On a sunny Saturday morning in Norfolk, a couple dozen riders roll down the Elizabeth River Trail to the sound of DJ Bee's beats. Some are on cruisers, some on hybrids, a few on whatever was in the garage. Nobody paid to be there. Nobody had to sign up. They just showed up, clipped in, and followed the music.
That scene has been a weekly ritual since May 2019, when DJ Bee — a veteran turntablist with more than 28 years of terrestrial radio experience — and his wife decided that a stretch of Norfolk asphalt needed some company. The result is the LIVE.LIFE.FRESH Boom Box Bike Ride, a free, family-friendly group cruise that meets every Saturday, weather permitting, and rolls out at 10:30 a.m. On October 3, 2026, the ride gathers at the Elizabeth River Trail's Trailside Headquarters building, at the corner of Orapax Street and Raleigh Avenue in Norfolk.
The origin story is almost comically simple. In January 2019, Fresh Radio and Freshtopia — DJ Bee's online station and record shop — moved to 35th Street in Norfolk. That block happens to have the only center-running bike lane in the city, and it connects directly to the Elizabeth River Trail. When May rolled around, the couple noticed something missing: there were no Bike Month activities scheduled for 35th Street.
"May is Bike Month and we decided to do a weekly bike ride and when the month of May in 2019 ended, we continued," DJ Bee told News 3, keeping his real name private. He and his wife called up a group of friends who ride, organized the first outing for the first Saturday in May, and used the bike lanes and the ERT as their route. The point, as he has put it, was partly to see the lanes actually used.
What began as a one-month experiment never stopped. The ride has become a fixture of Norfolk's weekend calendar, listed on the city's own events page. It has also survived disruption: the ride largely did not happen in 2020, but it returned in March 2021, and it has kept rolling since. Over the years the starting point has shifted with Freshtopia's own moves — from 35th Street to the MacArthur Center Mall green space and, in the current listing, to the ERT Trailside HQ. What hasn't changed is the format: a casual cruise, no ticket, no capacity limit, no drop policy beyond the group staying together.
The man behind it is as much a Norfolk institution as the ride. DJ Bee founded Fresh Radio, which launched on October 10, 2010, as an online station playing classic and progressive hip hop, R&B, soul, reggae, funk, pop, disco, and boogie, with mixes from DJs worldwide around the clock. He can be heard daily on itsfreshradio.com and hosts the Fresh Start Morning Show from 6 to 10 a.m. weekdays on 91.1 FM, NSU Radio, in Hampton Roads. In January 2019 he opened Freshtopia, the retail shop and record store that operates inside the Fresh Radio studio. The shop has been recognized as one of the relatively few Black-owned brick-and-mortar record stores in the country — Freshtopia's own site says it is one of 30, while the Elizabeth River Trail Foundation's spotlight notes it was featured in Essence Magazine's list of Black-owned record stores to visit across the country. DJ Bee is also the founder of Live Life Fresh Wellness, the banner under which the ride runs.
The ride's route is the other half of the story. The Elizabeth River Trail is a 10.5-mile pedestrian and bike path that winds along Norfolk's waterfront. Its own history reaches back to 1994, when the West Ghent Civic League, the Norfolk Historical Society, Norfolk Southern Corporation, and the City of Norfolk began talking about a shared vision: a walking route linking a proposed Plum Point Park to West Ghent, and better access to the 1807-vintage Fort Norfolk. After three unsuccessful applications for federal alternative transportation funding, Norfolk Southern agreed in October 1999 to donate 3,500 feet of its old Atlantic City Spur rail line to the city for the trail's first segment. The trail grew from there along a waterfront that once held an icehouse, a knitting factory, cotton warehouses, and lumber mills — the remnants of Atlantic City, a neighborhood annexed by Norfolk in 1890 and largely erased by mid-century urban renewal.
That layered landscape is exactly what DJ Bee says makes the ride worth doing. "When we ride, the Elizabeth River Trail and the bike lanes take you through places of Norfolk you might never have seen before," he told News 3. "So every new rider is like, 'I didn't know this is back here, this don't look like Norfolk.' So it's good, they get to see the city." He frames the benefits in mental as well as physical terms: "Mentally, you'll feel like you've done something. Physically, you'll feel like you're working out a little."
And the music is not incidental. The ride's name is literal — a boombox, or the modern equivalent, supplies the soundtrack as the group moves. It is a small thing that changes the character of a group ride: less training session, more rolling party, the kind of thing that makes a first-timer feel comfortable navigating bike lanes alongside people who know them. The city's listing makes the pitch directly, calling it "a great way to feel comfortable navigating the trail and the bike lanes with a great group of riders."
For anyone who wants to join, the logistics are deliberately low-key. Riders meet at 10 a.m. at the ERT Trailside Headquarters building at Orapax Street and Raleigh Avenue, and the group rolls out at 10:30 a.m. for a casual cruise around Norfolk via bike lanes and the Elizabeth River Trail. It is family-friendly and free. Because the ride is weather-permitting, Freshtopia is the source to follow for last-minute changes or cancellations. No registration, no fee, no cap on how many can come.
In a city with a 10.5-mile waterfront trail, a one-of-a-kind center bike lane, and a record store that doubles as a radio studio, the Boom Box Bike Ride is the thing that ties them together every Saturday morning — a free invitation to see a familiar city from a slightly different seat, with someone else handling the playlist.