“I could tell by their spirits. I met them all in different ways. She used to buy boxes from me. I met her at a toy run. I can’t say all of the words from the day I met her, but we were at a Denny’s in Tyler, Texas and I heard her say, ‘Mo fo, I broke a foing nail. Don’t you hate when that happens?’ I didn’t know who she was, or where she was, but I liked her and we joined together and went looking for someone named Peanut. And my mirror here, we think alike. We have known each other a long time through a recovery program. A spiritual, mental, physical recovery program.”

“We help each other through life. We are emotional healing.”

“We all have the same Father. He is really a cool dude. He goes on us on every motorcycle trip. He talks and walks and plays with us too.”

“This is our fifth trip, but the first one that all five have gotten to go on together. We take a flat person of the one who can’t go. It has been Flat Linda or Flat Thumper, so we make sure we have a picture of us together.”

“Thumper?”

“I have a Thumper tattoo.”

“We all have one tattoo that matches. It means ‘I love you’ in sign language. Most of us have it on the back of our necks. When we are on our motorcycles and spur off to go home, we can’t say, bye and I love you, so we put our hand in the air and the tattoo is the last thing we see.”

“We only see each other once a year and we never miss a beat. It’s like we saw each other yesterday. We laugh every day.”

“Our motto is No Whiners, No Wieners, No Worries. Our men can’t go on these rides and my sister made this shirt for us.”

“We have seen each other through injury and divorces and death of family. They are there for me and give me strength.”

“I need the connection of these women to pull me up when I forget to fly on my own.”

“I come from a family of riders. I started riding when I was 9 and will be 58 on July 6. My brother was hit and killed on his bike on Memorial Day Weekend and two years later my best friend was killed on her bike on the way to my house. We had just done a road trip of 10 states.”

“Is it hard to stay focused on a motorcycle?”

“No. Your mindset is totally different. You are out there in the elements. The cold, the heat, the wet, the sunburn. You smell the good things and the bad things. You can’t make the same mistakes on a motorcycle that you can in a car. You clip a bumper and you are gone. But riding a bike is freedom.”

“Mama duck corrals us and gets us line. She has a mama duck tattoo. We were quacking behind her in the streets of Fairhope yesterday.”

“People have been so good to us this weekend. We haven’t decided about next year. Maybe Arkansas.”