Jay’s Note: This is part twelve of a running two-week adventure log for RAGBRAI. Each day I’ll be posting a journal entry and some pictures from our trip that begins in Virginia, lands us in Iowa for a bike ride, and then eventually gets us back to the East Coast. Part eleven is here.
Short ride today, cool weather, about 40 miles — gonna be an easy one. That was the plan, anyway. More on that later.
We got up at 5 and got out around 6:30. Packing up from the family campground was easy because Sarah left the trailer partially hitched last night, so all we really had to do was break the rooftop tent down. Sarah’s job today: drive ahead and find us a campsite near Dyersville. She found one at a county park she said was about five and a half miles out of town. Hold that thought.
Today was the day the girls ride. About 20 miles each: Elizabeth taking the first leg, Maura the second. This has been a long time in the making.
We set out and Jeremy, Andrew, and Rudy all flanked Elizabeth to keep things clear behind her while I led. It was really nice of the guys to help out. I was so proud, too — of Elizabeth, and later Maura.
First stop: Chris Cakes, where the guys got unlimited pancakes and sausage but held themselves to one serving each. Elizabeth got oatmeal. We kept riding until we hit another roadside attraction — Iowa’s smallest cow. Elizabeth got her picture with the cow, obviously.
Somewhere in there we also got passed by the guy who rides RAGBRAI sitting backwards on his bike every year. As he went by, Andrew yelled after him: “Hey, this is the last time I let you pass me!”
We got to the meeting town and stopped in the Walmart parking lot to switch the bike and gear from Elizabeth to Maura — thanks to Jeremy’s wife Amber for driving her up. Maura had been nervous earlier in the day, but she overcame it and did great. The guys kept riding behind her, same as they had for her sister.
Right after the next town, they were handing out free Red Bulls on the way out. Rudy was going to grab one, so I decided to, too. Big mistake! I don’t like Red Bull.
During her leg, Maura got her first Beekman’s — the homemade ice cream that follows RAGBRAI around, churned on the spot by antique one-cylinder hit-and-miss engines. It’s the most famous stop on the route, and now both girls have had it the way you’re supposed to: standing over a bike in the middle of Iowa. She also tried some root beer from the Iowa Craft Beer tent, but didn’t want the rest of it. More for me.
At the end of her ride Maura got a hamburger and chips, the guys got their lunch, and we hung out under a tree before heading up to camp.
Remember that campsite five and a half miles out of town? Somewhere in the middle of the ride we found out it was more like eight — and the way there ran through either rough gravel or a fast highway. So the “easy 40” grew a tail.
We started out for camp, and Maura — who’d been riding well the whole time — fell off her bike once, and into a ditch another time. The ditch was actually really well padded with long grass, so nobody and no bike was injured in the process. Then when we got onto the gravel road, Amber and Sarah came out to pick folks up. Andrew and I decided to keep riding, and we made it through a lot of rough gravel — and just when we hit pavement, it sounded like his chain dropped. Turned out his entire derailleur had fallen off. Finishing the ride, which ends tomorrow, suddenly came into question.
We got into camp and I set the Starlink up, because there’s no cell reception out here at all. Then I went to take a shower while Sarah took Andrew to get his bike looked at. Turns out he went into town with her and the bike got fixed in two hours. He rides tomorrow.
The last day of RAGBRAI is tomorrow — another 40-ish miles — and then we head off to Starved Rock. So thankful for friends who helped watch over my kids and my family, and so proud of my girls for having ridden their first RAGBRAI.