RAGBRAI - Day 61-68, Glenwood, IA to Moline, IL

I'm just going to condense everything about RAGBRAI into one post, because to do otherwise would be way too long.

I woke up from my hidey-hole along the Wabash Trail and arrived in Glenwood, IA, at about 7 AM on RAGBRAI day zero. To refresh, RAGBRAI stands for the Register's Annual Great Bicycle Ride Across Iowa, and it's the event that I had been aiming for since leaving Hutchinson, KS. In short, it claims to be the longest and oldest touring cycling event in the world, where about 20,000 cyclists get together to form a massive rolling party from one end of Iowa to the other. The route isn't the most direct, but takes riders about 50-75 miles per day through a bunch of small towns and interesting sites.

Though I had a blast overall, the whole event was very commercialized, which was a letdown compared to stories I'd read about the RAGBRAI of old. There were vendors everywhere selling food and goodies at inflated prices. Some places asked $8 for a shower. At one point, a bike mechanic refused to let me use his tire pump unless I put something in the tip jar first, even though he had plenty of other business and no immediate need for the pump. Maybe that would've changed if he knew I was on a longer journey.

The dedicated freeloader can, however, find all the elements of Ye Olde RAGBRAI still present, and the event is still a lot of fun on a budget. Team Good Beer arranged with Left Hand Brewing and others to set up a free microbrew tent along the route every day. Local kids line parts of the route armed with squirt guns while their parents watch the freak show roll by. Each town tries to outdo the next with live entertainment. At the center of it all are the riders themselves, which is really where one should look for the spirit of the event anyway. Riding self-supported meant that I could ignore whatever "official" parts of the event I wanted.

A bit of social anxiety prevented me from participating as fully as I wanted, but I did manage to meet people along the way. On day zero, I spent a lot of time harassing people who were waiting to buy vendor beer, trying to convince them to come with me to the local grocery and split a six-pack. I'm much more able to interact with people when I feel I can offer them some kind of service; in this case, the local grocery meant more and better beer for less money, not to mention directly supporting local business. I made some friends that way.

Backpocket Brewing set up the most popular stops every day, usually just before the halfway point and just before the end town. I stopped at each of these, and usually drank a Murderhorn or two at the day's-end site - all beer was the same price, and Murderhorn is a tasty strong blonde with an ABV of over 10%, so I'm not sure why they bothered with other choices. I spent a lot of time running through the typical Trans-America FAQs. A lot of people stayed with their teammates, but I was able to find a few RAGBRAI orphans who seemed approachable. I started Team Generic with another guy in a plain T-shirt. A couple people were from Chicago, and invited me to drop by. One even had a ukulele I could play when I got there. I ran into Deanna and Sonia a few times. I met another bearded, dark-haired, kind of awkward Trans-America cyclist from Portland, who is in all those aspects much like myself. I would run into Mike repeatedly throughout the rest of RAGBRAI, and repeatedly had to let people know that we were not brothers.

Through Mike, I met Team Hot Sauce and Team Party Pants, two of the most dedicated groups of partiers on the ride. I ended up at an off-route party with them and several other fraternity-esque teams, and was amazed that they could drink like they did and ride the whole week. It turned out that many of them rode the team bus instead of their bike for a few days. It also helped that, like most RAGBRAI riders, they had a bus to carry all their stuff for them. Jerseys for Team Hot Sauce came equipped with a "hot pocket" on the back, with a bottle of Fireball Whiskey printed on the actual jersey to remind them where it goes. Fireball, of course, is the "hot sauce" for which they are named. Team Party Pants definitely delivered on their name, with an array of designs including rainbow tiger stripes and leopard print to be worn on the bike, and in at least one case, a shiny metallic man-thong for off the bike.

A few of the other teams on the ride included:

• Team Butt Ice, who has outlived their former sponsor by the same name, which made a real product for sore butts;
• Team Monkey Butt, whose jerseys included an image of a monkey cyclist with a red, swollen ass -- presumably, former customers of Butt Ice;
• Team Good Beer, as mentioned previously, whose jerseys were printed to resemble lederhosen and dirndls;
• Team Roadkill, who were blamed for decorating roadkill with Mardi Gras beads despite that being the work of Team Fur Bandits;
• Team Bad Music, blasting the bottom-40 hits of today and yesterday from a tricked-out tandem;
• Team KYBO, named for a company that used to make portapotties - supposedly, it stands for Keep Your Bowels Open, but I'm guessing that's a backronym;
• Team Plywood: "Easy to lay, fun to nail";

and many others, though not all were quite so creative. I think there was a team for each branch of the Armed Forces, which seemed out of place. According to Team Air Force, they were able to use some form of PR leave for the event but weren't allowed to drink. Most major teams were accompanied by a tricked-out school bus with custom paint and all sorts of modern conveniences. I felt it was a shame that none of the busses had been to Burning Man as far as I could find.

The bikes were interesting, too. Most were super-light road bikes, in many cases carbon fiber. A few people lounged on high-tech recumbents. Some, like myself, were on touring or mountain bikes, loaded down with racks, panniers, and other equipment. These were generally unregistered riders like myself who had no support team to rely on. A surprising number of tandem (two-person) bikes were present, including one with an articulated pool-noodle-person as the rear rider, with its feet taped to the pedals to give the impression that it was participating. Tandems were mostly ridden by couples, hence the alternate name: divorce bikes. One family rode what I will call a super-tandem, putting five people - two adults, one teen, and two smaller children - together on one vehicle.

Some brave souls took novelty bikes, though I don't know how many actually rode the entire route. A couple bikes had superfat tires as wide as my fist. One tall bike was present, created by welding one bike frame on top of another. Some single-speed masochists struggled their way up hills for no good reason. A couple people used hand-bikes, powering themselves with their arms the whole way. A genuine 19th-century Pennyfarthing participated, though the rider had previously ridden it from San Francisco to Boston, so I guess that was no big feat. Two longboarders made it. A rollerblader was rumored, but I never saw them. One guy with impressive facial hair finished the route on a touring unicycle, which is apparently a real thing. Two people just ran the route, in at least one case pushing a stroller with water and other equipment inside.

The riders themselves came from all over the US, with a few from places like Tokyo or New Zealand. I got a free beer from someone I later learned was a state legislator, who may or may not also be bananaman ("We never realized a man in a banana suit could be so popular!"). All ages were represented, with three riders over 90, several children on tandems or on their own, and at least one infant in a trailer. A range of body types were present. Lance Armstrong was there as he apparently always is. In all, the ridership itself made a very good argument for bikes as practical transit for a wider range of people than I initially expected.

In all, I have no regrets with my decision to kill time and add several hundred miles to make RAGBRAI. If nothing else, the variety was nice, and it's worth it to have the roads (mostly) closed while crossing an entire state. It was jarring to always have people around, and I fought with some depressed, alone-in-a-crowd kind of feelings, but I was happy to meet the people that I did. If nothing else, they tended to have beer and distracted the most annoying kinds of bugs.


Pics, in no particular order:

Killing time - Day 60: Bellevue to Omaha, NE

I left the registration booth at 6:30 AM without incident, and spent about an hour and a half using their free showers for myself and my laundry. I got onto a library's wifi, discovered I was basically in Omaha, and decided to visit the city proper.

I found a coffee shop on the edge of the Old Market area, and they said I could stay there as long as I wanted. So I did. The shop become my HQ for the day, from which I periodically set out to try nearby breweries. I caught up on my blog a little, charged everything I owned to max, and generally did what I could to abuse their hospitality.

Outside of the coffee shop, I spent most of my time at Brickway Brewery. I spent about an hour chatting with a woman about her travels and my own, met another cross-country cyclist on his way to RAGBRAI, and apparently just missed Deanna and Sonia by about five minutes as if this were somehow the only bar in town. The beers were good, especially their Epic Stout, but I'm pretty sure nobody wants more detailed reviews.

I stayed in the coffee shop until they closed at 10 PM. I stayed out front until 11 PM. Finally, I left for Glenwood where RAGBRAI starts, and promptly got stopped trying to cross a pedestrian bridge. A small crowd had gathered part of the way up, so I rang my bell to try and get through. Then someone informed me that there was a jumper on the bridge, and snidely added "Thanks for being respectful". I'm not sure how I was supposed to know that was what was going on. I assumed there was music in the park down below or something, since people had gathered there too. Also, is it any more respectful to ogle at a suicidal person? I figured this probably wasn't the time to point that out. I napped for a bit in the park below, near enough so that I could hear when the cops drove away. When they left, one cop apologized for the delay and explained there was just a super rare Pokemon that they had to catch up there.

I made it across the bridge, bumbled my way through the park on the other side, talked with a homeless dude and considered sleeping there, decided against it, and emerged into a Harrah's parking lot. This was kind of surreal to me. Coming from Sacramento, I had grown up under the unreasonable assumption that Nevada was the only place where Harrah's existed. Some big event was just getting out, so I made my way through snarled traffic until emerging into Council Bluffs proper. Eventually I found another rail-trail, found a wide spot that seemed kind of hidden, and fell asleep.


The only pictures I took: abusing the ability to charge devices and a beard update.

Shadowrun - Day 59: Lincoln to Bellevue, NE

I had a couple days to kill before heading to Iowa to meet up with RAGBRAI, so I spent most of today eating bagels and being useless at Bagels n' Joe while Deanna and Sonia left for Omaha. A few people told me that Omaha was really worth visiting, but I liked the idea of getting to the start of RAGBRAI early to have a rest day or two and to get in before it became a gigantic commercial event.

At something like 5 PM I finally left for Plattsmouth, NE on the Iowa border, most of the way to Glenwood. The late start wasn't entirely due to laziness. A major heat wave had been making this entire week difficult, with the humidity pushing the heat index over 120 F on some days even though the absolute temperature hardly broke 100. I had been told that many of the farm roads out this direction were paved, so riding at night didn't seem like such a bad idea.

The first portion of my route was another crushed limestone rail-trail. I don't mind dirt, and dedicated bike trails tend to be a lot more shady and less trafficked than the alternatives. Along the way, I stopped in a small town named Eagle to refill my water. I saw a man out watering his garden and tried to say hi, but he ignored me for maybe a full minute before realizing that I just wanted water. He immediately apologized, explaining that he thought I was "a Jehovah's Witness or something". When he learned that I was biking across the country, it just about blew his mind that I had ended up in front of his house in Eagle, Nebraska. He invited me inside, introduced me to his wife, reheated a burger patty for me, and gave me a ham sandwich and some chips for the road. I didn't spend too long there because I was a little nervous about my late start, but now I kind of regret taking off as soon as I did.

The rail-trail deteriorated as I got farther from Lincoln, eventually leading to a complete washout with no way around. I took some unpaved farm roads to circumvent the washout and eventually made it to a nice, smooth section that had been paved about one week before I got there. Down the road a ways, I met an old man out for his evening walk and asked if he knew where I could refill my water. He said I could follow him to his place, so I walked with him for about fifteen minutes, answering all the usual questions along the way.

It was pretty dark once I left there, but that's what lights are for. I quickly discovered that my headlamp had turned itself on and died in my bag, but the largely flat terrain meant that I wasn't going too fast for my front light to handle. As it got darker, I realized that the near-full moon did a better job of illuminating the street than my light, so I went dark save for a rear blinker. This made the night much more magical. I didn't like the humidity, but the bugs did, and this meant lots of bites around sunset. It also meant that the fireflies were out in full force, and I had just been too focused on the little spot of light directly in front of me to notice. The cloud of phosphorescent green specks floating gently over miles of gently-rolling farmland made for a spectacular view, but attempts to take a picture resulted in nothing but ruined night vision. A tripod and a DSLR would've made a great long exposure shot.

I got to Plattsmouth after midnight and couldn't find a suitable hiding place to sleep. A family was out playing Pokemon Go together, so I bothered them to ask about my options. The father knew a free campground about an hour north, but didn't know the name. It was farther than I wanted to go, so I kept looking. I found the one bar that was still open, but didn't go inside. It was loud, I wasn't feeling super extroverted, and everyone seemed far too drunk to be interesting. They did have unsecured WiFi, though, so I found directions to the free campground and set off again.

In short, I think Google tried to get me captured and sent to a corporate black site, then tried to get me killed when I chickened out. Or I've just played too much Shadowrun. Either way, here's what happened.

First, Google took me down a long road, deserted besides a couple on a Harley that passed me part way down. Deserted roads were expected, given that it was about 2 AM in middle-of-nowhere, Nebraska. The road then started to get cracked and overgrown, eventually skirting a dilapidated industrial area. The Harley couple passed me again, heading back to the freeway. This was explained when the road ran into a reinforced concrete barrier a bit later, with an impressive array skid marks stopping just short of, and sometimes at, the concrete. "That's fine," I thought. "No road is closed to bikes. Google knows best." I heaved my bike over the barrier and kept going.

The road hit another barrier, this time painted yellow and black and braced with metal supports like it was made to repel a vehicular assault. "It's probably fine," I thought. "That Air Force base I saw on the map is way north of here, and this place is obviously abandoned." I again hefted 71 lbs of bike and gear over the barrier. Next, Google instructed me to turn and scale a 10-foot fence with curls of barbed wire on top. "It probably meant the next street, not this one," I hedged. "Plus, that looks like the kind of thing someone might electrify." The next street had a similar fence, but with a motorized gate and guardhouse built into it. This was cool. Maybe it was unlocked?

In my defense, there was no obvious way around this place without getting on a major highway at night. I also figure that stealth ops rarely wear safety-yellow retroreflective vests the way I was.

I tossed a piece of rebar at the gate and saw no sparks. I propped it up carefully against the gate, thinking maybe it needed to be grounded. No sparks. I still didn't trust that electrified fences worked the way they do in movies, so I prodded the gate with my bike tire. It didn't budge. I went back to try the previous fence. Also no luck, and with multiple large padlocks on it. I examined the map and tried to find a better option.

Around this time, I noticed that the obviously-abandoned guard house now had a light on inside. This significantly shortened my planning horizon and I bolted back to the freeway. The map indicated a nearby street that led to a railyard, and on the other side of that railyard was a street that picked up Google's instructions from the other side of cement-barrier-and-barbed-wire-land. So I headed that way. This street led to a small trailer park with an angry dog to trailer ratio of about 3, so my presence must have woken up the entire community. The roads were also dirt, so I couldn't get anywhere fast. I got off to walk, then drew my bear spray and removed the safety. I didn't encounter any dogs that were motivated enough to jump their fences, unlike previous encounters.

The road ended in bushes and grass about as tall as my bike. I plowed through it and emerged in the railyard. With dogs still barking behind me and the near-certainty that somebody was loading their gun in response, I didn't bother checking for ticks before working my way over sharp rocks, about six sets of tracks, and bunch more tall grass on the opposite side. I emerged on a small road and followed it to another road which, Google informed me, should have crossed back over the railyard and rejoined my planned route. Instead, it ran into a concrete barrier and stopped. This time, though, I could clearly see the barriers on the opposite side of the tracks, and what looked like a clear shot beyond that. So I went ahead and crossed again.

Once across, some shipping containers revealed themselves to be temporary housing units, situated like another guardhouse but meant to not appear as such from the outside. There was a truck out front. I was in, though, so I kept going. I got rid of the reflective vest, figuring it best to not invite confrontation. It seemed like this had to be a public road, anyway.

Google and the Pokemon-playing father had both promised me that there was a bike path ahead. The Pokemon player said he'd even done this ride before. It would be a right turn just past a bridge, and sure enough, I found a dirt path turning right along a levi immediately after a bridge. The path hit a locked gate, but there appeared to be a paved path a little ways below, going under the bridge. I started trying to roll my bike down the steep hill toward it. Turns out the steep cliff turned into a vertical wall at the bottom. It appeared to be maybe 2 feet tall, so I tried to drop my back wheel down it. It was closer to 5 feet, and the weight of my bike dragged me off the wall with it. I tossed the bike aside, landed with a roll (thanks Judo), and felt badass despite the fact that I just fell off a wall. I made sure nothing was wrong with the bike, took off down the trail, and promptly felt much less badass when I noticed a perfectly nice paved trail that I could have used to join this trail gracefully.

The nicely-paved bike trail was much more pleasant than anything I had experienced that day. I was still riding a bit of an adrenaline high, the temperature had finally cooled off to something reasonable, and a few fireflies were still out, making the last few miles feel exceptionally free and invigorating. I made it to the free campground I had been told about, but couldn't find the actual tent-camping area. Instead, I found a registration booth with a single computer set up inside for campers to register. I tried to register, but found that the computer had no internet connection. I wasn't looking forward to dealing with the heat inside my bivy sack or the bugs outside of it, and the registration booth was air-conditioned, had outlets to charge my lights, and probably would be deserted until tomorrow afternoon when new campers arrived. So, I opened notepad, typed "Wake me up if I need to leave - Dave" in size 36 font, and went to sleep in the corner.


Not many pictures today, just a funny sign and the building that became my campsite. The sign is about a street named A, so it looks like someone made a sign to say "Stop, a street!" If that's not funny, it's because you had to be there.