Say Cheese

They come from all over North America every Friday the 13th.  I saw licence plates from Oklahoma.  I’m told, this time, one rider came from Belgium.  Every Friday the 13th Port Dover plays host to the biggest motorcycle rally on the Continent.  

It all began when Chris Simons and 25 of his friends got together at the Commercial Hotel in Port Dover.  They had such a good time they decided to do it every Friday 13th.  That was November 1981.  The rest is history. To read up on the origin of this tradition click here.

Last Friday, myself and four friends from the Mississauga Camera Club met at 5:30 AM, piled our camera gear into Fred’s van and headed to Port Dover. 

We got there around 6:30 AM and already it was bustling with people. We were lucky to find a good parking spot. We then headed to the one and only Tim Horton’s in town, got our coffees, sat and talked for a while.  We decided to do our own thing and rendezvous at 1200 hours right there at Tim Horton’s.

We started off at the main street photographing bikers as they entered town. Later, I meandered to the beach.  It was a big, wide beach.  To my surprise, I saw four palm trees.  Big, tall palm trees. After doing a little research I discovered that they were 30 feet tall, were imported from Florida and will be dug up in the fall to winter in a greenhouse and then replanted next Spring.  Furthermore, more palm trees are on order.

Meanwhile, the bikers kept coming and coming.  You could hear the roar of motorcycles all over the place. 

There were happy people as far as the eye could see. Some of the riders were pretty scary looking until you talked to them.  Even Hell’s Angels were there. Lots of merchants as well, selling everything from leather biker clothes, bike items of all sorts, sunglasses and the ever-popular t-shirts.  So this sleepy little fishing village on Lake Erie - population 5500 ballooned out to 150,000 last weekend.  Surprisingly, there were no problems.  The event was extremely well organized and has morphed into a huge fundraiser for a number of charities. 

Plenty of portable loos such as those pictured below.  Hey, that’s important, eh?

When we left at around one, they were still coming into town in streams. We stopped at many places on our way home for various photo-ops.  Then, we told jokes all the way home.  All in all, we had such a great time together, we decided to do this more often as a group.

And that’s how traditions get started.