Rolling Thunder Day! Up at 5:30 to meet Sis, Randy & Cliff for breakfast. We were all ready to go at 6:30 as planned. Headdog led 50 motorcycles to the Pentagon parking lot from our motel. When we got there, there seemed to be some confusion as to where to put our group. I had planned to ride up to the front of the line for better exposure for pictures. They stopped us and had the whole group pull all the way through and turn around again. I was at the end of our group so when it was time to go through, I pulled up to the front of a line and stopped. Randy, Sis, and Cliff followed my lead. A few minutes later, our group pulled right up beside me and formed 2 lines behind us!
After quite a few pictures, a director asked me to pull my bike forward so more people could see it. A while later, another director asked me to pull it farther up to keep the crowd out of the road. Every one loved the rat bike. Except one older lady. She walked up to it, stared at it, and said, “What a sin,” and tried to walk away. I stopped her and asked, “What part is a sin? The fact that I’ve been riding the same bike for 33 years? Or was it the fact that I’ve ridden well over 550,000 miles”? She said nothing as she made her way through the crowd. I told her, “I can only make so many people happy, and it’s just not your day!” The crowd loved it. There was a lot of the “Milo Show” as Stuart would say. After 3 or 4 hours, my throat was starting to hurt, so I walked away for a while and I let other riders in our group tell about the rat bike. I could only stand it for so long, and had to go back to answering questions and doing ‘show & tell’.
The porta-pottys were way off in the distance, and the lines were hundreds of people wide and deep. I waited in line once and it took 15 minutes to get to go. Back at my bike, there was a vendor booth across the way, that were selling Rolling Thunder hats and stuff. I bought a kerchief that had Rolling Thunder XXI on it. It was only $5.00. I gave him 20.00 and he said, “Thanks for the extra donation”. I told him he could keep the rest if I could use one of their personal porta-pottys. He said, “Sure”, and told the guard to let me use it. I thanked him and asked if I could use it again before the parade. Schultz said, “Sure”!
Randy & Cynthia were getting very over heated, and weren’t sure what was going to happen. It was better once we were in the wind when the parade started at 12:00. Our NVAR group went out right after the Run For The Wall gang did. As soon as it started, I told Headdog to come up front. My CO2 for my train horns ran out just after we started. I used my siren almost the whole way ‘cause it rubs on the back tire to work. There was a very big crowd waiting our grand entrance. Once we got going we made it four wide to make it go faster. The main ride was about 20 minutes or so. The crowd loved the rat bike along with the overwhelming sound of hundreds of thousands of motorcycles. The estimate was well over a half a million bikes.
After we got through most of it I came up to Randy and Cliff and said, ‘Lets get out of here”. They agreed and followed me. I made it on to a side street, and Randy followed. I found out later that one more bike made it in when a cop on a big horse stopped Cliff by walking in front of him and pointing to keep going. Randy followed me (blind leading the blind), and we did some city streets until I saw a sign saying hwy 29 south. That took us to hwy110, which took us to 395 south. We finally made it back to the motel, and we talked to Joni for a while. Randy & Sis went to rest in their room. It’s about 6:00 PM out here now and time to figure out dinner and a plan for tomorrow. I’ll let you know more as we figure it out!…….
