Aaron Ewer
Aaron Ewers thoughts about everything

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

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.

Since the wife has to lay off caffeine for a few days while she battles a bladder infection, we’ve been trying to find something for her to drink besides water. We got the brainstorm this morning to head over to the local Sonic Drive In and she ordered a watermelon slush. That really hits the spot when the temperatures outside hit into the 80′2 or 90’s, and today we with 84, last I looked.

I love the Sonic Drive In for the basic hamburger and chili cheese dog kind of quick meal, and the types of beverages and multitude of flavors is awesome. It can be hard to make up your mind just which one you want to order!

I wish we had Sonics when I was a kid, but I never saw one until we moved to Tennessee back in the 90’s. Witht he Sonic version of a drive in, you pull into a stall and stay in you car, then order through a car-side menu and speaker system, then a carhop brings your food out to the car. Some of them still have carhops bring the food to your car while skating on roller skates. That’s a lot of fun - reminds me of American Graffiti.

Today I decide that I’m going to dedicate one day each week to not driving anywhere in my car. If I absolutely HAVE to go somewhere I will either walk, ride a bicycle or take the Harley. Gas has hit $3.69 per gallon and this big jump in gas is killing our budget. We’re going to have to find some ways to cut back on expenses to make up for the extra cost of gas each week.

At the moment, I’m going to try to make the driving day off be on Sundays, as we always have a lot of family errands to run on Saturdays. But we have sometimes put off some of the errands on Saturdays and let them bleed over onto Sundays. But starting this week, I want to work harder at running the Saturday errands more efficiently and not drive on Sundays.

Saw the video clip of a pit crewman bouncing off the racetrack when Danica’s car ran into him today. The newscast says that he is in the hospital with relatively minor injuries, a concussion plus cuts and scrapes on his face. He’s lucky it wasn’t much worse and I’ve seen worse. From the video clip it seems like he wasn’t even looking at the approaching car and never saw it coming.

There was a short interview with Danica and she looked pretty haggard. Interestingly, she did not express anything that could be used against her later as admitting any fault or responsibility in the accident. She just said that she was glad to hear that he is OK and hoped that he got back to the track soon.