As you walk down the crowded streets, loud bike engines roar all around you. Each step you take live music fills your ears as you walk to the beat.  The sweet and savory smell of rich barbeque sauce and smoke attacks your senses. Every year on Dixon Street, a motorcycle rally is held: Bikes, Blues, and Barbeque. This year, it’s starting on September 21 and will go through September 24. There are many activities and events held for everyone in mind. There are car shows, vendors, and live music, which gives everyone something to take part in. Women and men from all over come to show off their unique and custom made bikes.

Bikes, Blues, and Barbeque was created with a purpose. This is an event made with whole families in mind. Bikes, Blues, and Barbeque is held to give back to the community, every year hundreds of bikers ride to raise money for charity.

This year, the bikers raised around $2,00 dollars to give to 23 year old man battling Leukemia, who has a wife with a baby on the way. Of all the people working on this achievement, our very own art teacher, Vicki Delozier, participated with the group of bikers raising money for this cause.

“We always do these benefit rallies, that’s what we do to make it purposeful,” Delozier said.

Delozier got into Bikes, Blues, and BBQ with the help of her husband. She was weary at first, but now she has come to love the event and what it stands for.

“The riding with everybody, the comradery. You get all kinds of people…everyone experiencing it together,” Delozier said.

Not only is this a motorcycle rally with a purpose, it is also a fun and exciting event for all ages. Vendors are staked out up and down the streets and custom bikes are everywhere to gaze at. A rally full of bikers at first may be thought of as a scary and meaningless event, but it’s the welcoming community made for all ages that makes Bikes, Blues, and Barbeque what it is all about.

However, it is still about the the riding. Hundreds of bikers zoom down the Arkansas highways taking in the beauty of the Natural State. Everyone comes together from different walks of life to be a part of this rally with a purpose.

“Just riding and seeing this beautiful country… just seeing them [the bikers] out on the road together,” Delozier said.