luck would have it, I was able to roll into yet another cliche of route 66, "Exotic Animal Paradise".

This was the kind of place that would hire some terrible artist to render up some overly optimistic and disproportional pictures of big cats and monkeys, and proclaim Where the white buffalo roam!, then dot them all over the landscape. I would normally regard this as a bad marketing move, but apparently it works.

I pushed the bike through the rear parking lot, where truckers missing their teeth yelled things like "your supposed to ride it, not push it!". I made it into the building, that was reminiscent of silver dollar city, except less manufactured. The gift store was about the only thing open, it sold grocery store twinkies and every tourist item you could use on a safari. The woman at the counter was a larger woman, wearing a safari shirt and a lot of makeup. Friendly people though they were quite willing to give me a gallon of gas to make it back to Strafford. thanks.

Next weekend I'm going to pick up Jack Nicholson and head to New Orleans.

- Tydence Davis 3/5/05