I wanted to briefly talk about our bike night at Arizona Joes in Apache Junction. We hold a bike night at Arizona Joe's (AJ's) every Thursday. We started the bike night three years ago in October and it has been going on ever since.
Our original plan when we approached AJ's three years ago was to have a bike night until May(ish). After May in Arizona, the heat gets almost unbearable and we figured most of the motorcyclists would not want to ride to a bike night that is held in an outside patio during the heat of the summer. Our other reason was that we usually start our traveling after May and could not be in attendance during that time.
What happened surprised us all. Once we got the bike night going, people didn't want to stop showing up. Even though we planned on leaving to attend motorcycle rallies around the country, the attendees of AJ's bike night and the owners of AJ's decided to continue the event through the summer. We were able to get a few of the attendees to help manage our table of products and hand out raffle tickets while we were gone. Believe it or not, the bike night went all year long that year and has continued since then.
This year our bike night is expanding. Originally there was us, Hawgwash, offering waterless cleaning products for sale, and some other people selling miscellaneous other items related to motorcycling. We held a raffle at the end of each evening and we had various people performing during the evening. Now we have several people showing up each Thursday offering items for sale, we periodically hold a 50/50 drawing where 50% of the proceeds go to the winner and the remaining 50% goes either to a local charity (Legion riders, VFW, Wounded Warrior, etc) or to help pay for the raffle prizes that we give away each week and we have an awesome band to keep everyone entertained.
I would like to point out that the 'band' is one person, Greywolf, but he and his computer are the best thing to happen to our Bike Night. Greywolf keeps the crowd entertained, plays the music that we all want to hear, has an awesome voice and plays a mean guitar. He does have a band that plays on Saturdays at AJ's, but he does all his solo work on our Thursday bike nights. If nothing else, it would be worth while to come to bike night just to hear Greywolf perform.
We hold a free raffle weekly, each person who comes to bike night receives one raffle ticket. The items for raffle are donated by Arizona Joe's. We also get prizes from some of the people who are offering items for sale (we donate every time we are in attendance), and some of the regular attendees of Bike Night make up gift packages to raffle off. The raffle gets to be a lot of fun since you never know what will be raffled off. Sometimes if a guy wins a girl's shirt or other item of clothing (leave that to your imagination), we make the guy try on the clothing item before they can return to their seat.
This winter we are going to start up our bike show again holding that once a month (we haven't figured out which week yet), we are looking into doing a "walking" poker run, so people can wander around AJ's without leaving the premises, maybe a treasure hunt, we may try a wet t-shirt contest (you would not believe how many guys want to be the ones to pour water on the front of the ladies...), we will be holding motorcycle care clinics, and are open to other ideas that people have to suggest.
Hopefully, if you are in the Apache Junction/Mesa area of Arizona, you can come on by some Thursday night to AJ's and partake of the fun....
Until tomorrow...
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