Meet The New Rider Patricia Thurston Rider # 948

Ditch as she is affectionately known as by her friends grew up around motorcycling, Dad and several uncles, inner city ‘50s biker types, riding trail bikes by 12, a neighbor kids, we all shared riding Central Texas dirt fields on. Before graduating high school, I was married at sixteen, and we owned a 1976 AMF Sportster we chopped, piecing it together inside a second story apartment, hence got us evicted. By nineteen, I had saved enough money to buy a chopped 1952 Panhead, for then husband; which we rebuilt inside our apartment, engine, spray can paint and buff the chrome, in attempts to bring the bike back to the original style. I learned to ride street motorcycles on this tank shift bike with the ole man sitting behind me on a gravel road, he slid off and I was in the wind. We divorced, I lost both bikes, and sorta of inherited a 1982 HD Superglide, I road all winter through early summer

when I had a slide in the rain at seven months pregnant (’83) and the bike went with the owner. I

road a 1969 FL in the early ‘90s and finally had enough funds in 2011, paid cash for my Baby

Louise, `98 Dyna SG. I also own a 2015 HD FLS (Slim low), I don’t think is really a softtail, after

riding just at 5,300 miles round trip in 2015 from Denver, sharing about 1200miles with a Motor

Maid sister, to Moncton NWB and back around home!

Why She wants to ride Hoka Hey Motorcycle Challenge? Wow, to me it’s been on my ‘list’ for a number of years, after meeting my first challenger at the Broken Spoke Sturgis almost ten years ago, for the life, can’t remember his name, but what an influence he made when he spoke what the ride did for him, what he found. In recent years, though quite a few back 2012, I met Rob Keller, a very

knowledgeable, humble being who after knowing, I learned he was a challenger and thought

wow, the path comes back! Then the third sign, as it came to be, when I took a quick ride south

a few years back, knowing a major blizzard may greet us going home, I headed to Pueblo to

meet up with my co-rider, for a charity dinner on behalf of another fallen biker. We road

southwest to Wichita Falls Texas for steak dinner, stopped in Amarillo and wound up at this

gorgeous ranch early Saturday afternoon, where I met so many other Hoka Hey riders and one

special to me, Junie Rose. She was someone, a women distance rider like myself, that Rob and

Karen Keller had spoken so highly of and I had looked forward to meeting in the wind someday.

Here it was, the third sign, I had to get myself in, I had to be a Hoka Hey challenger, she gave

me a spark in our conversation that cool Texas evening on Christoff’s porch and I knew needed

this more than anything now, I needed to find my spirit from within, I needed this challenge, not

just for myself, but to find a way to share the experience of this, as it was shared with me. 

She will be supporting The Aiden Jack Seeger Foundation.