Goose & Whit's Wild Ride

Things that nearly but the kibosh on the Wild Ride:

1. My bike was in many little pieces less than two weeks before the trip was scheduled to begin, and I am neither a mechanic nor a magician. I had discovered a transmission problem last year and finally started to fix it a few months ago. In this case, my version of "fixing it" meant saving myself some money by pulling the engine out of the bike so that I could take it to a mechanic. Guess what I found out. Taking the engine out of a motorcycle isn't like taking the batteries out of a Lite Brite. As you can see from the previous entry, the carcass is very un-motorcycle-like. And putting it all back together? Just as difficult. I got the last pieces together just a couple of days before our departure date. On that note...

2. Orders that would normally take one week took three. Among the items that arrived later than they should have were: the engine parts that I needed to finish the bike, the new windshield that I needed to save my neck from the buffeting wind (I know from experience), the new seat that I needed to save my ass from the buffeting road (experience again). And then there were the checks I was expecting...

3. Money, as in, "not very much money," which is how much I have. Between the broken bike, the expected trip costs and all sorts of unrelated bills, I was scraping by right up to the last minute. I shouldn't have been scraping by because I had invoiced several of my clients a few weeks ago, but well, that just doesn't always mean that I'm going to get paid on time. Such is the life of a freelancer.

4. Waaaaaaaaaaay too much damned work that supposedly just had to be done before I left for my trip, but much in the same way that some clients flake on paying their bill, some clients flake on their due dates, so fortunately for me, much of that work got put off after all, while much of it I just got done more quickly than I thought I would be able to.

5. My riding companion had his own issues, including tight May schedules, last-minute delays and a handful of other problematic crap.

As you can see, there were all sort of things working against us leaving on the date that we wanted (and truth be told, we will leave one day later than expected), but it all miraculously wrapped itself up neatly in the end.

So brace yourself, America. The G&W train is about to leave the station.