A.B.A.T.E. of Arkansas District 9 Blossom Festival Bike Show May 20, 2000

The annual Magnolia Blossom Festival Bike Show

Well, we got dealt a tough hand to start off our Bike Show. Serious thunderstorms and rains pelted the area for 2 days before the show, and the forecast for show day was basically more of the same, if not quite as severe. No doubt, this kept away a number of committed supporters from other Districts, and understandably so. Even though it was partly cloudy and warm (and no rain!) in Magnolia, it was apparently raining cats and dogs when folks from Hot Springs, Little Rock, etc., opened their doors Saturday morning. Checking weather radar reports, even though Magnolia was in the dry, it appeared as if we were in an isolated pocket within a horseshoe, with open end of ‘shoe to our South, and serious storms otherwise everywhere to the north, east, and west. So we knew that the areas we were expecting bikes to come from were socked in. Hey, in a similar situation, I would have left my bike in the garage, too! Still, as it turned out, we had a very nice day, with 45 nice bikes in the show. We had trikes, custom bikes, a monster rat bike, and several bikes with trailers, along with the usual array of domestic and foreign cruisers, sport and sport touring bikes. Every category was well-represented except for Antique, which had no entries. The biggest surprise, however, was the much larger crowd that showed up. I would say that there were easily twice as many folks milling around, checking out bikes, and asking questions, than at either of our prior two shows. And everybody at the show seemed to be having a really good time. This whole scenerio was very encouraging, and bodes well for "sunny days" in the future. We also had a new feature this year, that was extremely well-received. As had been announced prior to trophy presentations, Bill Norris met with each trophy winner after the ceremonies, and took pictures of the winners with their bikes and trophies. These pictures can be viewed below. Happily, we more than covered our expenses for the trophies and door prizes. We also had a near sellout of the Bike Show T-shirts Russell had made up for this year. Actually, we sold 73 of the 96 printed, with the remaining 23 being in the XXL and XXXL sizes. We’ll try to sell these in the next couple of weeks. We also took special orders for anyone who didn’t get a shirt, or needed smaller sizes. Kudos to Russel and Dale again for a really nice design. And, last, but not least, many thanks to everyone who helped to make this our most smooth-running Bike Show yet. When everybody pitches in, it shows.

Here are the winners

The pictures are here!!