RAGBRAI XXVIII

Saturday early AM

Me and my Dad head off to BWI airport.  We get there about two hours early because we're pretty confident that we're going to run into problems getting the bikes packed up and onto the plane.  Our intuition is proven correct.  Even though Dad had called several days before to make sure that the airport did indeed have bike boxes, and the airport said they ordered some, our airline had no bike boxes.  They spent about 45 minutes hunting them down from other airlines.  Then, they forgot to call down to the baggage handlers to have them pick up the bikes...  this didn't happen until our flight started boarding, we saw the bikes were still where we left them, and we went up to the clerks and said, "Ummm... what about the bikes?"  Ragbrai would have been much less fun without them.

Me and my Dad pack up the bikes at BWI airport in the early AM.

We get to the camp site at Council Bluffs, Iowa.  We're not late, but it's already a sea of tents for acres and acres in every direction.  I get up on top of one of the team busses parked nearby to get this picture of a tiny piece of it.
 

To get to Council Bluffs, we hitched a ride with a charter group that calls themselves "Pork Belly Ventures."  They had a cute mascot... this little piglet!

We got our first taste of the carnival atmosphere of Ragbrai.  There was lots to look at and do.... fake rock climbing, a hillbilly band, a hot air balloon, lots more.

This portentous snake greeted us on the morning of Sunday--our first day of biking.

We outfit ourselves in our team uniforms.  We are part of Team Katydid, honoring the memory of Kathryn Stroud, ancestor of many team members.  "Kate" did the first 13 Ragbrai rides, thus the name.  Our costumes got many strange looks, and incorrect guesses as to what we are supposed to be.  No, we're not grasshoppers, or mosquitoes, or frogs, we're katydids!

"RAGBRAI" stands for "Register's Annual Great Bicycle Ride Across Iowa," and it is indeed a ride across Iowa.  Each ride starts out at the Missouri River on the western edge of the state, and ends up at the Mississippi River on the eastern edge.  As is the tradition of Ragbrai, the riders start out by dipping the rear bicycle tire in the Missouri.

Finally, some actual biking!  On the road...  As you can see, Iowa is not flat.

A highlight of this bike tour was the pancakes.  Here I actually got a shot of the pancake guy flipping one behind his back, but you can just barely see it.

More random images from Sunday.  I was overwhelmed by the number of people on this tour--there was an estimated 15,000 people.  The last tour I had done (a week-long tour across Tennessee) had just a few hundred.  Everywhere you went, at any time of day or night, there were just so many people and bikes.  Here is a sea of bikes, bikers getting drunk at the first town on the tour (it's 9 AM and we've still got 40 miles of biking to go!), the Budwiser bus setting the tone at another small Iowa town rest stop.

We had heard of Team "Bad Boy," and that they were carrying an extraordinary amount of gear.  At around 8 in the morning, on the way out of the camp site town, we actaully saw their bikes, parked next to a bar, where the Team was stopped for a few pre-ride beers.  The three bikes were porting:  A 1,000-watt gasoline-powered Honda generator with a huge and massively powerful stereo system, a refrigerator stocked with meat, and a drum-style barbecue grill.  Each bike must have weighed at least 70 pounds.  No, I'm not kidding.  These guys pedalled this stuff 450 miles across Iowa.  Honest.  I even saw them several times biking on the road.  These guys aren't really "bad" boys, they actually are a small group of medical students that were promoting organ donation.

More cyclists cruising through bucolic Iowa countryside.  Iowa is the most agriculturally developed state in the union, with over 98% of its land used for farming.  Mostly corn and soy.  Lots and lots of corn and soy.

The first major town stop was Elk Horn.  This little town was settled by the Dutch, and is proud of its heritage.  There are lots of pastry and chocolate shops, and an actual working windmill that really grinds grain.  Plus, for some reason, this mannequin, here covered with Ragbrai team stickers.  All along the trip, the various teams kept putting their team stickers on everything, including fresh (as well as not-so-fresh) road kill, but unfortunately I didn't stop to take a photo of those.

The windmill in Elk Horn--outside and inside views.  This windmill was originally located in Holland.  It was meticulously taken apart, shipped over to Elk Horn and reconstructed.

One stop along the way was a sheep-shearing demonstration.

One man biked the entire trip on an ancient 1920s-style "velocipede."  This bike has exactly ONE gear.  I took this photo of him on the hilliest day of the ride, a day that was purported to be the hilliest RAGBRAI day ever.  It really can't be all that hilly--it's Iowa, after all--but it was damn hilly enough.  I actually took this photo while I was riding my own bike... I thought it would come out blurry, but came out surprisingly nice.

And then there was this guy.  He biked the entire trip by himself on a tandem.  Each day, he had an inflateable woman in the rear saddle (the "stoker"), in a different position.  This day she was lying on a blow-up mattress.  What was the point?  He was raising money for Muscular Dystrophy, and was asking for a $1 donation per photo.

Tuesday morning wasn't so pleasant.  My Dad and I were awoken just a few minutes before 6 AM to the sounds of far-off thunder getting closer.  It looked pretty dangerous...  I was reminded of a previous year, during a tour across Maryland, when we had to vacate our tent and all of our stuff due to an approaching tornado.  But it ended up being just a bad thunderstorm.

We got on the road, but it wasn't finished raining yet.  About 2 miles out of town, we ran into a huge hailstorm.  I ducked into this roadside coffee stand (those are my cycling gloves drying on warm counter). The people working there were nice enough to let us hang out until it stopped hailing.  My Dad, on the other hand, just kept biking through it.  He's a tough old bugger.

I met up with a gentleman from Minnesota, part of Team Loon.  He had this Barbie doll attached to the front of his recumbent bike, and another attached to the back (with a different outfit, of course, they would never be seen out in public wearing the same dress).  He even had a matching hot pink seat cover.

At one stop this day, there was a man giving people rides on his fork lift so that we could get a nice panoramic shot.

The fork lift driver and his kids.  Could they possibly look any more wholesome?

These two guys had an unusual "tandem."  It was side-by-side, the two bikes were attached by a custom-made frame which ported a beer cooler.  It didn't look too easy to steer with this thing... how could they possibly stay in sync while climbing up and down all those hills?  My conversation with them went like this:  "Hey, nice tandem!"  "You like it?  Meet up with us at the next town, the damn thing's yours!"

My Dad on the road, still drying out after the morning's rain.

There was a vendor who called herself The Corn Woman.  She made and sold jewelry and clothing made out of dried and dyed corn.  Yes, corn.  That bra and skirt are made out of corn.  I don't wear bras or skirts, but it didn't look all too comfortable to me.  100% appropriate for Ragbrai.

The Corn Woman (left) and "Niblet," her friend who sold 70's-style tie-dye skirts and stuff.  They looked like they were having fun, so I had to have a photo of them.

"Is that all there is?"

No.  There's actually lots more pictures and narrative that I haven't gotten around to doing yet.

"Why does your site suck?  I thought you were a computer guy."

Yes.  Well, it's kind of because I'm a computer guy that it sucks.  There are a couple of factors working against me here:  1)  I'm not all that visually creative in the first place; 2)  It's very difficult to make something warm and organic out of HTML; 3)  Although my real job is indeed doing Internet-based software development, I excel at doing "back-end" server-side stuff (the parts that handle the business logic) and not the front-end touchy-feely user interface stuff;  4)  My computer job and other hobbies take up so much of my time that I've only allotted a few hours for this site, and it's much quicker to slap down some static HTML with a few pictures than it is to try to implement the ideas I have in my head.

"Can you name some sites that influenced the look and feel of your site?"

Yes, here is one.