RAGBRAI - Day 1 - Glenwood to Shenandoah (49.7 miles, 2614 feet of climb)

Addendum:

I forgot to add the following bits:

• We saw Ghost Busters in Shenandoah.  Ming was pretty sure we could skip it because he had promised to go with his family, but it was the only thing starting.  His family went without him during the ride. It all worked out.
• I was on the shuttle bus with a drive who told a few of us his life story about being born in the town 63 years earlier.  He left for a woman.  Those women can make you do whatever they want.  You can't do a thing about it.
• We were told to meet the shuttle at the tennis courts.  The shuttle didn't stop at the tennis courts, so we sprinted to a nearby stop with a man and his wife - the guy was very cranky about the directions.  We met him a few other times during the ride.  He was just sort of cranky.  At one point on a tractor ride later during RAGBRAI someone was surprised at the turn radius of the tractor shuttle.  He noted, "That's what tractors do."
• The spaghetti dinner below as at the Knights of Columbus.  The highlight...the ice cold iced tea - all you could drink.  Later in RAGBRAI Ming would come to judge other dinners by their lack of all you could drink beverages.
• I got lost.  I got up in the middle of the night and wandered the quarter mile or more to the bathroom down by the stadium.  When I came back, I couldn't find our tents.  I wandered from tree to tree looking for one with a lot of dead branches with no luck.  Then I wandered from (same) tree to (same) tree looking for my bike.  After a few rotations, I finally found it.  I was probably walking around the same tents multiple times at 2:00 a.m. for almost 20 minutes.

Day 1 - the heat isn't exactly gone, but it's not as bad as 3:00 a.m. on Day 0.



Still..everyone is very careful to ensure they have enough water.


It was HOT in Tabor.  But we were functional.  So I took this sweet, sweet photo of me on a stand in front of a cutout of Iowa. This is the very first spot Adam accused Ming of eating watermelon just so he could get a boner.  That lasted the whole week.


Bikes.  There were a lot of bikes.


Breakfast in Malvern.  I didn't eat pancakes all week as I have in the past.  We mixed it up a bit.  Although I had more pancakes than Ming or Adam.  I tend to meet nice people sitting down for some flapjacks.


All this tech and I can still get my finger in the picture.  Adam's in this photo.



Cyclists! In motion!


We were generally up by 4:40 and on the road by 5:15 a.m.  EARLY AS FUCK.  I didn't even have lights because I'm used to getting up early, but leaving with first light.  So wherever we were, it was relatively sparse.  I think Ming may have missed out on a bit of RAGBRAI by not rolling along with a group of 1000.


In Shenandoah, it sprinkled on and off.  But never enough to have to find shelter.


Here's the other half of that rainbow.  But wait for it...it gets better.........


IT'S A MOTHERFUCKIGN DOUBLE RAINBOW!  AND MING HAS ONLY ONE ARM AND YET HE FINISHED RAGBRAI!  Amazing.  You can barely see him, but Tun is in this picture.  Ming met him in the bleachers and we saw him every day for the rest of the ride.  Nice guy although fuck all faster than we are on his loaner $8500 carbon fiber bike (he's only faster because of that expensive bike - I'm sure on my bike, or Ming's bike, he's actually slower than we are).


At one point a bunch of guys hauled this tent to the middle of the field as a joke.  The volunteer in the stands told us the groundskeeper would NOT be amused.


TENTS!  This is a tents-centric post.  There were a lot of tents.  Look for the one with broken poles.  That's Ming's tent.  Adam could have helped him at any time with his pole repair kit.  He wisely chose to refrain until the end of RAGBRAI.


We had a spaghetti dinner in Shenandoah.  Delicious.  The "pick 2" homemade dessert bar was excellent.


Shenandoah is the home of the Everly Brothers. (All I Have to do is Dream and Cathy's Clown).  It wasn't an exciting historical site other than the fact that their house was MICROSCOPIC.  One room.  And not a big room.


This is it, including a jukebox they probably didn't have.


I said this was a tents-centric post.  Ming's tent serving as a dryer.  My tent is in the foreground.


Adam looks like he's going to puke.  He got a new tent for this ride.  No pole issues like last time.


TENTS!


MORE TENTS!


SO MANY MOTHER-F-ING TENTS!


It was one of the few days it rained.  But we were already in the end town, so we were caught under the Casey's canopy for a while, but not much more.  There are people smoking next to the gas dispensers in this photo.    Seriously.


The live version...



We spent quite a bit of time in the Shenandoah museum which had a bit of A/C and lots of displays.  Adam thought this lady was creepy.


They had a sense of humor.  This mastodon skull is ready to ride.  I had some ice cream across the street before taking my second tour of the museum.

RAGBRAI 2016 - Day 0 - Glenwood (-420 miles)

2016 RAGBRAI.  My fourth.  First one with my Dad.  Second one with my Dad, sister, brother-in-law, and mother/daughter/nieces in an RV.  What Eryn affectionately refers to as "the most fucked up trip I've ever been on."  I put words in her mouth, but she wouldn't disagree. She's not a fan of family RV trips.  Third one with Adam - aka PukeDog, aka Teenage Data, aka Toussaint Charbonneau (a distant relative I imagine having facial hair exactly like Adam).  Fourth one with Adam and Ming - aka French Dip aka the multi in Pan-Universal Multicultural Peddlers (although perhaps I'm the multi).

420 miles to go.  Here's the profile.  Lots of climb those first days with a general elevation climb.  That's what you get skirting the foothills of Missouri.  Although it gives you something to look forward to on the east end of the state.



The more concerning issue was this...the weather report for Sunday.  You can't see it here, but it doesn't go below 80 degrees until AFTER 3:00 a.m.  And that potential for rain...I think you get an inkling of the humidity.  It was not 71%  It was more like inside an aquarium.  You moved.  You sweated.  I remember after sleeping almost not at all that if the ride was going to be like that for the next 7 days, I might actually crack.  Sad to think the weather would break you, not the pedaling.

Know what else breaks you?  A guy driving over you tent in the middle of the night.  That happened.  As Adam says, it was one of my first rules on RAGBRAI #3, don't camp near the road.  We camped closer to the road than I liked that first night, but I made sure there was a (big!) truck between us and the road.  The guy who was run over lived, but needs several surgeries.  Still, he fared better than the guy who went the reverse direction in the morning in order to dip his tire in the river (we were far from the river this time) and was hit and killed.  Two deaths on RAGBRAI this year.  Him and another guy who had a heart attack.  Happens when the average age is 49.

While we didn't have rain the first night - this is what it looked like on the way down.  Those cars are all pulled over to the side of the road because they can't see the road.  That would have been a fun ride.  But we actually saw no rain except once while we were under a gas station canopy until the last day despite some dice rolls with the forecast.  Even on the last day we only saw some sprinkles despite flash flood warnings only miles from our campsite.  The RAGBRAI site shows riders hiding from the rain under picnic tables, but they must have come through later than us.

The first bus we saw.  They separated the buses from the baggage truck campers this year most nights (Ottumwa was an exception).  Which was nice.  Quieter.

We stopped for lunch at Fong's Pizza in Ankeny.  Delicious.  I hope they move up here.  However, I asked for a local Ankeny drink and when the waitress asked 10" or 16" I replied 16", because who wants a 10" drink?  She was referring to the pizza.  That was a lot of damn pizza.  Eryn ordered these cinnamon-covered bites for dessert which came in a gross.  Crazy amount of food.  This is from the mural by their bathroom.  Reminds me of Tsuro.

Here we are on our official start of ride photo inside the school.  We're standing there because it's next to the spaghetti dinner room which is heavily air conditioned and sometimes it leaks out.  Shortly after this photo Pooteewheet and Eryn bugged out.  We kicked ourselves for not having them take us downtown in the air conditioned car.  Turns out they took some total strangers downtown in their air conditioned car.

Me and Eryn.  I think we've had a start of ride picture every year.  Some of my favorites.  That look is "holy cow is this hot."

We went into town.  I posed as an Iowan pork chop.

Ming posed as corn with a vagina.  Seriously.  Click into that picture and get a good look using a larger photo size.  Corn.  With.  A. Vagina.  I don't know what he was thinking.  Corn has tassels.  It doesn't need a vagina.

My first food on RAGBRAI.  Pie.  I found the Methodist Church in town with pie and A/C.  Ming and Adam went across the street to spaghetti.  Remember, I'd had 16" of Fong's Pizza.  I didn't really need anything else to eat.

My pie.  Yum.  I did not obsess about pie as much as I have at past RAGBRAI's, but the two days I found ice cream with my pie were THE BEST.  This is not one of those days.

Walking back to the campsite.  Bikes everywhere - just like every RAGBRAI.  While we were headed back there was a couple at the bridge where the wife/girlfriend could barely walk on her clippable shoes.  Her husband/boyfriend took her bike away and she was incensed.  So she stomped off into the street which we all agreed was preferable to her being anywhere near the edge of the bridge.  Drunk to the point of not really functioning and having an argument with your significant other at 8:00-ish on Day 0 - poor life choice.

I forgot - this is from the church.  Even bikes need A/C.

ANGRY BEAVERS! I should have been wearing my "Fear the Beavers!" t-shirt.

I saw Freedom rocks everywhere in Iowa.  I know they're supposed to be patriotic, but mostly they made me think the towns couldn't afford a real statute.  They remind me of black velvet Elvis paintings more than anything.