Motorcycle diary
Riding islands in the sun
By GREGORY TYRER “Riding in the Caribbean” came up one
day in casual conversation with three of my riding buddies, Mike Code, Rob Gilchrist, and John McLees. Mike said he had been on a cruise ship
and had noticed motorcycles getting on and off at each port. So he asked about it, and discovered there were motorcycle Caribbean island cruises through a company called Entertainment Travel Alternatives (ETA). It seemed like a good idea to us, and we
decided to give it a try. The men would trailer the bikes to Florida, and our wives would fly down and meet us for the cruise later. We contacted ETA and spoke to Tami
Newton. We booked the staterooms and paid an extra $325 for each bike to go with us. At the end of January we crawled into
Mike’s truck, the trailer loaded with our bikes. We were ready to leave the -40 degrees c. behind and head to the sunshine state. John had no idea what his next 28 hours
would be like. The rest of us did. Mike was a former long distant trucker. Rob and I were retired police – We had spent our careers in
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vehicles, driving and staying up all night. We were going to keep moving, stopping only as necessary. With four drivers you can do that sort of thing. We’d be in Florida a few days before our wives arrived. We’d have a chance to feel the bikes and the wind in our faces before we set out on the cruise ship. Our gas fill-ups were more like NASCAR
pit stops, and we were right back on the road, putting miles between us and the cold. John found it much more difficult than the rest of us. Eating on the road and not stopping for pee breaks unless we had to stop for gas was getting to be a bit much for him. Poor John. We had no sympathy, no mercy. We forged on.
We finally made it to Fort Lauderdale just
ahead of bad weather moving in behind us in the north. Now it was time to ride. White sand sure beat cold snow! And then things got a bit complicated.
Two days before we were to set sail with our bikes on board, the oil pump on John’s Harley failed. There wasn’t much anyone could do. All the bikes had to register with
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