Hailwood1965

I've been down to see my dad's grave only a few times since he died now more than 40 years ago. His final resting spot is something like 4-5 hours from my house in an almost forgotten village where the streets have no names. Each time I've visited the place in the last 25 years--twice--odd events struck.  The first time, in the early 1990s, I hadn't been by to see it in since I was 10-12 years old and swung by on a lark, somehow found the town on a map and parked my bike on one of the few paved streets in that little blue river town. I walked around remembering houses and buildings from one of my visits from my childhood. My dad had grown up in this town, and had graduated from high school there, when they still had a high school. His family settled in there as well, his brother, and assorted cousins and stuff. I'd been there for a wedding and a funeral when I was a kid, won my first fist fight (I'd lost a ton of them previously, of course) in an alley in that...

Day one with a rough CBX. The Minnesota State Highway Patrolman stepped back and looked at the giant hulk in the back of my son's truck. Ready to give him a speeding ticket the highway patrolman looked at the six cylinder powered beast for a few moments and asked what I learned was a popular question: "Does it run?" A 1979 Honda CBX popped up on a CL ad last month and we jumped in the truck to take a look. I spoke with the owner via phone and asked him the Big Question: "Does it run?" No, not now. But it WILL run someday, he said. Marion Minnesota is not an unknown location for me. It is home to Wheels Unlimited, probably the last 'no internet' Ducati dealership in the US. In fact Ducati USA dropped Wheels because the owner/brothers refused on principle to get a computer in order to relay parts orders. It wasn't the brothers who had the CBX, but a neighbor. He'd bought it from the original owner and tried to begin a restoration but was ...