1997 Honda Gold Wing

   If you scroll back a few days you will discover that I owned a 1985 Honda Gold Wing motorcycle... After I sold it for a profit I had a couple other bikes, but in the year 2001 I decided I wanted another Gold Wing. They had changed their body style in 2000 and I didn't like it as well as the older body style. One day I grabbed the check book and headed for the Honda dealership in Plano.. A fellow employee at Wal-Mart had a new 1800cc Gold Wing and I had ridden it and got the bug for another big bike. I told the salesman about preferring the older body style and he said, "Do I have a surprise for you." We went into the make-ready department where they shine up the machines prior to delivery. There sat a 1997 Gold Wing Aspencade...with less than two thousand miles on it.

   
   I kept walking around the bike noticing it had a Michigan license plate, but I kept coming back to the odometer. Finally I could contain myself no longer. When I inquired about the extremely low mileage for a 4-year old bike I got this answer. A Michigan man bought the bike in Pontiac and he was an assembly line worker for General Motors in Detroit. He rode the bike one summer and put the bike in storage for the winter. He got married and after early marital difficulty his wife moved back to Texas and a month later he followed. They lived in an apartment for a couple of years and now wanted to buy a house. They decided to sell the bike for a down payment on a house. He had the bike shipped to Plano Honda and the dealership went over the bike changing all the fluids and installed a new battery. I rode it around for about thirty minutes and was convinced I had the buy of the year. This was a top-of-the-line bike with all the options. The dealership got the owner on the phone and we haggled for a bit before settling on a price. He got rid of the bike and I had an almost new Gold Wing for about nine thousand dollars less than what I had been ready to pay for a new one.

    In the top photo is my Green Wing along with my 1999 Kawasaki Vulcan Classic. The Vulcan was an 800cc bike but I had a set of Cobra pipes on it and it really sounded sweet. Just the thing for puttering around town or hanging with other biker dudes. Squeezer, our midnight cat, looks on without any interest. The bottom photo shows just how pristine the bike was. I installed the rack on the trunk the first week I had the bike. It was a six-cylinder 1500cc engine and ran so quite that I was always grinding the starter a second time when the engine was already running.

 
  When my wife made a cover for the 1985 Gold Wing, she made it out of denim and it weighed about 50 pounds when wet. On this one we learned our lesson and made this one from a sheet of plastic. This is my 1997 parked at the distribution center at Sanger after I transfered my stuff to the truck. Note she has also sewn an applique of Underdog to each side and the front of the cover. No doubt whose bike was under this cover.

    This is the bike I should have converted into a trike. It had a reverse gear for backing up and ran like a dream. In racing circles, green is suppose to be a bad luck color, but this color was super. Honda does a good job on painting these bike and this one was deep metallic green and would shine like a new penny when I applied some wax and elbow grease to it. I had this bike for just under two years and put an ad in Craig's List to sell it. Three guys got into a fight on my front yard as to who was going to buy it. One guy went to the bank for his funds, and another had to call his wife for approval. An insurance agent from Southlake pulled a wad of one-hundred dollars bills out of his pocket and started counting. He rode home with the bike. As he rode away I saw the Underdog between the tailpipes I had forgotten to remove.