Vacationing with the Motorcycle Gang

All this talk of vacations has me thinking of the weirdest vacation we went on when I was a child. We were meandering through the Appalachians, with no particular destination in mind, and we were at this little campground way up in the mountains, just us and, as it happened, this vacationing motorcycle gang. The gang was made up of about thirty men, with assorted women and children, and motorcycles and vans and rottweilers and other mean-looking dogs. Lots of tattoos and big moustaches and long hair (I thought they were strange-looking, but handsome. I still do.). All us kids spent a good three days in the pool or playing in the creek. And my mom folded laundry with the women and my dad whooped out his guitar and amused them (god, I can't even imagine) with his renditions of such classics as "House of the Rising Sun" and... well, he only knows three chords, but what he lacks in talent, he makes up for in enthusiasm, so I'm sure he bellowed his way through tons of songs. And then we all packed up and moved on to the next place. For about a week, we just traveled with these bikers, because they were nice and we had no place we needed to be. The unexpected result of this was that for a good three or four years, my dad would get at least two weddings a summer from this group. A couple and their kids would stop by and my mom and I would fish our official Harley Davidson t-shirts procured just for such an event out of a drawer and put them on and go stand as witnesses to the wedding. God, we must have seemed so damn corny.