Aaron Ewer
Aaron Ewers thoughts about everything

School will be starting up again here. Some neighboring counties are actually starting back this week, and by the end of next week I believe all the kids in the area will be back in school. That doesn’t worry me too much other than having to spend a bunch of money on school uniforms and supplies this month.

The upside to this is that if we can still get away for a short vacation, the beaches won’t be near as crowded yet there are still two months left of great beach weather at all the Gulf of Mexico beaches.

I checked online for a condo rental in Destin or anywhere along the Florida panhandle and found a great site, Rentalo.com to help book a condo. I was pleasantly surprised to see all the listings they have for Destin condos and I think we can find the perfect spot tonight and make our plans.

This same site handles condo rentals for all over the U.S., so I checked out what they have listed for Kissimmee vacation villas because we want to go back to Disneyworld for Thanksgiving and visit the grandparents in New Port Richey.

With air travel costs going up every week, we should probably book our spring break trip, too. So I checked the condo listings for Cancun and compared those with villas Puerto Vallarta deals and as long as we can get the new passports for the kids, we’ll have all our travel booked in some great spots for really great prices.

It’s been a while since I went into a Harley Davidson dealership and looked at a bike. They are still an elusive dream for a lot of middle aged boomer guys, and Harley Davidson is really playing up to their fat wallets. There is all kinds of gear and accessories heavily logo’d for the new rider to spend money on.

The home base for H-D has always been Milwauke and now they have opened a new museum. Anyone with an interest in the story of America’s bike tradition will probably enjoy this. There’s a great video on the new museum from the Chiago Tribune web site:
H-D Video

For all the doomsayers I don’t think this hurricane season has been any where near as bad as they were predicting. Here it is almost August and they are only up to the letter “D” for Dolly, which is threatening the southern Texas and Mexicans shores of the Gulf of Mexico.

Don’t take me wrong - I’m all for a low impact hurricane season. What I’m saying is I’m sick of these so called experts being sought out to grandiousely pronounce that we’re going to have major weather-related tragedies. Surely there are experts that were also saying that this season will not be very bad, but that’s just not sensational enough to make the news.

I’m sick of the news media channeling my thoughts and concerns with all the doom and gloom. They need to focus on what is actually happening and report the facts - not opinions and not advice.

Our CEO is a high profile man who travels most of the time. His life is truly a series of airport to hotel to board meeting to airport type of days. He flies all over the country 5 days a week but insists on being home with his family on the weekend. If he absolutely cannot be home on the weekend he often arranges for his family to be flown out to wherever he is meeting so they can have some short trips away and spend time with him. I admire his resolve and dedication to his family.

Last week he was supposed to fly back to Nashville from a Las Vegas convention. The flight was supposed to stop in Houston, but with such bad weather, his flight was diverted to Arkansas. With it being so late and with the really bad weather, he couldn’t find another commercial flight to get him home for the final leg of his trip. I overheard his secretary begging the travel agent to find a way to get him home, and what they ended up doing was chartering a private plane from Arkansas to Nashville.

He sang the praises of the charter service called Wing Aviation when he came in the office the next day. He says the plane was first class equipment, the crew was top notch and they got him home safely and quickly. What more could you ask for? Thank goodness his secretary and the travel agent were resourceful enough to search for and find the keywords airplane charter Arkansas to find Wing Aviation’s contact number and get him home that night.

A story in today’s Chicago Tribune reports that Sonic will be entering the Chicagoland market this year with 4 new drive-in restaurants. That’s great news! What took them so long?

Sonic is headquartered in Oklahoma and is the country’s largest operator of drive-in restaurants, with over 3,000 drive-ins nationwide. SONIC enjoys the highest customer frequency rate in the quick-service restaurant industry.

In 1953, SONIC was founded by Troy Smith and was originally named Top Hat Drive-In, and the name was changed to SONIC in 1959. The prototype of the first SONIC Drive-In opened in Shawnee, Oklahoma and the unique use of curbside speakers to allow customers to place food orders without leaving their cars, was the basis for their slogan of “SONIC, Service with the Speed of Sound.”

They have a special offer of milkshakes for 99 cents - that makes it awfully hard to drive past one without stopping for a different milkshake flavor every day at a bargain price!