What My
Great Grandmother
Taught Me
C o u r t R a n d
The bedrock of our family during the challenging
conditions of the Great Depression my greatgrandmother,
Lucile Howenstine, was the matriarch of
my family’s farm in Huntington, Indiana (USA).
Lucile’s optimism and strength gave my family the
resilience they needed to get through such uncertain
times.
I think of her oddly enough when I find myself getting
excited about planning guided motorcycle tours and
self-guided adventures for customers. She had a saying;
“Anticipation is greater than participation.”
What she meant by that was that the planning and
the preparation for special occasions were often more
rewarding and just as much fun as the actual event. She
suggested that getting ready for the Christmas holidays
and the joy it brought her was as meaningful as the
holiday alone.
Getting prepared, inviting family, making gifts,
planning meals, and festively decorating the house was
just as important to her as Christmas day. The same can
be said for waiting for a child to be born, practicing and
preparing for a sports competition and, for planning a
motorcycle adventure; it’s preparing and anticipating an
occasion that can bring us as much joy and fun as the
event itself.
With a worldwide pandemic going on, it has probably
been tough to look forward to your next motorcycle
vacation with any sort of certainty but going on the
actual motorcycle tour is only a small part of the
vacation process.
A motorcycle tour (or any vacation for that matter) is
made up of three parts.
First, there is the planning and booking of the
motorcycle adventure. We pitch the idea to our
friends and loved ones and get them to join in the fun
of planning the adventure. We book the flights and
then sit down to pore over the tour description again
and again. We trace through the route, master basic
Spanish phrases, and investigate the highlights of the
trip on the internet. After we book a motorcycle tour,
the anticipation grows and grows until we can barely
contain ourselves. We end up dancing at the airport with
excitement while we think of all the fantastic things we
are going to do on our vacation.
The second part of a motorcycle vacation is the
adventure itself. All that anticipation boils over, and we
have an amazing time, doing things out of our comfort
zone; riding and exploring new parts of the world with
those we love. We try fresh coconut shrimp in a small
restaurant on Ecuador’s Pacific coast. We listen to the
birds as we float on inner tubes down the Napo River in
the Amazon basin. We hike through the rainforest to
TRAVERSE 77