RAGBRAI Day 0: Making History

Welcome home!

I wake to a flash of lightning followed by a thunderclap. “We need to pack up the tent before it starts really raining!” Judy  springs into action and I groggily follow. As we put the tent away into our big plastic bins the rain starts in earnest and so we don our rain gear and go to find some coffee.

We are at the 52nd RAGBRAI, which is an acronym for the “Register’s Annual Great Bike Ride Across Iowa.” (Register is the name of a newspaper here.) It’s the largest and longest running organized bike ride. There are 15,000 other bicyclists here with us. These are our people!

We are here to test and admittedly show off our Honey Cycle, a solar-powered recumbent tandem trike that I’ve developed. So far it has generated lots of interest and discussions, and we are already becoming known as “the people with the cool bike”.

When we get to the front of the line for coffee we find out that they are out of coffee. So we return later to find out that, yes they do now have coffee but now they are out of cups. The rain is coming down steadily now and in spite of wearing our rain gear we are soaked. But we are not upset. Far from it. People here are so fucking nice and cheerful it is all but impossible to get upset for long.

We see people huddled on a porch across the street. It turns out that the home owner has welcomed the wet bicyclists to come get out of the rain. At one point he appears with a pot of hot coffee and pours cups for us. We learn that his name is “Ed” and that his cat’s name is “KellySue22”. This is the famous Iowa hospitality that we had heard about.

Ed’s porch.

Finally the buses arrive to take us to the west end of Iowa so that we can all bike the 400 miles back to the east end during the coming week. On the bus we overhear some anti-ebike sentiment behind us. “I saw this one guy on an ebike and he wasn’t even pedaling. Then ten miles before the end of the ride his battery ran out and he was just standing there, dumbfounded. He didn’t know what to do. I wish I had gotten a photo. It was hilarious.” Our comrades are mostly road bikers and there is still some sense among them that ebikes are far old people and “cheaters”. We think of ebikes as an environmentally responsible replacement for the automobile.

The buses arrive in Orange City where the ride starts tomorrow morning. Everyone climbs off the bus and with a clatter of tent poles a colorful cloth city rises in a field behind the high school.

Tent town in Orange City.

Most people here are riding one-by carbon fiber bikes with drop bars, disc brakes and gravel tires. So we kinda stand out as oddballs. There are a few other tandems, a few recumbents, a few ebikes and even a penny farthing. But as far as I know we are the first RAGBRAI riders to bring a solar-powered bike. We’re making history.

One of the few people weirder than us was riding a penny farthing.

Orange City Iowa has a Dutch hermitage, including the funny shoes.

The locals get into the spirit of the event.

Guttenberg features a large chair perfect for selfies.