I always loved the idea of owning a Harley Davidson, and for all the normal reasons a guy would want one. I never rode a street bike before and rarely a kids dirt bike, so this was something I had to learn to do.
About a year before I met Nicole I found an old 69 iron head, lowboy stretch Harley sitting in the corner of a country motorcycle shop. I couldn’t afford a new or even a decent used bike, so I made an offer to the shop owner on the dilapidated hunk in the corner. He gave me a strange look and asked “you work on bikes?” I said “no, but I can learn!” He chuckled…
After a few months of swearing, sweating and making mistakes… That old bike I named “Skully” roared to life. It was loud, rough and ya ached if you rode it more than 30 minutes. But it was my creation and I loved it. Being that it was so old and past it’s prime, at bars and bike rally’s it was a fan favorite. It wasn’t long after I met Nicole, and we literally spent the next few months bombing around the southeast carefree in the wind.
Leap forward a few years and all that was traded out for our lifestyle in the remote wilderness of British Columbia. More on that story here. I couldn’t bring my iron horse with me as there was no way to use it, so I sadly swapped it to a dear friend to settle a dept. It was like losing a best buddy.
My fix? Well, I had moved to wild horse country so I had to catch me a wild horse right? Again I couldn’t afford to buy one, and honestly like the Harley, I didn’t know how to ride. So then the story of Challenger began. When I caught him he was 12, the local Cowboys said that was too old to train, had hurt two Cowboys when he was 3, and had been running in the mountains free for 9 years. The perfect horse to learn from right!? But he was mine… So here I was, back to the swearing, sweating and making mistakes again…
Email me: michael@flyinglranch.ca