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.