'Tis the Season

And its always a busy one. Places to go, people to see, and a boatload of stuff do do around the house from cleaning, decorating, cooking, gift wrapping, etc. Still have to find time to relax occasionally.

This past Saturday was our AEHOG Christmas Party. Always a lot of fun and this year we had premium jello shots smuggled in as the hotel clamped down on the TABC rules a bit.

One of the big announcements this year was the results of our effort to be the first HOG chapter to ride 2,000,000 miles in a year. North Texas HOG was the first or one of the first to ride 1 million a couple of years ago.

Our chapter heavily promoted this event and aggressive targeted new members to join, which was needed if we even had a hope of achieving this incredible milestone. Earlier this summer we had a bit of a checkpoint and I think our efforts were in jeopardy but it was never communicated. In fact North Texas were also trying to achieve this milestone, and were far short, at roughly 1.2 million miles.

Anyway we have approx 400 members, of which a large portion partipated in the activity. But collecting all the miles in a timely manner was very difficult. At the deadline we still had about 60-80 members who had not reported. We extended the deadline for those members for an additional week or so, this was planned from the outset.

At the party, Lynn held everyone in suspense, teasing us at one point during the party with a faux announcement, that had us about 200,000 miles short.

Finally the official announcement 2,004,880 miles. Woo Hoo!!! Honestly, I had no idea if we would make it or not. Even if we collected from only 200 members. Actually we had results from 213 riders. That is just roughly 9,400 miles each on average, which is considerable miles for a "recreational" vehicle as most folks don't use the bikes as their primary transportation.

Darlene and I both contributed, with her having 11,072 miles and myself riding 18,688 miles. I was a bit short of my 20K goal, but considering the riding we did not do in the latter half of the year, it was still quite good. I think next year we will reduce our goals again rather significantly as we have a lot of projects to finish that we started last year, and our boys are at an influential age and its important that we are around to give them proper guidance. Hopefully gas will stay down in price though....

Also, special shout out to Senator Dave Zien. As the story goes, he had a issue with his motorcycle just a couple of miles from the dealership. From what I understand his visit to the dealership and his meetings with AEHOG members was so great, that he joined our club just so that he could contribute to our goal, and contribute he did to the tune of 55,897 miles.

Of course all these miles come at a cost. Fortunately for most of us its literally just financial. So also this past Saturday, I needed to put new rubber on my bike. Both front and rear, at 44.8K miles.