Ragbrai L – Let’s Do This! | Big Bird's Adventures

Ragbrai L – Let’s Do This!

August 5, 2023 § 2 Comments

My Des Moine’s Register’s Annual Great Bicycle Ride Across Iowa finished this past Saturday July 29th in Davenport Iowa. This was my first Ragbrai, but not my first time riding across Iowa, as that occurred in 1981 when Frank Falcione and I rode our bikes across the country, at the time somewhat trying to get to that year’s start town on the West side of Iowa for that year’s Ragbrai. We weren’t even close to the start date as I recall, but we did have a good ride.

I found myself doing Ragbrai this year for a couple of reasons. 1) I knew it was the 50th year (Roman numeral L), and if there was going to be a year to do this, then this would be that year. I actually have a friend who has done several, since he was planning to do it again this year that brings me to 2) which was I told my friend Larry Butler “If you do it Larry, I will do it”, and so that is how, when the registration officially opened earlier this year, I was in like Flynn (Whoever the hell Flynn is). Pete Toheey, our common friend, always uses one of the additional charter services, which in this case was Brancel Bicycle Charters, and their page didn’t go live for another 2 weeks afterwards, so that was another slightly tense moment to await the call to go online and sign up.

How is this different than Ride The Rockies which I have done twice? Well, for 1 RTR is a little more self-contained, and certainly smaller, but an RTR registration includes all the organized aid stations along each day’s route, where as Ragbrai has none of that. It also includes as many hot showers as you want to take whereas Ragbrai includes none. Showers, like everything else is extra, on the spot pay so bring a lot of cash. RTR Registration is $750 whereas Ragbrai is $250 ish, however, the Brancel fee was another $490. What does the charter service do for you? They get one of the camp areas negotiated with each host town, and though technically our Ragbrai fee includes baggage (1 bag) and camping at the main campground, Brancel is unlimited bags, and tightly coupled with their assigned camping area. That means everything is closer together. Brancel gets their own shower trucks, but you pay ahead for 1 shower each day, and a towel is extra. They also set up relaxation tents for shade, massage and charging stations as well as keep an honor system supply of sports drinks, sodas (or Pop if a Mid-Westerner), regular, and craft beers as well as water. All this makes for a tighter community within the greater Ragbrai community. They also bring in at least one food at night, though it may not be what you desire, and that is extra as well.

Now, it isn’t just Brancel that works this way, but the entire Ragbrai experience is “Always have money” because everything along each route will mostly cost, though some setups give away water (Or beer!) they are usually looking for a donation. Along the route offerings were mainly water, though watermelon was on offer a lot, at small family controlled sites, usually an intersection along the route, however there were much larger offerings as well, including two “Iowa Craft Beer Tent” stops. These are usually setup on someone’s property where once the route is announced, the respective organizers of these stops go out along the route and meet with property owners, usually farmers, and negotiate a revenue share for property usage. There is always “Mr. Porkchop“, Beekman’s Ice Cream, and maybe the Iowa Beer Bus as regulars every day.

Then there are the route towns, and in every route town the town has food and drink vendors out in force along the route. In fact they are literally on the route, or the route routes right through the downtown so you have to go through it. Make no mistake, you WANT to go through it, because you want calories, and you want whatever you can find to fill your emptying water bottles and of course you want to see that street view Ragbrai experience.

Those that have read some of my previous posts regarding events like this know that I have written something about each day’s ride, however this time I am just going to keep my entire Ragbrai post to a single posting (Ha! Wait till the end).

The plan all along was to join Pete and “His Gang”, which is actually an assemblage of other gangs of people. There was Larry Rosenthal from Virginia who brought along his good buddy Justin Exner. To say that he also brought along the Virginia friends of his daughter is probably a stretch, as his daughter, Nat, who has done this before but is not doing it this year, got her friend Amber to do it, and Amber brought the other Virginia young women, Ally, Tabitha and Haley. Though Amber is a Virginian she is now a Texan and drove up with Pete and the Texas crew which also included Parker (the reason Amber is now a Texan), his brother Cory, and their friend Taylor as well as Cory and Parker’s dad Robert.

Once I told my friend Terry Downs about it, he signed up, and though he is a Jersey Boy born and bred, he is now a Virginian. My friend Larry Butler couldn’t make it this year, and a friend of his, David Rodriguez took his spot as another Virginian. We were supposed to have Robert Risberg as well, but he pulled out with about 2 weeks to go. So, if my math is correct that makes 14 of us.

Being ready to ride at the end of July isn’t usually a problem for me. I usually have 3000 miles in my legs by then, but this has not been a normal year for me. For one, my love a cold morning ride, and when I say cold I mean 25-45, seems to not be a love any more. At least it wasn’t this year, and though I did upgrade my downstairs basement setup to a smart trainer, you have to be a smart and determined person to put yourself on said trainer to get anything out of it, so I was missing a lot of initial early miles. It seemed like every bit of progress made was met with some setback, whether that setback was successive lazy days, or in case of early May, a 9 day excursion abroad to Iceland and The Netherlands to attend my adopted daughter’s wedding. Just as I was getting my legs back again I was hit with the Flu (Not Covid) in June which knocked me out. I tried the Rope-a-Dope, but it didn’t work, and the physical drain of that lasted weeks. So, needless to say I didn’t hit Sioux City with the best of legs to start this thing.

Everyone was driving in, and that included me. Terry agreed to meet me at my In-Laws in Beaver (Outside of Pittsburgh) and from there we would hit the road early Friday and drive to Davenport where we would check in with Brancel, turn over our bikes for transportation, get our Brancel Charters bracelet and packages, and then check into a hotel and meet everyone else once they had all arrived. That plan played out well and soon we got the text that we were all meeting downtown Davenport at Sippis American Grill and Craft Beer on the corner of 2nd and Ripley. I thought I might recognize Larry Rosenthal from his daughter’s You Tube channel, but I did not, however we did find he and Justin sitting at the bar just before the others showed up. We shared beers, and high hopes for a tremendous adventure together, ate, and then split up for our meet-up the next day for the Brancel Charter buses across the state to the starting city Sioux City. That Bus expense (and Bike transport) was part of the Brancel fee.

Early Pearly Terry and I were up, packed and in his truck heading for the meetup location on the campus of Saint Ambrose University on Gaines Street. With so many Charters, and in this case Brancel had 500 people to send across the state on at least 10 buses, as well as the constraint that most people would be leaving a car/vehicle in Davenport access to the drop-off was a wee bit restricted, but we managed to get through where Terry dropped me off with the stuff, and he went off to find his allocated lot for his truck. Since I knew we were supposed to await the others so we could all get on the same bus, I got some food, as there were some vendors there, and awaited everyone. Brancel was handing out coded tickets for the busses and everyone had to be there to get a ticket, so I could just walk up and say “I need fourteen” because as soon as all the tickets for A bus were handed out that bus filled and left.

As it turned out the Texas contingent forgot that instruction and all ended up on one bus, and the rest of use were assigned a different bus together. There isn’t much to say about the bus trip across Iowa expect that it gave us another opportunity to become acquainted. I sat in the front row with Larry Rosenthal and Justin Exner with Terry and David behind us. We were the Gray bus, and we barely got our bags underneath us. We had one stop in Des Moines for an early lunch and except for an over turned pickup and tow-behind trailer that overturned right before our very eyes, the ride was uneventful. Justin had some PGA golf match showing on his IPad, and our Brancel host brought two Dvds (those are discs, each with a movie that you insert into something called a Dvd Player which “plays” the dvd as a TV signal to display on the bus’s monitors. We had Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (A Classic) and Fast and Furious (The first of the F&F franchise films).

As we arrived in Sioux City, the programable billboards alerted drivers to the festivities of the weekend warning them about the convergence upon their fair city of tens of thousands of cyclists from around the country/world that would hitting on the city center this weekend. With the highway following the Missouri River at this point we could see the main expo area where all the main hubbub was going on. Our camp was four miles to the West in a park bordering the triple state point where South Dakota, Nebraska, and Iowa meet. We arrived at Riverside Park and debussed as one of the early busses. Yea! This gave us ample opportunity to secure a nice shady Oak tree to pitch our tents under. I think we chose well, right on the edge of playground equipment, which meant that we weren’t completely surrounded by tents. That may not sound like much, but when you have to get up at night 3 or 4 times to handle #1, it helps to find your way back to your tent when it isn’t lost in a sea of tents.

With our tents erected, and our bikes retrieved, we all decided to head down to the festivities at the Expo. For one thing, I didn’t have my registration packet, and needed to get checked in to the main Ragbrai event. Why did I not have my packet when everyone else received theirs in the mail (Snail Mail)? The reality is that the moment I realized that I might have accidently thrown it away as junk mail was the exact moment I could hear the recycling truck outside hammering the final nail into my stupid idiot coffin of my own making. So, I needed to get an official bracelet. As it turns out that was pretty easy. All I needed from them was a stupid looking blue bracelet and I was good to go.

After that it was simply wandering around the food area, which was set up in an open parking lot, so no shade, and it was hot. The other option, which we opted for was to walk over to the other area where all the bike shit was. Guess what. It was also a parking lot with no shade and it also was hot as fuck. One mistake I made was there is a fairly giant tent/vendor where all the left over unsold jerseys from past Ragbrais were being sold off for $5 if you could find your size. That was an opportunity missed, as why not buy a couple of perfectly dry nice brandy spanking new cycling Jerseys, in case you were stupid and only brought 3 thinking Iowa would be like Colorado, and everything would magically dry out all the time. Ha!

We wandered back over to the food area where I, seeking something as close to vegan as I could find chose a falafel truck with a leaky propane tank and a slow moving line. While my friends gained purchase of their food stuffs, and downed them, I sat in line whiffing on the unnatural sulfuric smell added to propane as protection so you know when it is leaking. Looking over at the tank itself and seeing the condensate floating above the tank was also a dead give away. Being 6’4″ I walked over and took a sniff, thus confirming my suspicions, and went around the back of the food truck and got the attention of a staffer to whom I pointed out “Your propane tank is leaking” and when his eyeballs went <—————> this wide I turned around and got back in line because I wanted my falafel pita sandwich. Standing in line I saw someone else come out of the truck, look at the tank, do something, and then the condensate, and the smell abated.

Finally fed, and beveraged (new word) we all decided it was too hot to hang out there, and that we would all be better off back at the campground where we could relax, and partake of the honor system of beers at Brancel, but on the way we would pass the official Missouri River dip site where we could touch our back wheels in the Western Border of Iowa as our official start to Ragbrai. With everyone there, we took that opportunity to individually dip, as well as a collective group dip, captured in bits using our trusty digital recording devices.

Dipped as we were, we retreated back to camp where the only thing missing was a roaring fire, which really we didn’t need. We gathered as if we had one, and sat around the rest of the evening chatting, storying, and downing a few more beers, as well as maybe a wee bit of drams of bourbon. That bourbon I brought wasn’t going to drink itself!! The watchword of the night was “Remember you have to ride tomorrow!”. Okay, perhaps that is a watchphrase (another new word), but a wise watchphrase it was, and we all eventually retreated to process the alcohol in our collective systems.

Remember back a few paragraphs when I said I was only going to write 1 summary? I lied! I think I will do 3, with this now being called the “Let’s do This!” first installment. I don’t want it to get too long, so we’ll devote another post to the 7 days, and then wrap it up with an overall impression.