It was just after new year’s when New Orleans finally turned cold. It would prove an uncommonly brutal winter over most of the U.S. this year. For two decades I’d spent these frozen months all over the southern states and had learned beyond doubt that southern Florida is the only stateside place that offers summertime temperatures all winter long. This was the destination now. As the back roads across southern Mississippi, Alabama, then the Florida panhandle opened up I peaked from the great pile of laundry worn upon my body against the intense cold, to watch the spectacular beauty of landscape ahead.
It had been at the Florida, Leesburg rally early last year that I’d met a man who said he’d recently retired with a small pension and would soon be moving onto his motorcycle. I had taken this talk in stride; for I’d heard it before. Yet it had been some months later that—aboard an old BMW—he’d met up with me in Idaho and we’d spent most of a month together, 10 days of which had been touring the hot springs of those Rocky Mountains. Later, we’d hooked up on Texas too. To date, he’d been one of the happiest road-dogs I’d ever known. Well, Tom had also chosen to winter in Florida and we’d agreed to spend time together there as well.
As the road left the panhandle to begin its southward decent along Florida’s west coast, the weather began to warm. What a wonderful sensation, for I was sick of long underwear and and having my balls sucked up into the heat of my body.
