RAGBRAI Day 6 – Preemptive Eating

[NOTE: This post was written Friday night. However, the internet was non-existent in West Union and I haven’t been able to post until now. Also, I haven’t written the post for today (spoiler alert — we did finish) but will do so as soon as I can. I may not be able to post until Monday as I’m visiting family in Iowa before heading back to Huntsville.]

Today was another grueling day. The 64 miles from Charles City to West Union included a lot of hills. Too many hills for our taste. Luckily, it wasn’t too hot … as long as the sun wasn’t shining. But when the sun shone directly on us, it just felt brutal. We were definitely slower today averaging only about 10 MPH, but there wasn’t any more we could do given the ~2000 ft we had to climb.

Today was apparently preemptive eating day for us. It worked something like this:
Susan: “I’m not hungry yet but I will be in the next few miles. Do you want to get something to eat?”
Leah: “Yeah, that sounds like a good idea.”
We were never truly hungry, but continued eating our way through Iowa nevertheless.

Leah ate the fun item today — candied bacon on a stick. She said it was delicious. I had ribs which were yummy. For dessert, we took a completely different route than our usual. We had ice cold watermelon which really hit the spot but made our hands sticky. I tried cleaning my hands with sanitizer but was only minimally successful in removing the stickiness.

We bought some more Iowa-shaped sugar cookies. (This time there was a heart that showed where we were so Leah didn’t have to ask which edge was the top edge.) In the same town, we bought refrigerator magnets which we thought were very cute.

We finally got a picture of the roller blading crew. We have seen this group of 6 to 7 people every single day on the route. They are roller blading across Iowa. How strong would your ankles need to be to even attempt such a feat?! Definitely stronger than mine!

There was one guy today who I want to mention but I don’t have his picture. We have dubbed him “surfer biker dude”. He passed us today going up a hill which is not particularly noteworthy; almost everyone we encounter passes us. But when we started going downhill, he did something quite unexpected. He actually stood on top of his bike! He put one foot on top of the handlebars and other foot on the top of the bike frame. Then he stood straight up with his arms extended and proceeded to surf down the hill on top of his bike. We were amazed and very scared for him. Kids, DO NOT TRY THIS AT HOME!

The jersey of the day was on a woman Leah spotted in one of the towns. She was from Alabama and her jersey depicted Birmingham’s Vulcan on a bicycle which was pretty cool. Turns out that the rider was actually from Birmingham.

When we generally approach a town, the bike traffic slows and the bikers get off their bikes and start walking. The cool thing about the trikes is that we can stay on our trikes and pedal slowly through the town instead of pushing our trikes. As we stroll through town, there are vendors on either side of the street peddling all kinds of things: food, snacks, water, bike equipment, bike services, trinkets, etc. Leah and I will typically go through the town taking note of what we’d like to buy or do. Then we park on the other side of town and walk back. For almost everything, there is a line and sometimes a really long line. Everyone is patient which is important.

Since Tim has been hounding me to get more pictures of the crowds, I tried to do so today. Honestly, it is a little tough, but I did get manage to snap a few as we traveled through one of the towns. What you have to remember is that these are just the people who are in the vicinity where we are. There are riders who started earlier and/or ride faster who are well ahead of us. There are other riders who started later and/or ride slower who are well behind us. For each of these towns, riders are coming through for approximately 12 hours and I imagine that the flow is fairly constant during that time.

Tonight in West Union, we are camping at the fairgrounds. The guys got here early and set us up in a great spot close to the bathrooms. The town of West Union is a bit away and uphill, so we opted to cook on the grill tonight. Tim cooked us hot dogs while Todd served them to us. What service we have been receiving from these two!

John Schulz is camping nearby in the same fairgrounds. He came by for a visit, but I missed him as I was taking a nap. We’ll be taking him to the airport tomorrow when our cycling is complete.

The guys wanted to report on their exceptional fly killing prowess. (I hope that you can feel my eyes rolling…) By request, Leah bought Tim a fly-swatter on our first day in Iowa because the flies here are fairly intense. Tim and Todd have been honing skills to become expert fly killers. Todd is the spotter and Tim is the bombardier. Tim will attempt to kill a fly on just about any surface including his own knee which completely grosses me out. The two of them estimated that Tim has killed about 30 flies today although I’m not sure that number is anywhere near the truth … it changes drastically every time they tell the story, LOL.

Tomorrow is the last day of RAGBRAI. We will be riding from West Union to Lansing. The climb will be even worse than today. Oh joy! We decided to start an hour earlier so that we can go as far as we can before it gets too hot.