Mount Washington Ski Bus

In the summer of 1998 I took a trip on a motorcycle that many people consider a dream of living. Add to this the fact that I did as an act of my job, all expenses paid for nearly seven weeks. Since I had 4 weeks vacation and finds most boring vacation, I offered my employer my 4 weeks holiday they would let me travel on my bike to visit as many constituents that I have been on their behalf. They agreed that trade.

My job was to visit many donors and potential donors as I could for Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia. For this feat, I committed a turquoise and white 1994 Harley-Davidson Wide Glide with pipes of thunder that has always caused the elderly and middle-aged to recall all the big words they could imagine. I loaded a giant T-bag that probably weighed 75 pounds with clothes for all occasions and he perched behind me in the passenger seat for a folder. On the morning of June 22, 1998, I yelled at my Holland, Michigan, ran for a starter and a dinner at York, Nebraska, that night, 753 miles on the pike. York is about 100 miles to the state, 50 miles outside of Lincoln on I-80. U.S. 81, a highway that runs from Oklahoma to Canada through crossroads York. The city is about 97% white and rural. There are many Germans in this area. It sits at the gateway to the Great Plains and is flat as a pancake. west towards York on a sunny day and the sky will open before you like a movie that you sit on a concrete slab 2-way straight as an arrow.

I made this trip to York scores of times to see some single farmer who lit a cigarette off the previous one, ate toast and Texas T-bone steak every night of his life, and shed his stiff black coffee throat as if someone had a heat stroke. Then he went home with a belly full of caffeine, meat, and smoke and sleep, as if he was in a coma. The ground seat passenger in his car or truck was piled with coffee cups and cigarette butts in a dashboard covered with brown dust. Driving to Chicago for him was like driving in a nest of cobras in Calcutta. He hated every second. Sitting alone on a tractor or another pound steak and coffee in a coffee-fly-infested truck stopped in front in a town called Sutton, Nebraska, was the same as Disneyland in him. He had aa Blue Heeler that would sit beside him in the van and threatening look down all the cars coming down the road. As the car approached, the dog's head would lower his eyes and pearls in the coup. When the vehicle passed, the dog's head would whip to the left to the last challenge, as if saying, "I thought." I visited several people in Des Moines, Iowa, on the way it and when I arrived, I could barely keep my eyes open for dinner, when he was almost choked on a 20 ounce T-bone, a chuck wagon, coffee and cigarettes enough to finish a cancer ward.

The next morning I drove down I-80 that the slab on the same ground covered wagons that 50,000 a year used for travel in the 1850s and entered the main gate of the Oregon Trail Kearney, Nebraska, which was named after Stephen Kearny who is called "the father of the U.S. cavalry." Between 1843 and 1869, more than half a million men, women and children, drove and walked the trails around here on the West Coast. All roads converged here from Oregon in Kearney, a natural route through Nebraska and the easiest part of the trail in Oregon. There were no bridges, no shops or houses, no food, except the buffalo, no roads, except they did with their chariots, and some sign posts indicating primitive and uncertain of how precarious along the Oregon Trail. Just before arriving Kearney, straddling I-80 is a large arch and a museum called The Great Platte River Road Archway. A stop there.