Discovering The Mature Lifestyle
Marti Sanville takes trip to see camels in Egypt, elephants in Thailand. Page 6
Travel
November 19, 2015
November Issue
New Hope couple finds fresh air, magnificent views on a motorcycle BY SUE WEBBER CONTRIBUTING WRITER Betty and Ron Schumacher of New Hope are motorcycle aficionados. Married 11 years, they have taken eight big trips on their Harley. “I’m on the back with the camera,” said Betty, who retired in 2011 from her job as office supervisor at the New Hope Police Department. She said she finds the trips “kind of liberating.” “You can’t pack that much,” she said. “You don’t worry about your hair. I don’t even take hair products along.” Ron has been a motorcycle rider since the early 1970s; he got his first cycle in his early 20s. “I had a BMW first, in the ’70s,” he said. “I liked that old bike. For a while we had three bikes.” He doesn’t do major mechanical work, but does do the basic repairs. Ron didn’t wear a helmet at first, but he does now. Betty’s colleagues at the New Hope Police Department urged her to convince her husband that helmets are a necessity for motorcycle riders. One of the Schumachers’ longest trips started in New Hope and went as far as Durango, Colorado. “There were a lot of high passes,” Ron said. “We rode the Million Dollar Highway. That was our best trip to this point.”
The couple l had h db l been planning a ffuture trip to Nova Scotia, but their trips have narrowed in scope by necessity. Betty had bone marrow cancer and then a kidney transplant in February 2015. But they’ve still been able to take some motorcycle trips, traveling 200-300 miles a day and sometimes pulling a trailer of medical equipment. While Betty was still under medical care, they occasionally had to stop somewhere along the way for Betty’s dialysis treatments. Their travels have included trips to the North Shore, where they rented a house in Superior and rode on the shoreline. They also traveled to Mackinaw Island and northern Michigan, the area where Betty grew up. Their longest trip was to Yellowstone, Wyoming and the Grand Tetons. Their time in Colorado and through Rocky Mountain Park was “totally awesome,” Betty said, though some of the narrow mountain roads were “white-knuckle time.” The trip to Colorado was the best, she said. “I hadn’t been in those mountains before,” Betty said. “They were just so awesome.” However, she said, when they’re traveling through the Colorado switchbacks, “you learn to sit very still.” “Now I say a prayer when I get on the bike and then let it go,” Betty said. “I really totally trust Ron as a driver.” She does recall one “white-knuckle”
Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming was one of the Schumachers’ stopping places. (Submitted photo) trip in Arizona in mountains that had turned into a dirt road and they couldn’t turn back. The road led straight down. “We drove 25 miles winding on a narrow-ledge road,” she said. The Schumachers flew to the Florida Keys and rented bikes there during the winter. Even when they took a cruise around
Hawaii, they rented a Harley to do some biking on their own. Yes, they’ve ridden in the pouring rain, too. They have been to the annual gathering in Sturgis, but generally avoid it because too many people congregate there, Betty MOTORCYCLE - TO PAGE 3