Bike Week has come and gone and life in Daytona is returning to normal. Another year, another parade of sparkling bodies, boobs, leather, and chrome. This year I played it smart and only went up the first weekend, the nice quiet weekend where Daytona still belongs to the locals and righteous riders. I had a blast hanging out at the Upper Deck Bar overlooking Main Street and the parade of thunder below. That will be my modus operandi for years to come. The weather was nice...rained just enough to keep the sissies off the streets but the sun won out and shined brightly most of the days. I was diligent in keeping the Daytona weather report posted on my web site.

For those of you who want to do some serious cruising on the information highway, you can check out my web site at www.pelenet.net/~lori. Head out on some of the side roads on my links page and you could be gone for days. You can find all kinds of cool shit on the web. Remember, that’s how I met our new Iron Horse World System leader, Hammer. Everybody’s getting in on the action. This year, even the local photo shop in Daytona had a live camera pointed on Main Street from three different angles to catch most of the riff raff and scooter trash that wanted to show their ugly faces to the world via the Internet. Ah, the web is a wonderful place. No one has to know who you are. You can travel in secrecy, like a phantom, going from bike shop to bike shop. Hey, I even met some of my cyber space (or would that be spaced out), pals during bike week. You never know who you’ll run into these days.

Back to Main street. I thought I would again witness the annual yuppie invasion like years past, you know, the Sunshine State’s edition of the gay pride parade, drag queens, trailer whores and effeminate bikes honoring the factory’s influence, with their fearless leader Willy G heading up the cast. But I must admit, I was pleasantly surprised. What I saw while I was in Volusia County were some nice, lowbuck, original customs, not the billet, machined, conveyer belt, cookie cutter bull shit, either. I saw lots of leather tooled seats, hand fabricated pegs, powder coated sheet metal and hand made originalia. But then again, I was only there the first weekend. I gotta know one thing fellas, who gives you the right to ride in hawaiian shorts and sneakers with your hairly legs up on the billet forwards? If your gonna dress down, us ladies require the thong and chaps outfit! Pleeeze! I know none of you guys reading this would EVER even THINK of showing yourself on a Harley with that getup. I did think the gals with their bare chests painted was pretty cool, but for the barmaid who wanted me to PAY her to take a picture of her chest, honey, your chest wouldn’t have appealed to any of our loyal readers anyway. That stuff should be free to the public if you’re gonna go around showing off your body like that. Sorry guys, but I’m not paying for ANY boob job, especially some barmaid’s.

I learned a lot about Daytona’s history from the Ellis brothers, who own the Upper Deck Bar, the one I mentioned earlier that overlooks Main Street. From high atop their deck, you could pretty much catch all the action, since their smack dab in the middle of it all. I asked them how their location came to be and was quite surprised to hear that their grandmother, Ruth Carter, sold oranges and citrus from a little cart there, back in the 1940’s. Then their father, in the 1960’s, opened up a little store, called Ellis’ Fruit Store but moved it to the corner in 1977, which is now Ellis’ Grocery. The major part of their time is spent working with BAM, Biker’s Against Manslaughter. They travel to Sturgis every year, and this year will include Myrtle Beach in their BAM itinerary to help get the message out there to make sure cagers see us on two wheels and that killing or injuring a biker will not be taken lightly. I want to thank Jim, Jody, Tim and Rob Ellis for the hospitality they showed us while in Daytona and their patronage to the Horse. They’ve been reading this rag, well, since they learned to open a magazine and look at cool pictures.

Again, I’ll look forward to next march, just to see how many trailers I can count. I like the ones with the full dressers with the blankets rolled up on the handlebars, bungeed on so they look like they actually rode somewhere.

Think they’ll ever get it?

Angel