Right before this picture, I had some pie. It wasn't as good as some of the other pie, but it was made by the kids at the church and the stand was run by them. While I was standing there getting an apple and slice, the guy next to me asked, "Are these real peaches?" To which the pie salesperson replied, "Real canned peaches." I don't think that's what the cyclist was after.
I used the indoor bathroom and right as I was getting ready to use it the breaker blew. It wasn't just sort of dark, it was pitch black, like being locked in a closet. Someone else came in and I couldn't believe they were actually going to try to use the facilities. There was no guarantee they'd get anywhere near their target. Not that that necessarily stops someone on RAGBRAI. They can be kind of self centered and gross in their need to use a clean bathroom. At a later stop I was using a stall when a guy came into the bathroom with his girlfriend (or girl friend) and started rooting around for plugs. Seriously.
But in this case the peer-in-the-dark fixed it. They propped the door wide open. A whole downstairs room full of church ladies and pies and teens and they're propping open a door to do their business and expecting me to hang out and pair pee. I took initiative and went out to my bike and retrieved my flashlight. By that time the door holder was gone and I could hang out with the door closed and the flashlight shining from my where it was clutched between shoulder and head. Someone else came in and made to hold the door open and I made ghost noises and rolled my flash light around a bit. They got weirded out and left, exactly as I was hoping.
The town made a nice entrance out of hay bales. Except for the patriotic cross. That's not a very good separation of church and state. Or, as Christianity would have it, rendering unto God what's his and Caesar (in the form of patriotism) what's his. Still, better than the town with the pirate theme where it promised raping and pillaging in town.
Couple folks on the cobblestones. There's a mister in the foreground creating the rainbow.
I liked the cobblestones and I got back here a few times looking for Adam after hanging out on the other side of town watching local tap dancers.
One more so you can see we were in Mt. Ayr. I wish I had done a better job of taking a picture of the town signs right before each set of photos. I think the geotagging will give me details, but that's actually more work if you're writing commentary. I used up my camera memory to the photo, so I didn't have extra space. But I had a secondary camera along, like some sort of old man from the late 2010s.
Let's do it in live action! Wait...this isn't the time lapse. And that other one isn't the hay bales. That'll confuse someone who tries to reconcile titles and videos in the future. Future historian. Fuck you. I'm not fixing it.
This is a really nice panorama. Ming and Adam are on the middle left. I got here ahead of the two of them and parked myself in the biggest patch of shade I could find. We spent more time in that shade than we usually did in a town.
Big version
The town wasn't very big - really just a corner.
The traditional wire between two tractors or a tractor and something else as a way to park bicycles.
NOT hay bales. Time lapse bicycling on the route on Day 3.
We stopped to have some cheese served up from a French intern who came to work for a cheese factory and ended up handing out chilled cheese to thousands of bicyclists in Iowa. That's got to be an interesting resume bullet point. #Thanks2Farmers took our picture and sent me a copy. Nice of them.
More time lapsing. Appropriately labeled this time. You can see a water stop on the right.
In Leon we caught a movie at the small movie house. We went to My Fellow Americans (yes...Jack Lemmon, James Gardner, Dan Ackroyd...awful), but in order to enjoy the A/C we ended up sitting through the last 5 minutes of Tarzan, the set up time for Jefferson Highway (which took a very long time), and the Kickstarter-type preview of Jefferson Highway, a documentary being created by a local of Leon. The 5 minutes of Tarzan convinced us we shouldn't see that movie. A few days later it was the only option. Most of it wasn't as bad as the last 5 minutes, but I would be hesitant to call any of it good and the part tying "you want a hug" between Samuel L. Jackson and Tarzan to "you going to lick his (the gorilla's) balls" was lost on Ming until Adam explained it.
The documentary bit was pretty good once they got it running. It was about how highways used to be named before they had numbers and the Jefferson ran between Canada (international Rotarian conspiracy!) and New Orleans. The film maker and his co-producer (director?) took his uncle's old car on the trip only to find out in places the original road cut through corn fields and bifurcated because different states wanted to lay claim to the road.
My Fellow Americans was a good place to take a nap.
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