Laconia

Laconia is a former textile and knitting-mill city wedged between Winnipesaukee and Winnisquam lakes, and for most of the year it’s an unshowy Lakes Region hub of about seventeen thousand people. Then, every June, Laconia Motorcycle Week takes over — one of the oldest and largest motorcycle rallies in the country, dating back to 1916, when close to a quarter-million riders descend on the region and downtown fills with the constant low rumble of engines. Lia and I don’t own so much as a moped, and we still had a great time getting swept up in it.

Downtown during Bike Week

We walked Main Street on the rally’s opening weekend, past blocks of parked motorcycles lined up nose-to-curb in numbers I’d never seen outside a dealership, vendors selling leather and custom parts out of tents, and a genuinely wide mix of riders — retirees on touring bikes, younger crews on stripped-down customs, whole clubs riding in formation. The noise was constant but not unpleasant, more like weather than nuisance, and a bar owner told us the week accounts for a meaningful chunk of the town’s entire annual revenue.

Weirs Beach and the lakeside boardwalk

A few miles from downtown, Laconia’s Weirs Beach neighborhood has its own small boardwalk on Winnipesaukee, with an arcade, a public beach, and the dock for the M/S Mount Washington, a cruise ship that circles the lake in summer. We skipped the cruise but walked the boardwalk at sunset, watching motorcycles cruise slowly along the lakefront road in an unofficial evening parade, chrome catching the last light off the water, which somehow felt more like a lake town tradition than a rally spectacle by that point.

Getting There

Laconia is about an hour north of Manchester-Boston Regional Airport (MHT) via I-93, or roughly ninety minutes north of Boston Logan International Airport (BOS). A car is necessary, and if you’re coming during Bike Week, expect significantly heavier traffic and book accommodations well in advance.