Hangin' With Uncle Howie

In the summer of 2009 Jesse and I went on our summer vacation to NY State on our motorcycles to visit friends and family.  We were gone for nine days total.  We took Cooper, of course, and had a WONDERFUL trip.  The trip was our only vacation for the year.  We didn’t want to have any agenda to follow.  All we were sure of was that we were going to visit Jesse’s daughters and grand children and we wanted to visit a few friends.  Other than that we were free to ride, sleep where we wanted to for the night and go when we felt like it.  Mostly we were just going to be away from home and be on our bikes for the whole week.  What a great week it was!

The day Howie meets his nephew Cooper

We got to see everyone we wanted to see and we had BEAUTIFUL weather the whole time.  The one storm we encountered was a doozie!  We had to try to beat it to our destination before the storm got there.  We had been hanging around with our friend Howard, who was a passenger on Jesse’s bike.  We were on the way to Howard’s girlfriend’s house when the skies began to darken.  We were riding right into the storm with our fingers crossed.  There was thunder and lightening ahead of us and the wind was really picking up a lot.  I thought we were going to really get wet.  None of us had rain gear on, so if the skies opened up we were defenseless.

In this video, you can see lightening in the distance just above Jesse and Howard’s heads to the left and right of them at about 4 seconds into the video.  As we rode a bit longer you can see the skies darken and wind pick up a little.  The storm was coming in really fast.  I thought we were going to really get it.

Howard was trying to give directions from the back of Jesse’s bike.  When we got to the apartment complex, Jesse missed the driveway to the complex, so Howard pointed around the side of the building.  Jesse cut off onto the lawn with a bounce that threw Howard four inches off the seat.  I followed (good thing for Cooper’s harness) and we cut across the lawn and around the house.

We came into the driveway from the other side.  When Howard’s girlfriend saw us arrive she was ready to throw two garage doors up for Jesse and me to each pull inside.  We parked the bikes and ran to the house.  Branches were being blown off trees with the heavy winds.  Just as we got inside the door of the house the rain came crashing down in huge abundant drops.  It couldn’t have missed us by any less without one of us getting wet.  Not a single drop fell on us.  The volume of the rain was incredible!  The thunder and lightening was quite a show for us to watch from the safety of the apartment window.  Cooper watched out the window too.  I can’t help but wonder what he might have thought of all that rain.  Did he realize we were almost caught in that?  Would he have cared? 

We stayed for a nice visit until the storm ended.  Only a short time passed when the sun had dried the ground, allowing us to give Howard a ride home.  We enjoyed a cookout on the grill at Howard’s house.  We stayed until about 10 PM and then rode back to our motel a few miles away.  We entered the comfort of our home away from home and started talking about what we wanted to do tomorrow.