RAGBRAI - Day 4 - Leon to Centerville - 65.1 miles, 2708 feet of climb)

ADDENDUM: I missed pictures from breakfast!

Day 4 - Leon to Centerville!  65.1 and only 2708 feet of climb, but it was hot and there were some bigger hills.  This is the day Adam and Ming made their gentlemen's agreement that you would wait for someone at a stop for only 30 minutes before all bets were off and they could move on.



I said we got up early.  This early.  Damn that's early.  That's Adam headed to the truck.


And Ming, getting his stuff loaded.  He's facing the other direction because he's got morning wood from all that watermelon.  At least that's what Adam says.


Our first stop was Garden Grove - a Mormon town.  They weren't really ready for us so early in the morning.  They were still getting the tractors and wires adjusted for parking bicycles.


This guy was actually pretty good. I liked his foot pedal that allowed him to sing with himself.  I hope he got a much larger audience later.

We ended up stopping for breakfast in Humeston, Iowa.  This gigantic bull's head greeted you to town.


My sister was dubious of our breakfast.  It wasn't typical RAGBRAI fare.  We ended up in a sit-down cafe with a waitress, the Grassroots Cafe,...


...eating quiche of a glass plate and drinking coffee from a ceramic cup and following it up with custom baked bread and grape salad dessert.



Almost looks like one of those French paintings of a bicycle outside a cafe.  Ming, Adam, and I are all in this photo.  Ming paying the bill and flirting with the teenage waitress.  Ming and I reflected in the window.


I spent a chunk of the day sprinting ahead of Ming and Adam trying to find a bathroom without a line.  Something wasn't sitting right.  Most of the towns on Day 4 were unincorporated, so they were just a bar, or a corner, or a church.  Every single one of them with porta potties with a big line.  Finally, in Mystic, only 5 miles from the end, I found an unoccupied pair.  It was a good place to stop - goat races, pinch pies (like you'd get at McDonald's but better), a smoothie, pulled pork sandwiches, and a big hill leading out of town.  A lot of folks rested before the hill and commented that once they got up it they were stopping again for the craft beer tent.


I didn't actually see the goats racing.  I was talking to a guy from the lower midwest and a woman from San Antonio.  But I did see the goats getting ready.  The little one wasn't ready to race.



Ming texted me to shoot ahead and I found us a spot at the community college right near the fence and truck.  It was an interesting time to pull in as about the only other riders pulling in at the same time were many attractive young women.  They're FAST (as was the woman from San Antonio in Mystic).  I'm not sure if they've got something to prove to male riders, or if they're just staying ahead of the pervs.  I talked to one for a while who was interning in Madison at Trek and was headed out West to work as management for another big outdoor firm if she got the chance.

It was our day to wash clothes.  This is the laundromat I found on Google.  There's a problem.  We talked to a woman who was going to give us a ride to the other laundromat, but then I just started walking.  Sometimes you just have to assume you'll get there before the details work themselves out or you'll be waiting all day when the rest of the riders catch up.  There was a tractor shuttle in town, but the guy was from out of town and didn't know if he went near the other laundromat.  He did.  Within three blocks.  We probably walked at least a mile.



The other laundromat was a bit dicey.  The shower trucks were washing loads of towels and many of the dryers were broken.  You can't see it in this smaller panorama, but if you click into the original you can see that every single washer on the side where Ming is sitting is out of order.

Original Size (huge)


Someone doesn't trust Carl to fix them anytime soon.  But we got our hands on a few and a few dryers and talked to a guy riding unsupported and another guy supporting the Air Force team.  We'd passed a church on the way there, so we went back for dinner.  There was an elevator.  But that was a mistake because a.) it was hot and b.) you'll note I didn't mention a shower for us prior to the laundromat.  It was a hothouse of stink.  This other guy on the elevator made a face.


Centerville had a nice setup.  I got to see a lot of it as I forgot my clothes on the way to the shower truck.  We had waited for quite a while to catch a shuttle as they kept stopping before the stop and people would run over and fill it up that weren't in the line.  So once I was back to collect my clothes, I stopped at the other location.  And it promptly switched to the correct location.

They decorated their porta potties with themes.  You can't see her, but behind me in this photo is Ms. Pancake Day.  Madison Moorman, Miss Pancake, is over on the Facebook Pancake Day page if you really need to see the details about Pancake Day - she explains it in depth.  We didn't have the ham ball dinner, so no photo for us.


A close up of the yellow brick road porta potty.


Here's the tractor transportation.  We spent some time downtown just wandering around visiting the stores and taking in some air conditioning.

RAGBRAI - Day 3 - Creston to Leon 58.5 miles, 3318 feet of climb)

Day 3 - Creston to Leon.  Still very hilly.  This isn't the day where Adam figures out he's got breaks that are rubbing which is why he's going down hills so much slower than Ming or me, when in reality he should be somewhere between the two of us on the coasting scale.  That's later.  So feel bad for him on Day 3 - he used a lot of extra energy on a very hilly route.



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.