am 6’ 4” and weigh 300 pounds, and Billy Jack is 5’

Bob Bitchin

with no sleep. Then came our downfall. A road called the George Wallace Highway, also known as Alabama 80, looked like a short cut on the map, so we decided to take it. That was a mistake. This road is used by all of the big eighteen wheelers to go around the weight scales and they do it at no less than 80 miles an hour, curves and things that no sane man would try at 60 included. We dodged the big trucks and tried to stay awake. After 34 nonstop hours we were starting to weaken. Then we hit this foolish drawbridge and almost lost the game. I figure the designing engineers must have hated bikes and known the width of motorcycle tires. They put steel girders just far enough apart to catch bike wheels and hold them. We had to go over almost at a crawl speed, with 18-wheelers disputing our right to be there. I recall this to be the trickiest riding required in the entire 10,000 miles. A large truck crossed the double line a few miles farther up the road and knocked one of the sleeping bags off my bike. Billy Jack tried to turn around to pick it up, but his front wheel lost it in some gravel, and he ended up on his keister in the middle of the road, with two large 18-wheelers bearing down on him. When I pulled my hands from my eyes after the longest screech of brakes, I saw Billy Jack sitting in the middle of the road with two large trucks about 5 feet from him, their tires smoking from a king-size panic stop. We got his bike out of the way and loaded my sleeping bag back on the bike. We headed into the

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Biker

next town, Selma. As we sat filling up our tanks I looked at my

watch.

We didn’t make it. It was exactly 36 hours to the minute since we left the West Coast, and we still had over three hundred miles to go. We thought we could do it, but we couldn’t. To celebrate (?) we got a motel room and had our first good meal in the last two days, thick steak, washed down with mucho tequila. That night we slept well. In fact, almost too well since it was almost 11 a.m. the next day when we woke up. No matter how bad things look at night, you can count on the fact that they will look even worse the next day. Here we were in a place called Selma, and we hadn’t seen one bit of the country between Los Angeles and here. We decided that it was time to slow down and start enjoying the trip. We looked at a map and decided it was a good time to see Atlanta, Georgia, since neither of us had been there before. We headed north-east. You know something? You can sure see a lot of a town when you ride through on a bike. It was really neat to think that just three days earlier we were at home, and here we were all the way across the country, riding through a strange town on our bikes. We really felt good. We kept heading north all that day, and by night were heading into Winston-Salem, North Carolina, where my long-lost brother lives. I hadn’t seen him since we were kids, so I gave him a call, after searching

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