A Real Life Member Story worth the read!!

[the chi]

Courtesy of that crazy "old" guy with the fancy busa!

He shared this after seeing the old Member of the Month Thread, and it is definitely worth the read. How many of US have wanted to do something just like this? How many have?

Member Name: MFFJM2
Current Ride: 2007 Suzuki Hayabusa
How many years have you been riding: 40+
What is your preferred style(Track, Street, Dirt, Etc): Street
Dream ride and why: I already own my dream ride.
Best Advice for your fellow riders: Keep the rubber side down.

I’ve had many memorable rides in my 40 years of motorcycling, but the most memorable so far was the one I took when I was just seventeen years old with Chris Czarnota, in the summer of 1969. It was also the summer of the first Apollo moon landing, the summer of Woodstock, and the summer of the Manson murders in LA. It’s hard to believe it all happened over 40 years ago. But that was the summer that I rode from Perth Amboy, New Jersey to Vancouver, British Columbia.

A friend of mine, Ricky Shannahan, who was a couple of years older than I was, had gotten his father to buy him a brand new 1968 Triumph, Bonneville T-120R the year before my trip. He’d been riding it at night, after drinking. He crashed the bike putting himself in the hospital and in critical condition. While Ricky was recovering from his injuries his father was going to junk the bike. When I found out I convinced Ricky’s father to sell the damaged bike to me. I spent the next year fixing it up and getting it in running condition.
Chris Czarnota, another buddy of mine, had just gotten a new 1969 Honda CB 750, and the two of us decided to take a long ride in order to break in our bikes properly. I’d always wanted to ride across the country, and this seemed like the perfect opportunity. Chris was eighteen, and had just graduated from High School. I had another year of school to go. After the summer vacation I would be returning to high school, and then probably heading off to college. When Chris returned from our trip he was going into the Army, and probably Vietnam. We both agreed that we needed to save for a month to have enough money to make the trip possible. We planned to stop and visit relatives and friends along the way, in order to reduce costs. We agreed to start on the 4th of July.

I was a pretty independent even then, and since I often stayed away from home overnight I just told my parents I’d be traveling with Chris for a few days, to break in our bikes.

The route we decided on was a little off the beaten path, because we didn’t just want to drive the interstate, but wanted to see more of the countryside. We drove north out of New Jersey from Hwy 20 to 287 and then north of Greenwood Lake we turned northwest riding on Hwy 17. We stayed on Hwy 17 all the way to Binghamton, NY. That was about 175 miles, and it was after noon when we stopped to get something to eat, fuel up, and get some much needed rest.

We had hoped to make Cleveland, OH on the first day, but by the time we got to Erie, PA we were bushed, and called it a day. We broke out our sleeping bags by “Six Mile Park”, just off I-90. The traffic wasn’t very heavy, with most people traveling for their summer vacations. It was perfect riding conditions. The temperature never got above 80 degrees, and the morning low was about 60. There was no rain the first day or night, and we slept soundly.

The next morning we had breakfast in a little diner in Erie, PA before heading back out on the road. About a mile from the diner the main drive chain on my motorcycle broke. I was sitting at a stop light, and then Chris pointed to the ground beneath my motorcycle, and there was my motorcycle chain. I assumed the O-ring had come unattached, but who knows. We pushed the bike to the curb, and I rode with him to the Erie Harley Davidson shop where we bought a chain. We returned to my bike, installed the chain, and we were on our way.

Our next stop was Milwaukee, WI where we knew a guy from Jersey who was spending the summer with his grandparents. This was the worst part of the ride, because we kept riding through dirty and run-down cities. We drove through Cleveland, OH; Toledo, OH; South Bend, IN; Gary, IN; Chicago, IL; and Kenosha, WI on our way to Milwaukee. We were welcomed in the home of the grandparents of our friend from Jersey, and stayed there for two days. The guy’s grandmother seemed to spend the whole day cooking, and the meals were large and excellent. I’ve never seen so much food in one place, and it seemed the family grew at each meal. The only obligation we had was to listen to her husband preach before each and every meal, but the food made that ordeal worth it.

We left after two days, and because we were falling behind in our plan we decided that we wouldn’t stop for more than one day anywhere else along the rest of the trip; a promise we were going to break several times before we got back home.

Our next stop was going to be Duluth, MN. I had an Aunt and Uncle living in Duluth, and they had agreed to let us crash there over night. It only took 8 hours to get there, and I was glad to stop. The weather had been terrible with fog and rain and a high temperature of about mid 50’s. It was hard to believe it was July. We ate, and got a good night’s rest before taking off the next morning to clearing skies and constantly rising temperatures until it finally reached the mid 70’s. We dried out quickly in the warming weather, and kept pushing west.

We took Hwy 2 from Duluth through the Chippewa National Forest to Bemidji, and from there to Grand Forks, MI, and then on to Minot, ND. Why Minot..? My riding companion had another friend from Jersey stationed at the Air Base in Minot, and we were going to get our next place to crash at his on post quarters. This friend of Chris’ was a young married Air Force NCO with a wife and new baby. Nine hours later we pulled into the enlisted quarters at Minot Air Force Base. I was pretty tired, so I don’t remember saying more than two words to Chris’ friend or his wife, before pulling out my sleeping bag and crashing. I was so tired I didn’t even eat.

Those of you who’ve been on long rides know that after riding awhile you become practically numb, and don’t really feel fatigued until you get off the bike, and then you can’t hardly move. That was how I felt when I arrived at the Minot Air Force Base. Chris woke me at 5:00 am the next morning and told me we needed to leave because his friend was already up and getting ready to go to work. We drove into Minot and found a little Café where we had breakfast. It was the 10th of July, and we’d been on the road for nearly a week and driven 1,800 miles. The air temperature was mid 60’s already, and the local weather report on the radio in the diner said it was going to get near 90 degrees.

We were traveling west through North Dakota and Montana towards our next stop Great Falls, and the scenery was really fantastic. These were the Badlands, and you could easily imagine millions of buffalo roaming these truly wide open spaces. We drove by the Theodore Roosevelt National Park, the Grasslands National Park, and many other smaller parks on the way. We found a cheap hotel near Black Eagle Falls, just north of Great Falls, and spent the night. The next day we found the Honda had a flat tire, and it was a puncture in the sidewall. We spent the day getting the tire replaced at a Honda dealership. After wasting the day at the Honda dealership we went back to the Hotel, and stayed another night so we could get a fresh start in the morning.

The next day we took off for Spokane, WA. The weather was less than perfect as we ran into intermittent rain all the way to Missoula, but the temperature was about 80 degrees, and the rain wasn’t hard enough to hold us up much. We pulled into Spokane, WA late in the afternoon, and it was sunny and 75 degrees according to the Bank we passed. We were trying to find a hotel with a vacancy that would take motorcycles (some wouldn’t back then), and finally went to a bar to get something to eat, and a beer. I wasn’t of legal age to buy alcohol, but I looked older. In those days if you looked old enough people usually wouldn’t bother to check your ID. Just in case I also had a fake ID that said I was nineteen. A driver’s license was easy to fake back then because they didn’t have pictures on them and they were made of paper. It was in this bar in Spokane that Chris met a couple of girls from Eastern Washington State College in Cheney, WA.

EWSC was a small college just about 15 or so miles south of Spokane. The co-eds decided, after only a few drinks, that we needed to come home with them to their apartment, especially if there was a chance they could ride on our bikes. We spent the next four days in Cheney, WA, and I almost decided to go to college there because it was such a fun place. The college girls were tired of the guys from nearby Fairchild Air Force Base hitting on them, but we were exotic and from the East Coast, and best of all we had motorcycles.

We left Cheney, WA and made the final leg of our trip to Vancouver, BC traveling through Snoqualmie Pass, Issaquah, Seattle, Everett, and finally the US/Canadian border and Vancouver, BC. When we arrived in Vancouver on the 18th of July it was 64 degrees and the sun was shining. We had been traveling for two full weeks, and had logged over 3,000 miles. We were nearly out of money, and the trip had left me weary to the bone. Chris suggested we try to sell the bikes in Seattle, and use the money to fly home. The next day we took the bikes to a car wash in SeaTac. We then drove the bikes down to a motorcycle shop and sold them. We used the proceeds to buy two tickets back to Newark, NJ and Chris had his Mother come and pick us up at the airport.

When I got home, my father asked where I’d been for two weeks, and I said I’d been riding my bike with Chris. He asked where the bike was and I told him I sold it. He never asked me anything else about it.

Even today I sometimes think back to those days in the summer of ’69 when everything lay before me. We really did feel like we could accomplish anything, and that we’d live forever. When I dream I can still feel the wind and the sun from that ride, looking forward to any adventure waiting around the next bend in the road.

I finished the summer vacation regaling my friends with stories of motorcycling across the country, and then went back to High School for my senior year. PFC Chris Czarnota went into the Army as a dog handler, because he really liked dogs. He was killed in action from an undetermined explosion on March 22, 1971 in Quang Tri Province, South Vietnam, six months to the day before his twentieth birthday. Rest in Peace Chris