For most of the year, Daytona Beach is a quiet seaside resort. But every spring, it turns into the wildest city in America: a spectacle of noise, speed, and excess.
You might know Daytona for its famous car race, the biggest sporting event after the Super Bowl. A few weeks later, there’s Bike Week, the largest gathering of motorcyclists in the world, with all the excess and revelry that go with it: think beer, sex, and big engines.
The noise of the engines has barely died down before students arrive from all over the country for the annual college cheerleading championship, the greatest in the world. Not to mention the nearby air park in Spruce Creek, a village of 4,000 inhabitants, who jet around in private planes, parked in the garages attached to their villas, and who gather every Friday evening to perform aerial acrobatics in the Florida sky.
On land or in the air, in Daytona Beach in the spring, madness and extravagance are everywhere.
Often used as an insult to describe poor, uneducated, rural Americans, the term "redneck" is being embraced by a new generation who are viscerally proud of their country and its traditions.
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