The wind in your hair, the feel of the air in your face, the first-hand sense of your surroundings, the freedom of open water, or the open road. Those are part of the attractions we feel when boating…and riding motorcycles. No surprise, then, that Wanda Kenton Smith, one of the recreational boating industry’s finest marketing and advertising gurus, also loves to ride her classic, distinctive orange-and-purple Harley-Davidson Fatboy. (Her helmet even has purple pigtails.)
No wonder she convinced Freedom Boat Club, Hurricane Boats, and a bunch of her boating buddies, like Jim Krueger, Midwest Sales Manager for Regal Boats, to put together the Hull of a Tour 2015. It was a ten-day historical bike-riding and boating tour from Sarasota, Florida through St. Augustine, Florida, Savannah, Georgia, Charleston, South Carolina, Williamsburg, Virginia, Annapolis, Maryland, Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, and Charlottesville, Virginia, concluding with a Memorial Day rendezvous with Rolling Thunder at the Viet Nam Veterans’ War Memorial.
LEARN MORE ABOUT THE HULL OF A TOUR
There was lots of fun along the way. BOATING caught up with them in Annapolis, where they watched the amazing precision-flying display of the Navy’s Blue Angels over the Chesapeake’s Severn River celebrating Commissioning Week at the United States Naval Academy. Growing up in Pensacola, Florida, as the daughter of a Navy pilot, Wanda has watched this extraordinary team multiple times, but on the Severn that day, she was just as fascinated as a kid who had never seen them before as they executed their delta and fleur de lis formations, especially in honor of USNA Midshipman Justin Zemser, killed the week before in the Amtrak derailment near Philadelphia.
Fitting for the week before Memorial Day, the Hull of a Tour moved on to Gettysburg to tour that iconic battlefield with Wanda’s inspiring high school history teacher, now a volunteer guide there, and to Thomas Jefferson’s beloved estate, Monticello, in Virginia’s Blue Ridge mountains before paying homage to those who gave their lives in Southeast Asia on Memorial Day. For a first-hand account of this extraordinary motorcycle journey, as ridden by boaters, visit www.kentonsmithmarketing.com/hull-of-a-tour.html.
