Are you going to Americade this year? I am, and it will be my first time.
Americade, billed as the world’s largest touring rally and taking place in Lake George, New York, celebrates its 30th anniversary this year. And Rider, which celebrates its 38th, has been involved pretty much from the beginning. Rider has been an opening night sponsor for many years, welcoming Americaders to the week-long rally and distributing dozens of popular door prizes.
Americade provides a great opportunity for Rider staffers—Mark Tuttle, Clement Salvadori, Bill Stermer, myself—to meet many of our longtime subscribers, folks who have been reading the magazine since it was launched in the summer of 1974, with the tagline “Motorcycle Touring and Commuting.” (Later it became “Motorcycle Touring, Commuting & Camping,” and eventually “Motorcycling At Its Best.”) We get a chance to shake hands, bench race, kick tires and ride in the lush, green Adirondack Mountains that surround Lake George.
I’ve been to Lake George before, where I stayed at a lakeside house owned by the parents of a long-gone girlfriend from my university days in Philadelphia. We sat on a screened in porch overlooking the lake, we took boat rides, and I managed to get up on a slalom water ski for the first time since my much skinnier, fitter high school days. A few months after that trip to Lake George, I bought my first motorcycle.
So, my attendance at Americade this year will be sort of a full-circle experience. I’ve never been to Lake George when the area is swarming with thousands of motorcycle enthusiasts of all types, when there is a huge vendor area, demo rides, organized rides into Adirondack Park, and lots of great food and entertainment. The good folks at BMW have offered me a motorcycle to ride during my stay, and I’ll be riding up from New Jersey with Joe Salluzzo, one of our ad guys who lives in Pennsylvania.
It will be an honor to represent Rider at Americade’s 30 anniversary rally. We’re sponsoring the Opening Night Carnival at the Fort William Henry Big Top Tent on Monday, June 4, 6:30-8:30pm. And on Tuesday night at 8:00pm at the Fort William Henry Conference Center, I’ll be a featured speaker. My topic will be “Lessons Learned from Crashes, Countries & Cover Stories.”
Americade will be a lot of fun this year, for multi-year veterans and for first-timers like me. If you plan on attending, drop by and say hello!
For more information, visit americade.com
