RAGBRAI 2009: RAGBRAI 2009

I'm starting this blog to report on my first-ever participation in the Registry’s Annual Great Bike Ride Across Iowa (commonly known as the RAGBRAI ride). My brother Barney signed me up to do this ride with him and his father-in-law Bill and Bill’s friend Dave back in March, which precipitated me buying a road bike and starting to learn how to use it. A little bit about RAGBRAI: this is the 37^th annual, it starts on the western edge of Iowa and ends on the eastern edge (Missouri river to the Mississippi river), takes 7 days of riding with average daily mileage being somewhere around 65, and is limited to 10,000 (registered) riders. Along the way we camp in little towns that make their parks and high school soccer fields available and start making as much ice cream, pie, and grilled meat as they can to cash in on the rolling revenue stream that hits their town for one short day.

I left San Francisco insanely early on Thursday morning and landed in Cincinnati, where Barney picked me up with a carload of camping gear and both our bikes (I had mine shipped to him last week) and then we started making our way across Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and Iowa. Our first night was spent in a state park that was surrounded by cornfields stretching to the horizon with giant wind turbines interspersed.

I haven’t really done the research to know if installations like this are generating enough power to justify their cost, but looking at them just makes me feel good. Standing under one of them was a pretty amazing experience too – from a distance they look like they’re turning pretty slowly, but when you’re right there you realize just how fast the tips of the blades are moving.

I finally understand how it’s conceivable that a bird would get killed by one, but still don’t think it’s a reason to not install them. You gotta weed out the stupid birds somehow.

Back on the road I snapped a picture of reason number one I love the Midwest – a guy on his way to or from one of those events where they race the souped-up lawn tractors.

When we hit Bloomfield, Illinois we rented a second car that we transferred all our stuff to and then parked Barney’s car in Burlington, Iowa where the ride will end and continued in the rental. Halfway across the state we rolled through the town of Ottumwa (where I think we’ll spend one night later this week) and drove past reason number two I love the Midwest – the Friday night combination tractor pull and car show. Nothing fancy here, just a bunch of locals taking over the park and showing off their toys. The tractor pull was actually only for tractors made in 1958 or earlier.

It wasn’t a particularly exciting spectator event, as the drivers got penalized if they went more than 3mph and the tractors weren’t particularly loud, but there were a lot of people sitting on tailgates and a guy selling hamburgers and hot dogs – big fun. I don’t think this kid won, but he definitely got style points for having the rustiest tractor:

We spent that night at another state park where the ranger chatted us up about pheasant and deer hunting and gave us a brochure for his guiding service. Then on Saturday we rolled over to Omaha where the ride starts and turned in our rental car and met up with Bill and Dave and their wives Debbie and Tina. The rest of the day was spent getting bikes tuned up, gear packed, and eating pasta like it was our job. This morning we left the hotel at 7:00:
and biked through Omaha to a pedestrian bridge over the river and into Iowa to start our ride. Once in Iowa, we all dipped our back tires in the Missouri and will hopefully dip the fronts in the Mississippi in a week:
From there the real ride started and it basically just felt like rolling along in a sea of bikes. We stopped a couple times to pee (here’s Bill coming back out of a cornfield – look how tall the corn is!)

and to help me get started on my goal of eating my weight in ice cream on this trip, but mostly we just cruised. Our bikes were all working well, as were our bodies, so most of the day looked about like this:

We rolled into Red Oak after about 5 hours and 60 miles, and had lunch at a restaurant that used to be a firehouse. I'm going to make my 3-year-old nephew really jealous here by including a picture of me in the driver's seat of an old school firetruck - eat your heart out Charlie:

After lunch Bill and Dave and Debbie and Tina went back to the hotel and Barney and I spent the afternoon wandering around the town, swimming in the pool, and eating carnival-type food. There was a county fair going on at the same time and we met a very nice family that was just packing up their animals for the day. The daughter was super excited because her pig had placed somewhere in the top 5, with an Average Daily Gain score of 2.6lbs. This means that between the time she weighed it in as a piglet back in the spring and today it put on an average of 2.6lbs per day - amazing. She also showed us her steer, that did not win a prize, but she was very attached to him and was actually crying a little as she said goodbye - apparently all the cows go right from the fair to the meat-packing plant.