"Where is everbody?"
Well I don't know about the rest of you but I've been in the Isle of Wight for the last week or so, and made the conscious decision not to access the interweb thingy while I was there.
And I can vouch for the fact that there are lots of scooterists on the IoW this weekend (see TTT's earlier post) because we had several of them staying at the same B&B as us (the riders not the scooters). Noisy little buggers they were (the scooters not the riders).
I was told by one of the riders that a couple of years ago they estimated there were 15,000 scooters attending the rally, and I can believe that might be true having witnessed the arrival of our ferry which had to unload at least 200 bikes. We saw two other ferries on our way back too and these had a similar number on them. When we docked there were at least another hundred queueing to get on, with more arriving by the minute.
I had to smile when the ferry was unloading the 200 aforementioned bikes though. Unfortunately, the vast majority of riders had forsaken the practicality of a decent wet suit for the sake of style, and were last seen heading off to their rallying points in a torrential downpour that would have made short work of their parkas and ordinary trousers. I wouldn't have thought the drowned rat look was the one they were aiming for.