Its Labor Day 2012 and “WE” haven’t been on our Wing for over a month. That’s ridiculous!
There are a lot of excuses for that but none are really acceptable. Our last adventure was a ride
from Florida to Alaska and back but that was in 2008, since then we’ve been out and about on
our new Wing but it hasn’t been anything to brag about. We even wrote a book about our Alaska
ride and I think we were able to inform and inspire some folks about a ride like that. However,
that ride lasted for 69 days and covered almost 13,000 miles, not to mention a few bucks to make
it happen.
We are retired and just had Birthdays that put us in our “70’s”, so we have the time but we
realize that a lot of riders aren’t retired and don’t have the time. We also realize that times are
hard; bucks are hard to come by. With those things in mind we decided to try and come up with
a ride that would be just as thrilling, just as demanding but a hell of a lot closer and less costly
for most of us. We started looking at maps for something east of the Mississippi River and not
too far north, since it’s already Labor Day too far north could bring big problems with weather.
I’d spent part of my youth in Southern Indiana and had fond memories of beautiful foliage,
lovely fall days and hilly winding roads, especially in the southwestern part of the state, near
Nashville and many other picturesque small towns in that area. We could be in position to ride
some of those windy roads in two and a half days after leaving Florida, so Southern Indiana it
would be, we’d worry about the trip home when the time came.
They call Indiana the “Crossroads of America” and if you’ve ever been through Indianapolis
you know why. When you look at the state map with Indianapolis in the middle it looks like
the hub of a wagon wheel with blue spokes. I-65, 70, 74, and 69, all run through or around
Indianapolis. I have a lifelong high school friend that lives in Indianapolis and we would try for
a quick visit but we were going to concentrate on the southwestern part of the state, specifically
the area west of I-65 south of Indianapolis all the way to Vincennes to the west.
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