RAGBRAI XLI 2013 - Fairfield to Fort Madison, 63 miles and 2,427 feet of climb

Last day, day 7!  Fairfield to Birmingham to Keosauqua to Bentonsport to Bonaparte to West Point to Fort Madison.

It was cold.  In the low 50s in the morning.  Cold enough that I wore my rain jacket for the first part of the ride and Adam shivered.  Twenty-one days of RAGBRAI in my life and I've never been cold before.  Crazy.  All sorts of riders had jackets and arm warmers on.

We saw two sets of these signs the last two days.  Adam and I both worked for Mycogen Seeds when we contracted for our old company, before they were bought out by Dow who closed down the Eagan, Minnesota, branch.  I didn't even realize they were still a name in the seed business.  When we worked for them, one of our applications was to track patents, which was precisely what Dow was after.  On one of my previous rides I saw a farmer with Mycogen swag on, which he presumably received as part of the seed incentive program we automated and layered applications on top of.


If you zoom in on the original of this photo you can see Adam in all his end of RAGBRAI-pedaling glory (not to be confused with his tire-dipping glory, which we'll see later).

This pie made me sad.  Partially because I went with a cream pie as my last slice of pie on RAGBRAI (fruit pies are my rule) and partially because it still tasted good with that fluffy top, but I dumped more than a third of it in my lap.  Last piece of pie on RAGBRAI = lap pie.  Damn it.  And I just wasn't in the mood, after daubing my crotch, to have a second piece.


The West Point Bike Mountain.  It's not turtles all the way down.  There's a structure the bicycles are glued to.  But pretty cool.


West Point panorama [original].  Only 10.9 miles from the end.

And the end.  Fort Madison and the tire dipping.  There was a fairly narrow space for getting down to the river.  A few people braved the rocks along the shore, but I'm a little skittish about things that affect my balance since the broken hip.  406 miles from the start, around 425 miles of total bicycling with overage and biking in towns, and 2486 miles since I started bicycling on the broken hip.  Not bad for 11 months.  There's a big wooden fort behind us.  Presumably a replica of Fort Madison.  I didn't realize the War of 1812 had involved Minnesota and Iowa, although the fact that it was fought with Native American allies makes that seem obvious with some consideration.


Adam and I officially dipping our tires.


My front tire getting a good wash.


Some live action tire dipping.


And 12 more seconds of dipping:


I had two other left over photos.  This is the charger I took along to recharge my iPhone.  It worked great because my phone was a bit of an energy hog.  This held six charges.  Usually I just added a half charge to the phone when it was closer to running out of power.  Much easier to handle than worrying about a solar-powered charger.  And when the ride was over, Eryn used it to power the iPhone and Android on the way home, and I powered up the iPad just to prove to myself it carried a significant charge.  Even without plugs, this would have probably gotten me through the week as long as I wasn't running RunKeeper the whole ride.


But I'd rather finish on a picture of the ride.  The sky merged with the tents a little in this picture, but it turned out very nice and sort of artsy looking [larger].  XLI was a great ride and Adam and I had a great time.  A fun 406 miles!

RAGBRAI XLI 2013 - Oskaloosa to Fairfield, 52 miles and 1,222 feet of climb

Day 6! Oskaloosa to Cedar to Fremont to Hedrick to Martinsburg to Packwood to Fairfield.

The last two days had small towns.  Even the meeting town was small.  No theater in the overnight town.  Instead we went to the local pizza place and had pizza, soft serve ice cream (at least I did - it came with the pizza, free access to the machine), and recharging.  We rounded it out with some shopping at the used book store and grabbing some air conditioning at the chocolate, cheesecake, and ice cream shop. Otherwise it was an early bedtime in one of the few shady sites we had during the ride, with a nice breeze, and the sound of the Spazmatics loudly playing until 10:30 p.m., even though they were 1.2 miles away.

It was a relaxing day, right down to a pretty pleasant shower with hot and cold water in the shower semi and a church that recharged our phones while providing free gatorade and popcorn.

I realized I missed two stories.  During the ride I was behind this guy who was listening to strange music I could only describe as elevator music.  Another rider passed me, pulled up next to him, and asked him about it.   The first rider explained it was a mixture of disco and synth.  So the second rider nodded his head in deep thought and offered that if he liked disco/synth, he'd probably like Flogging Molly. Flogging Molly is Celtic punk!  If you like the Dropkick Murphys, perhaps it's appropriate to say you'd like Flogging Molly.  But in no conceivable way are they related to disco/synth.  We listened to my Flogging Molly CD on the way down to the ride, so I know what I'm talking about.  The two sounded nothing alike.

Thursday there was a stop as we crossed a highway.  A couple of cops staffed the intersection and while Adam and I were there, they let some traffic through while accumulating a bundle of cyclists.  A peloton of cyclists?  A hub of cyclists?  Pick your own plural noun.  We waited, we waited, he slowly started to lift his hand, and one of the cyclists shot across the intersection all alone.  The cop shook his head, announced in his loudest, snarkiest, voice, "Sometimes I want to be first too," and waved the rest of us through.  There was a lot of chuckling.

Hedrick was the midway point and it was a little confusing as to whether you should go straight, or take the right.  We took the right, and it routed us past a community center that had a wonderful pie stop.  In my opinion, if it looks like there's a small loop at RAGBRAI that catches an odd part of the town, you should take it.  It's usually the difference between eating yet another smoothy and the traditional food stands, and a glorious piece of homemade pie.


This is one of the signs that you're going to get a very good piece of pie.


Lots of riders missed this stop so they didn't have to bike the extra five or six blocks.  Their loss.


Yum.  A more accurate picture would have showed the brat I ate sitting on top of my pie.  The other pieces of apple pie didn't look like this one.  They were definitely individually made and had different amounts of apple, sugar, and color to them.  One guy nearby asked for a particular kind of pie and a server disappeared for a few minutes and came back with a whole pie from the back room.


Fairfield.  They had a circus theme.  There were jugglers and gymnasts downtown culled from the local talent.


Some of the townsfolk built this amazing bicycle out of drainage pipe, pvc, and other items from the local hardware store.


I picked this up at the chocolate/ice cream shop.  I kept it so Erik H. can use it as inspiration for his next book.  I know he works hard on his blurbs.  To me this sounds sort of like a new age Doctor Who.  If you're 950 light years away, aren't you obviously in the future?  Why are they light years?  Because distance is involved as well as time?  Aren't they pretty much inter-related at that point?  Or is she 950 light years away AND in the future, just not necessarily 950 years in the future, given her mode of transportation and/or meditation techniques?


These two guys camped near us.  Adam's tent!  Pinky was right about the poles!  I noticed one of them hadn't set up earlier and, when I looked, it was obvious his poles were broken.  I offered them Adam's role of duct tape, but they had made due with other means, including stuffing a folding chair in the bottom of one tent to hold it up.  These pictures were from the next morning, so the guy with the folding chair had obviously kicked it over overnight.  I can't imagine that wasn't a bit wet with dew.


Overnight picture.  Six days of bicycling make Scooter go something something!

RAGBRAI XLI 2013 - Knoxville to Oskaloosa, 52 miles and 2,808 feet of climb

This is from later in the week.  I set my pack on a banana from the Iowa Conservation folks and, not wanting to eat a banana that had been mashed into my tent, decided to draw a face on it.  I surprised Adam in his tent with Banana Man and then mashed him over a sharp edge inside the trash can so that whomever opened the trash next would see him staring up, a look of surprise on his face at being trepanned by a trash can.  I have edited it down and added some music for Adam.


The windmill in Pella, Iowa.  The largest in-use windmill (of its sort) in the United States.  The thing is massive.  Shortly before the windmill we had pancakes at Central College.  At the other end of our table, and Adam missed this whole event, were two young guys and a woman having pancakes.  At one point one guy starts telling this story.  It seems he's sharing a tent with someone on RAGBRAI.  So he woke up touching his wiener (his word).  But it turns out it was the other guys wiener.  And that guy woke up, and he was touching his wiener. That was their homoerotic moment for RAGBRAI.  The woman starts laughing so hard I thought she was going to choke on her pancakes.  And the other guy, who's not wiener guy number two, looks absolutely shocked that anyone would admit to that story.  Laughs uncontrollably.  Is shocked again.  And then the three of them are laughing so hard for minutes they can't eat.  It was pretty funny.



The home of Banana Man, the Iowa Conservation free banana and postcard stand. It's somewhere along the route every day.  I sent Eryn a cow postcard and an owl postcard one stressing Whoo and one stressing Moooost proclaiming me to be the best dad.  She's still my little girl.

A very attractive picture of Adam with his camelpack on his front and applying sunblock.


Mr. Banana Man's family.  Bananas!  Bananas everywhere!


There were a couple signs like this on the ride, including one that warned that the road ahead was in no way built with bicycles in mind.

Oskaloosa's literature claimed they'd won a prize as one of the 15 most picturesque town squares in the Untied States.  Nothing adds to that beauty like dropping an orange safety fence and a giant, inflatable Budweiser bottle in the mix.


In Oskaloosa there was a cool book store called the Book Vault that used to be a bank and had a safe on each floor that was now a book closet.  Unfortunately, I needed a break from the book of plays I was reading, so I went searching for a horror or sci fi book.  There was a dubious looking book called Cryonic: A Zombie Novel on the shelf, but a search on the in-house computer told me it was about a 4.75/5 on Amazon.  These reviewers are friends of the author.  I can think of no other reason for a 4.75/5.  It is a bad book.  Sorry Travis Bradberry, but your book is one of the worst zombie books I've ever read.  Your main character is a Mary Sue of the most obvious sort and no one does anything particularly clever and your loose ends are blatantly tied up and the writing...well, at least it matches the plot.  I think I'm going to send it to Klund to read.

 

Next door to the Book Vault was an enormous coffee shop that looked like it had once been the movie theater.  For the first time since we had left Minnesota we managed to charge our phones to almost 100%.


For a while it looked like rain.  This was our tent neighbor's attempt to ensure his/her bike stayed as dry as possible.  I think it looks like a way to torture a bicycle.


The second picture of No Parking bicycle humor from the ride.


Mixed berry pie.  Excellent crust.  Delicious, even without the ala mode.


A pair of very wide photos of our Oskaloosa campsite.  The two of them together comprise about a 360 degree view.  There was a little girl near us who couldn't pronounce Oskaloosa.  I asked her if that was her name.  It was also near here that the Heather stretching discussion took place.

Through those tents lies a water hose that I used to fill my bottles.  The guy before me set it down and started walking away and when I picked it up I activated the hair trigger on the nozzle.  Shot him square in the back.  He took it with a good nature as I was obviously almost as startled as he was.

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Team Fur Bandit.  They covered their bikes in fur and what seemed to be carpet.

Unfortunately, it was near here that we saw Grown Ups 2.  Our selection of movies was incredibly limited and, in order to take advantage of the air conditioning, we were willing to see whatever was playing at the time we were available.  That included Sandra Bullock's The Heat and Grown Ups 2.  Grown Ups 2 made The Heat seem like an absolute masterpiece.  Wow was it bad.  At first we couldn't find the theater, but a very friendly woman gave Adam a hug, copped a feel, and personally escorted us to the theater.  I thought she might come in to canoodle with Adam.

A number of Iowa towns didn't have a theater, or had a theater that was undergoing a major overhaul but had stalled for lack of money.  The new digital technologies seemed to be expensive enough that revamping to support what had become standard was incredibly prohibitive.  It was hard to believe downs of 6-8,000 people didn't have a single screen unless you drove 16 miles down the road.

RAGBRAI XLI 2013 -Des Moines to Knoxville, 49.9 miles and 2,920 feet of climb

Wednesday.  Des Moines to Adelphi to Runnells to Monroe to Knoxville.

The ride had a beautiful start, routing past the Capitol.  The building is enormous and beautiful.  It certainly seems to outsize our St. Paul version.


I like this picture.  I thought about photoshopping the cyclist onto the pillar where the two men on horses are hanging out, but it looks good as is.


I didn't take pictures, but after Capitol hill the ride meandered through the state fair grounds.  The food stands were open for breakfast and although they weren't running when we went through, the skycars/gondalas opened for rides later.  We didn't eat at t he fairgrounds.  To me, it conjured the idea of eating cheese curds and corn dogs for breakfast.

Instead, we ate in Runnells.  Adam found the equivalent of a McMuffin down the street, and I stopped at the church for a Christmas breakfast of biscuits and gravy.  The whole of Runnells was done up with a Christmas theme and Santa Claus - a living one, not an animatronic sort - sang me a carol as we rolled into town.


When you run out of Christmas ornaments, improvise.  In this case, a festively decorated banana tree.


Here's the historical society.  I couldn't quite figure out why the LDS no longer had their church.  It seemed like it probably had something to do with the Mormon Trail (alt link to a free online book at the National Park Service), but it wasn't obvious.  Google street view for the Mormon Church in Runnells shows the historical society, so it's not like it just moved down the street.


I liked the local color on their timeline which included phrases like "torned down".  Very rural Iowa and Minnesota.


Cyclists and the back side of the historical society.  An old townsguy told Adam we could get water if we just walked around to the door on the back.  We walked in and I tried the second door and it wouldn't open.  So I went up here near the tractor to the water fountain and Adam went to tell the old guy.  He led Adam to the back door at a glacial pace, telling him there was no way the door was locked, and then simply opened it with a some sort of magical old guy wrist action.


Crowds!


Rhubarb Strawberry ala mode.  A very good piece of pie even with the flatter crust instead of the flakey crust.


On Wednesday they routed us over the river.  We were required to stay on the right to avoid the separation gaps and told, "Do not stop!"  There were three cops there to ensure we kept moving.  Halfway across there were two cyclists pressed up against the side replacing a flat tire, so there were exceptions to the rule.


Live motion river action.


In Knoxville we ate at the church.  I'm not sure whether to title this picture, "Go home bench.  You're not a gate.  You're drunk."  or "Bench, stop hanging out in Gate's friend zone.  She's making you carry her saying while she hooks up with Jesus."  In the end, it's a mean trick by Jesus and/or the bench.  There's literally no way to be saved in this context.


Although I don't drink and bike, or even drink at the end of a bike day or before a bike day, drinking is a big part of RAGBRAI for some people.  You can get an idea of how much alcohol is expected to be consumed by counting the trash cans in the beer garden.  Unlike previous years, this year there were a few microbreweries selling beer on the side of the ride and even a few stands for Templeton Rye.


The advantage of having a bus.  Portatoilets and shade.


Team Mayhem.  It seemed to have a number of Minnesotans on the team.


This guy rode his Fat Tire facsimile all the way across Iowa.  Looked like a lot of work and it made a lot of creaky/squeaky noise.


Keep Calm and Chive On!  These were not the drunk guys.  Or at least not the same drunk guys we encountered yelling for Heather in Des Moines.


The Cutters bus.  That's a good name for a team, ala Breaking Away.


By the way, this was our entry into Knoxville.  Definitely different than our entrance anywhere else.


A day four crowd.


Back to Knoxville.  If you can't see it accurately, go to the very large version of this photo and check out that charging station for the team next to the Budget truck.  I'm surprised it doesn't just explode or melt.


Bikes, bikes, bikes in our sleeping field.


This guy, who Adam called Pinky, set up next to him with the exact same tent.  Adam asked him if he had custom poles and he said yes, he had indeed replaced them, because the poles that came with the tent were total crap and constantly broke.  You can see the dent from Adam's broken pole in the picture.  That's a good picture of our luggage semi behind Adam.  From where we were camped we could enjoy the nearby karaoke which included an awful rendition of Sweet Caroline, which we heard at least five times during the ride.  It must be the Ring of Fire of Iowa.


Later in the day I walked across the road and discovered that there was a historic town, cheap pancakes in the morning, free water, and a beautifully laid out camping area.  The grass is greener on the other side of the road.  We never wandered too far from the luggage trailer, but apparently sometimes it's worth a short excursion before setting up tents.


And more random cyclists.  Find yourself!