Bike Week Lite...
Every year for most of America, the riding season always seems to start in the exact same location ... Daytona Beach, Florida, for Bike Week. For most of the hard-core riding crowd, the season ends in the exact same location for Biketoberfest. It has quickly become the weekend to enjoy one last ride before parking the bike for the winter. The good thing about Biketoberfest is that even though it takes up a lot of the same area as Bike Week, you can actually ride at speed instead of sitting in deadlocked traffic. Even though the crowd may not be as large, there are still plenty of vendors to be found at Destination Daytona. And, for the metric crowd, the Speedway is packed with vendors and hosts a really great bike show.
We actually started our Biketoberfest weekend hanging out with Dale and Vince from Wide Open Cycles. They had a pretty impressive layout of barbecue and bikes for the crowd. One of the highlights was a custom chopper they had built to raffle off for our soldiers overseas.
The next day was spent riding around from location to location checking out killer bikes and meeting bike owners from all over the country. Everyone always seems to have a crazy story to tell about their year out riding and, of course, a cold one to keep hydrated.
The nighttime in Daytona for Biketoberfest is just as crazy as Bike Week, and it looked like a rolling bike show on Main Street. We were out with the crowd until well past 3 a.m. Sunday came really early, but we finished up with a couple of great feature bikes and said good-bye to some friends before they headed home for the winter.
Biketoberfest is definitely a weekend you should hit up before packing up the bike for the winter. It gives you the best of Bike Week without the crowd keeping you from doing what you came to do in Daytona in the first place ... ride your bike.