The Last Hurrah....

This particular post is almost a personal one. Many of us here at WOW have been in the motorcycle business for decades and we have met all kinds of people from all kinds of places. And once you have been around awhile some of those people, well, pass on. Stark reality of life really. But we tend to hear about it a little more often in this business so after awhile you just get used to it and it is not as shocking. So when we first had a phone call from two brothers that wanted to rent a couple of bikes to go riding because one of them had stage four cancer, we thought, "well, are you sure about that?"
We meet Timothy and Scott Halleran for all of about an hour and a half while they were here picking their rental Goldwing and ST1300 to go ride in the mountains together. But during that time Timothy couldnt stop talking about their plans for riding. How excited he was to be able to have made it this far and he was thinking of this as "His last Hooorah"(ex-marine) with his brother and good friend. You hear alot of people say " Before I die..I want to....." And generally they mean some time in the future and they hope they are talking about years. When Tim said that he thought he was talking about months. He looked well enough. Big tall strong looking guy who kept joking the whole time he was here at WOW. We waved them off and sent them up to the mountains for their last ride together and Tim's Last Hoorah.
We write about this because we always hear people talking about the bucket list, or the one day list or the when I have the money list. But rarely do we meet the people crossing off the list.
Meeting Tim gave "The List" a whole new meaning to some of us around here and we wanted to share that with anyone who was interested.
As you can probably tell, Tim isnt with us anymore. He fell ill while on the trip and had to be flown by helicopter to a hospital and eventually transferred back down to Florida where he lived. While Tim was in the hospital in the mountains, he refused to ruin the trip for his brother and friend, insisting that they go ride for him and enjoy the beautiful scenery. Tim was an interesting fellow and we appreciated the opportunity to have him breeze through WOW and make us remember why we got into this business in the first place. For the love of the ride.
Make your list.
Start checking it off.
There is always an excuse to not ride. Tim reminded us of the good reason to ride.