Bucket list wishes: Barbara’s ride on a Harley Davidson

Posted on by Ricky

At Huntington and Langham Estate, we were absolutely delighted to see one of our residents’ dreams come true.

If you’ve been keeping a close eye on our social media, you might have seen our ‘Moon Landings’ video, in which we set out to discover our residents’ experiences of this momentous event. Whilst recording the video, we asked our residents if they’d like to have had the opportunity to go to the moon, which, following further discussion, revealed some further ‘bucket list’ wishes.

It was here that we discovered Barbara, one of our residents who witnessed the footage of the 1969 moon landing first-hand, had a lifelong wish to ride on the back of a Harley Davidson motorbike. Barbara, now 88 years old and living in Huntington House, saw her first Harley in a pub car park and, mesmerised by its appearance, had longed for the experience ever since.

In talking about her wish, Barbara told us: “I always remember my husband and I coming out of the pub, into the car park and we saw a beautiful Harley Davidson. It was very special because it had streamers from the handlebars and a cowboy scene on the seat. I was so excited, I thought ‘I would love a ride on that’.

She added: “I would definitely ride one now, as long as I had a crash helmet, yes, I would! Yippee!”

With Barbara having expressed the desire, and recognising it was a definite possibility, the team here consequently wanted to do all we could to make it happen. Barbara has such an extraordinarily positive outlook on life that we wanted to make her dream a reality, which subsequently saw us going the full hog – not just settling on arranging a Harley, but also sourcing a proper biker’s jacket and organising an accompanying biker group!

We did, of course, equip Barbara with a safety helmet, and she was accompanied by a lovely motorcyclist who, driving a Harley Davidson trike, navigated (not too quickly!) around the estate grounds.

 

We were all delighted to witness Barbara achieving her dream, as were many others who followed the experience on our Facebook Live video.