RAGBRAI Day 2: The People and Their Bikes

In the flow.

Again: wake up early. Strike the tent. Breakfast is two hard boiled eggs and coffee. Saddle up and ride ride ride. We are 20,000 bicyclists riding together. All along the highway we converse with our neighbors—something you can’t do as you travel the highway by car. As people pass us we are treated to a steady stream of compliments: “Cool bike!” “Nice ride!” “Are those solar panels?”

The Honey Cycle is a recumbent tandem trike with a solar array on top.

Typically people comment, with a hint of jealousy, on what they perceive to be a shade structure. “That’s smart!” they say. We reply that the covering is not just for shade, it’s solar panels. “Even smarter!” they say. Some people ask “What do the solar panels power?” We have to explain that our bike has pedal assist. Often the response is, with a grin to indicate that they are just kidding, “That’s cheating!” But more often the response is “Where can I get one?” I explain that solar-powered bicycles are “not yet available in stores”. If they are receptive I tell them some details on how to make their own.

A lot of people also ask if the Honey Cycle’s wind resistance is a problem. This is ironic since as both a recumbent and as an inline tandem the Honey Cycle has about one third the wind resistance per person of a regular bicycle, and we easily pull ahead of the other bicyclists if there is a head wind. But they think that the horizontal solar panels somehow add a lot of wind resistance. I have to explain that wind resistance only depends on the frontal area of a vehicle, and the solar panels add less than a square foot to the frontal area. For comparison the frontal area of a regular upright bicycle is about two feet wide by five feet tall so ten square feet. For a recumbent the riders are lying down so the frontal area is more like two feet wide by three feet tall so six square feet. Add a square foot for the solar array so that comes to seven. Then since the Honey Cycle is a tandem divide by half to get the frontal area per person: 3.5 square feet, about one third of an upright bicycle.

People also ask, perhaps facetiously, if the Honey Cycle can fly. In a previous post I do some calculations to determine that in order to fly the Honey Cycle’s solar array would have to be 40 feet wide and tilted up at a 15 degree angle. “Maybe next year’s model can fly!” I tell them.

We belong to three sub-groups who we hail as we pass: “Go tandems!”, “Hey there recumbent!” and “Nice ebike!” A few people hang next to us for longer conversations. We meet a mechanical engineer from Israel named Ruby. He is interested in the details of the Honey Cycle construction. I tell him that this is the third solar-powered tandem I’ve made. I tell him how this build started with buying a TerraTrike Tandem Pro. To that I added a Grin Technologies All-Axle hub motor to the rear wheel. As with our other two builds, this motor is great, but not quite powerful enough to get up steep long hills without overheating. So I added a Bafang BBSHD crank drive motor which we use mainly for climbing hills. The crank drive motor powers the drive train through a choice of three chain rings and nine cogs, so if needed we can get very low gearing for climbing any hill. Lastly, I tell him, I added the two 200 watt solar panels from BougeRV. The solar panels are simply zip tied to a frame made out of EMT conduit. The corners are connected with fittings from a company called MakerPipe.

Ruby tells me a little bit about one of his projects making a bicycle propelled by an elliptical mechanism. He says he did a patent search for a few thousand dollars and was able to determine that his design is unique. He suggests I do a patent search. I am a little uncertain that my ideas are patentable. But farther down the road we meet a lawyer from Fort Dodge who now lives in Utah. (He and Judy commiserate about how Iowa used to be a liberal state.) He tells me that I might be able to get an industrial design patent for the Honey Cycle design. I’m not so sure I want to do that, I tell him, because I would like to see solar powered ebikes proliferate.

We encounter one other person with a solar-powered recumbent. We pull up alongside and I converse at length with him about the technical details of our rigs as we ride. He says he goes by the online name “Recumbent Ron”.  He is riding a (single person) TerraTrike with a solar frame made out of carbon fiber tent poles, 3D printed joints, and cables attached with sailboat hardware. He has a lot of great info about what parts tend to fail first and how to get replacement parts. We could talk all day, I realize, but we are forced to break off to take a bathroom break.

Recumbent Ron’s recumbent trike is powered by a Mr. Fusion Home Energy Reactor.

We come across another bicyclist whose bike has the BBSHD crank drive motor. He appears to be paraplegic and he is riding a hand cycle.  He says he runs his pedal assist motor at 100 watts. I admit that we run our motors at more like 300 watts, and up to 1,500 watts on the hills. He scoffs at our wastefulness.

We encounter several other disabled people on the ride: a few blind people, a deaf person (we know she was deaf because she was wearing a bike jersey labeled “deaf”), and many paraplegics riding very fast hand cycles.

Backwards guy.

We see many weird bikes: the guy in a velociped towing a kayak; a tall bike; two teenagers riding unicycles; the colorful man on the penny farthing; and even a guy riding his bicycle backwards the whole way. When we are stopped in front of some towering grain silos a guy approaches us to ask about our bike. He says his name is Ray. I ask about his bike. It is a one speed cruiser modeled after the bicycle pictured on the cans of Fat Tire Ale made by New Belgium Brewery. He says he entered a raffle to win this bike. He didn’t win, but his wife arranged to get him one as a surprise.

Ray and his Fat Tire Ale bike.

The riders in front of us often have messages scrawled on their calf muscles with a sharpie. The most common message is “virgin”, meaning this is their first time riding the RAGBRAI. We see a woman with the message “KC 13”. Judy asks her what this means. She explains that she is riding to honor the memory of her brother KC who died in a car crash in 2013. “He was only a block from home. He was texting while driving and he crashed into a tree,” she tells us. “We’ll honor him too as we ride,” Judy says. I think about how much safer for each other it is for people to travel by bike than by car.

In every small town we are welcomed by onlookers who have gotten up remarkably early to cheer us on. In Estherville a woman jumps in front of us to stop us so she can take a picture of our weird bike. “Are you Esther?” I ask. She has to think about that for a moment. “No I’m Tammy,” she says.

Tammy in Estherville.

In Oelwein we see lots of rubber duck references and ask an elderly resident what that is about. “Oh, it’s because the town has a viaduct running through it,” she says. “Viaduct, via duck, get it?” We get it and we purchase duck themed hats at Oelwein’s Chamber of Commerce (see photo in subsequent post).

Dawn at tent city.

We reach our campground and pitch our tent in a sea of tents. As part of the Out Of State charter group we have 350 new friends. Over the course of the week of camping together we become aquaintences  with most of them and close with a few of them: the quirky tandem-riding couple from California, the hip young newlyweds from Vermont, the brash lesbians from Canada, and Nick the Macedonian restaurateur from Wisconsin. In particular we befriend a 78 year-old southern gentleman named Martin. He rides a fancy red ICE brand recumbent trike. He is full of stories. “I’ve done all the jobs that little boys dream of doing: I was a soldier, a fireman, and a police officer.” He pauses. “Actually I was made police chief,” he admits modestly. He tells how as the police chief one day the mayor called him in and told him “You’re giving too many tickets to white people.” He describes standing up to the gang bangers in his small town in Mississippi and even befriending them. Martin develops a UTI on the first day of the ride. This activates Judy’s mothering instincts and she gives him some healing attention. Martin takes the sag wagon the first few days of the ride but he recovers enough by the fourth day to finish the ride, We fall in love with Martin, and we are sad to part ways at the end of the ride.

Mississippi Martin.