It’s been four years since the national Motorcycle Museum moved from the Black Hills of South Dakota to a new home in Iowa. Nancy Keedy’s marketing director of the museum and says since the move from Sturgis the museum’s getting 18- to 20-thousand visitors a year and has over 170 motorcycles on display. While Anamosa isn’t on the interstate highway, Keedy says that’s one reason thousands of visitors have found there way to it.She says most bikers who head off on a trip somewhere look for back roads and scenic highways and prefer to stay off the big highways, but they want curves and routes that are fun to ride. It’s not the outdated stereotype of criminal bikers, she says, just people who like to ride something different on weekends or vacations. Anamosa is at the beginning of the Grant Wood Scenic Byway which heads off toward Wisconsin, and it’s also halfway between i-80 and Highway 20, and Keedy says motorcycle clubs from all over the Midwest are starting to make it a destination for ride-ins and overnight camping visits. She says one day a group of older riders came in, people in their late 60s including four women walking with canes. She says it’s a huge group from all over the country that gathers for a ride every year and they’d chosen Anamosa, riding bikes with “vintage” sidecars from the 1960s, seventies and eighties. There’s a state park for camping and she says the museum will help large groups make plans with area hotels. Some of the old bikes date to 1903, Keedy says. A prize of the collection is the red, white and blue “Captain America bike” that was featured in the 1970s film “Easy Rider.”
