BluesStringer
Les Brers
So on Saturday, May 28th around 10:00 A.M., an acquaintance of mine that I met on an organized ride a couple or three months ago called to tell me his club was headed out to Rolling Thunder in the next couple of hours, and asked if I/we wanted to ride along. I said, "Hold on, I'll ask GW if she wants to go" and about an hour later were packed up and headed over to the clubhouse for the meet-up. 13 hours later we pulled into the entrance of a National Park Service campground about 1.5 hours South of D.C. near Joplin, VA. It was a beautiful night so GW and I didn't even set up the tent, opting instead to roll out the sleeping bags on the ground and throw some mosquito netting over us. Slept like dog-tired babies until about 5:30 A.M. when we both awoke to the sound of sizzling bacon over the open fire the much-younger and heartier guys had started and partied around all night. We chowed down, hit the outhouses, splashed some water on our faces, packed up, started-up and headed out for the Pentagon parking lot for the Sunday festivities (listed in one of the graphics below).
Getting in and out of the Pentagon parking lots probably took just about as long as the ride we spent the rest of the day participating in. The estimates I've heard are that there were around 400,000 "riders" there. I don't know if that number included passengers too or not, but assuming it did, there were at least 200,000 motorcycles, probably quite a bit more than that, because there were lots of passengers on around half of the bikes I noticed. There were 20 bikes in our group, and only four of them had solo riders. A dang lot of bikes and people in any case.
The pics below are a mix of stuff I grabbed off the web, pics either me or GW took during the two days we were there, and a map and schedule of events I took off of Rolling Thunder's official website. If the pics are shot from ground-level, they're ours. The ones shot from cranes and scissor-lifts were so much better than the crowd-pics we tried to take that I just saved them off the web too, but they are all of this year's event. So here we go.....
Here's a video (not mine) that gives a flavor for what the bridge-crossing was like at the start of each day to get into D.C. for the various events. It's around 10 minutes long and doesn't even show half of the bikes cruising by that spot that day:
I might add pics to this thread from other of our cameras and some that others in our group took. This should whet your whistles though. Great, even if utterly exhausting, time was had by all.
Blues
Getting in and out of the Pentagon parking lots probably took just about as long as the ride we spent the rest of the day participating in. The estimates I've heard are that there were around 400,000 "riders" there. I don't know if that number included passengers too or not, but assuming it did, there were at least 200,000 motorcycles, probably quite a bit more than that, because there were lots of passengers on around half of the bikes I noticed. There were 20 bikes in our group, and only four of them had solo riders. A dang lot of bikes and people in any case.
The pics below are a mix of stuff I grabbed off the web, pics either me or GW took during the two days we were there, and a map and schedule of events I took off of Rolling Thunder's official website. If the pics are shot from ground-level, they're ours. The ones shot from cranes and scissor-lifts were so much better than the crowd-pics we tried to take that I just saved them off the web too, but they are all of this year's event. So here we go.....
Here's a video (not mine) that gives a flavor for what the bridge-crossing was like at the start of each day to get into D.C. for the various events. It's around 10 minutes long and doesn't even show half of the bikes cruising by that spot that day:
I might add pics to this thread from other of our cameras and some that others in our group took. This should whet your whistles though. Great, even if utterly exhausting, time was had by all.
Blues
