Panama City Beach’s ‘Fall Thunder Beach Rally’ Celebrates 19 Years
Spend a week at the beach in Florida with 50,000 of your biker brothers and sisters.
For 10 days out of the year, Panama City Beach, Florida becomes Thunder Beach. The event, which happens twice a year in May and October, is a five day celebration of sun, fun, freedom, and horsepower.
The event is massive in scale, with around 50,000 folks attending the fall event each year. This year’s fall Thunder Beach rally, in its 19th year, featured a ton of exciting activities worth of a show of this size.
Attendees participated in not just one, but five different poker runs – that’s one for each day of the event. In addition, Thunder Beach offered hundreds of vendors, plenty of live music, and some additional entertainment in the form of a beauty pageant.
As you can imagine, trying to cram folks into just one area could be a problem when there’s tens of thousands of bikes and people around. That’s why Thunder Beach had three locations for bikers to converge on: Harley-Davidson of Panama City Beach, Frank Brown Park, and a place locals call “the crossroads,” located across the street from Sharky’s Beachfront Restaurant.
With so many bikers taking over a beach vacation town, you can imagine that the locals might complain about the noise. Happily, that seems to not be the case here – in fact, it seems that the city of Panama City Beach is happy to host the rally twice a year.
In a statement to The Destin Log, Debbie Ward, a spokesperson for the town, said that “The weather is great, it’s a beautiful time to be at the beach, and we just want everybody to stay safe. We welcome the bikers twice a year and are always glad to see them.”
Event organizer Joe Biggs adds that “Our mission is to put heads in beds. We bring a lot of revenue to Panama City Beach…it does a lot economically for the area.” Lacee Rudd, another spokesperson for the city, added that after Hurricane Michael, the city was so devastated that last year’s event had to move to Pensacola. However, Thunder Beach Productions, the company that organizes the shows, stepped up to help Panama City Beach rebuild.
This year, the event ran from October 23-27. Next year’s Spring Thunder Beach event takes place from April 29 to May 3, so ask your boss for those days off now!
Photos: The Destin Log
