Beginning Wednesday, Sumter County will be filled with an expected 600-900 guests. Most of these will be members of the motorcycle club, The Rolling Thunder. Many have been here before, while others have not.

According to Jim “Moe” Moyer, chairman for the Rolling Thunder’s Ride Home event, “This will be the fifth year that we have come into town.”

The Ride Home, as many in the community are familiar with, is an event that occurs each year around National POW/MIA Recognition Day.

Moyer said, “Andersonville is the place that Congress, in their massive wisdom, decided is ‘the’ place, when it comes to representing what a POW, and they chose this as the place for national recognition. Look at the history, the museum and realize that it is the perfect venue for an event like this.”

Moyer added, “I am a veteran from the Vietnam era. In 1999, my wife and I went to check out this thing that was being done to pay tribute to the POWs/MIAs. They were meeting in Washington at the Vietnam Wall. We checked it out and just pursued it from there.”

A Rolling Thunder state director, Moyer and his wife, who reside in Florida, said they “have been riding motorcycles for a while. I have been riding since I was 15, and then in 2000 we started with Rolling Thunder, but we have been riding bikes for as long as we have been married.”

The Ride Home event, according to Moyer, has “a simple purpose of educating people about POW/MIAs and the status. There are about 84,000 families in the U.S. since World War I who have lost loved ones and do not know where they are. This event is about filling a promise we have, and that is to show we don’t forget those who are still missing in action, and we want to live up to the promise and bring them home.

“Americus and Andersonville have been great,” said Moyer. “They are really warming up to us. I think at first they were not sure. They have really rolled out the red carpet for us each year, and I think they are pleased that it is growing,” said Moyer.

“This year is really different, we are having actual POW/MIAs coming, and speaking.”

All the hotels are booked, or “most of them are — the Windsor, the Jameson, the Holiday Inn, the Days Inn and the Quality Inn. This is just exciting for us.”

Moyer paused, “It is just our way of saying ‘thank you.’”

The Times-Recorder will be following up with further stories from the events in future editions of this newspaper and online at www.americustimesrecorder.com.