A Harley Whiz or a Helpmeet?

On New Year's Day, Emma and I made a trip to Kansas with Dear Husband.  Well, actually we followed him in the car.  He rode his Harley.

About an hour and a half into the trip, he suddenly pulled over into a car wash parking lot.  I whipped in there behind him and waited to discover the cause of this unexpected pit stop.  This waiting for him to tell me things when he is ready is something I have learned over the years.  Early in our marriage I would have instantly asked him what was going on.  This strategy did not work out well, because generally he was concentrating on the problem and how he was going to fix it and did not want the distraction of me asking questions.  It just added to his frustration.  So I have learned to wait, and when he is ready, he always comes to tell me, and everything goes much more smoothly, as I have not added stress to an already tense situation by asking questions he does not yet have the answer to.

I watched as he knelt down and began working on the bike.  This certainly did not look good.  After about ten minutes he walked over to us, described the problem, and explained that we would have to leave the bike there while we traveled back home to get the trailer.  He found a protected place to leave the bike at the Dairy Queen next door, which was closed for the holiday.

So we took off for home with Herb at the wheel.  I decided to use the key words he had used to describe the problem to me, along with the year and model of his bike, to do a Google search on my phone.  I ended up on a Harley forum and began scanning through a rather daunting list of diagnoses and fixes, most of them not doable in our situation.  However, I came across this one that was extremely simple, and I thought I would mention it to Herb and see if he thought it could apply to his problem.  He did, so we made a quick u-turn and soon arrived back at the desolate Dairy Queen.

In ten minutes, Herb gave a big thumbs up to me and Emma, and we resumed our road trip.  Later Herb told Emma that her mama is a "Harley Whiz".  That made me a little nervous, because I prefer to keep our roles clear.  He is definitely the mechanical genius in general and the Harley Whiz in particular.   So I told him that I am no Harley Whiz, that I just applied my research skills that I use regularly for taking care of my family to the situation at hand and lucked out!  He assured me that he was just teasing.

And we all lived happily ever after.