Day 3 Wrap Up

Every day is a new adventure. Sgt Josh Forbess (pictured here on his Springer Classic) and his Captain, Bob Jenkins rolled into our hotel at about 0730 this morning. Josh's other toy is his new Harley Davidson F150 - life is good!

Josh conducted an interview for the local ABC news channel. I stood by as Josh told his story to the reporter. To this day, he still is overcome by emotion as he recounts his Blackhawk accident in November 2003 which took several American lives and left him badly burned. He does not remember the accident or the weeks preceeding the accident as he was in a medically induced coma for many weeks. The first thing he remembered after waking up was the Packers / Eagles playoff game and the 4th and 26 conversion which led the Eagles to victory.


Capt Bob Jenkins joined Josh at our hotel for our ride out of town (not so hard to get time off when you bring the boss along). Bob has only been riding for a month now, so having 18 wheelers blowing by him still is a little unsettling. He hung in there for about 10 miles before peeling off. One thing Bob will learn is that you don't just wear a T-shirt when its 55 degrees outside. That's ok walking around weather, but try it on a bike at 60MPH. It is COLD! Josh also only had a T-shirt but he was able to deal with it. Josh rode with us for about 75 miles, then we got some breakfast and bid him farewell.



As we crossed the Arkansas state line at 3:28PM we ran into another little mechanical problem as my turn signal lens popped off and hit Bob's bike, which was behind me. He didn't know what it was (and I didn't even know it happened) until we stopped for our radio interview with G. Gordon Liddy. We chose Dairy Queen for the stop and while Tom was on the phone with the G-man, we found an HD dealer outside Memphis that had the part (thanks to Dera for helping out on that one!).



















While we were having our ice cream, we noticed some guys outside checking out our bikes. Only one thing was unusual about these casually dressed guys --- they had guns and badges on their belts. Hmmm. We went outside and found out they were from Homeland Security - ICE division. I believe they said ICE stood for Immigration Customs Enforcement. They shared their frustrations about how politics and red tape still get in the way of getting their job done. We had a nice chat and they even donated a few bucks to the ride!




Next stop was the BumpusHarley dealer to fix my turn signal. That was a simple fix. At this stop we worked on RIDECAM again. As usual we got it working for a few minutes and then it died again. Bob had a nice chat with one of the guys at the HD dealership that just got approval for their own Rolling Thunder chapter. I'll let him talk about that.







Then it was off to Little Rock. The press coverage this time was the local CBS news channel that actually was on the side of the road filming as we were about 20 miles from our exit. They hopped in their car and videoed as we drove down I40. Tom and Bob took the lead on this interview and it was run on the 10:00 news as their TOP STORY! Here's the link to the video of the story: http://www.kthv.com/news/news.aspx?storyid=28712




Well, we are over 1000 miles now and off to Dallas in the morning. Things will really start to pick up as we will be meeting fellow RE/MAX agents from Kansas City. Then some Coaltion folks are coming to meet us. Oh, and the owner of Dick's Last Resort invited us for dinner! The weather finally got warm as we got near Arkansas and tomorrow's highs in Dallas will be in the 90s.

Once again another late night, so I'll be signing off. Oh one more thing...... we are really enjoying the blog comments that our friends are posting and the messages to the troops, which we look forward to giving to them. They come to Tom and my email which we read on our Blackberry and Treo at our meal stops. We've had messages from Iraq, Denmark and Korea! Unbelievable!