[Kona Bay Girl]

This was my first year at Bike Week in general, and frankly, I enjoyed it. There were a select few bikers who had messed with their exhaust pipes and sounded a lot louder, but for the most part, they were all polite. My uncle went up on his bike and had dinner with us. He said that it was acutally a lot more toned down than past years; that the crowd was either a lot older or the wannabes who wear the logos as a status symbol.

I myself visited several business and they had no complaints of the bikers. They said the majority of them were well-behaved. I could unsderstand why businesses' profits were down 50%, but I bet that lodging areas were booked solid and were benefiting. The small businesses will get their turn July 4th.

19 deaths? If you're looking at the small picture, that seems like a lot. However, considering that hundreds of thousands of bikers were up north during Bike Week, the numbers aren't that high.

I enjoyed my experience. The traffic was brutal, but residents should definitely know the shortcuts around Meredith by now (around the Wakewaum golf course, for one).

Where are all these obscene shirts? I must have missed them all. I went to Ireland for two weeks, and in one of it's major cities it had Bob the Builder t-shirts next to ones with Eminem flipping the bird. If you don't like controversial t-shirts, don't go to Europe. It's 10 times worse than anything you'd see in Laconia.

This post is an opinion of mine, not meant to anger anyone. It's just to put the whole aspect of Bike Week into retrospect. There are a lot of cons, but there are also pros to counter against it. Anyway, the week's over, so I'll end the discussion here.