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Grad school buddy Jerry and I met in Iowa and did the first two days
of RAGBRAI. Jerry's stories of his decades-old tours (he's really old)
were the original spark for all the touring I've done, and my very
first tour was with Jerry through Big Bend in western Texas. Ben
Bengfort and I originally came up w/ the idea to do the ride, but in
the end he could not make it.
RAGBRAI is
famous: 10's of thousands of riders biking across the state and passing of goofy and
friendly people in each tiny berg traversed. You get the sense that
this is the biggest thing to happen to any of these town in many years.
There is clearly a lot of
continuity even though the route changes every year. Many of the
riders are local, and most of the vendors come every year.
We were told that this year's ride was the most difficult ever. The two days we
did were both under 50 miles, but the second day had 2500 feet of
climbing. The third day was going to be
82 miles and over 4500 climbing, with the fourth and sixth days almost as big.
18,000 people registered anyway.
This was a camping trip, so the riders need space
to set up tents and ways to get fed and watered. Overnight towns
might average 2,000 permanent residents, so handling the
huge overnight cycling crowd was a big ask. However, the organized chaos as the
tour descends on the tiny towns has clearly been honed over the years. Each town seemingly
had identical town squares, and vendors travel with the
cyclists, so food and water (beer) was handled. Our tent space was
uniformly in school fields. Sometimes we had access to school
facilities, sometimes you had six porta-potties for 450 people.
Mornings were often foggy and the tents soggy. Jerry pointed out that an acre of corn
produces 2.5 tons of water vapor per day, and Iowa has more than
one acre of corn.
The people were the most fun: some seemed to be treating the ride as a
big cosplay event, others were serious about their speed, their
beer, or their social
media presence. See the continent-crossing Penny
Farthing, or the backwards rider (who didn't even have mirrors). Even worse, on one downhill
there was a guy standing on his bike: one foot on the seat and one on
the right handlebar grip. By the bottom of the downhill he was
presumably doing over 20 mph. I appreciate the wackiness, but I didn't
want to be around when it went awry.
Aside from a small percentage of crazy riders, most riders passed on the
left and I grew sorely sick of the continual calls
of "rider left", "rider
right", "rider coming on", "rider taking a piss" in just two short
days. There were plenty of pacelines going through, and it seemed that
everyone was passing us. However, there were so many people that the
passing never stopped! The people supply was endless.
You do RAGBRAI for the experience being part of a huge mass of
humanity biking through middle America. I don't think I'd want to it
again, as I really don't like crowds, but experiencing it once with
Jerry was an absolute blast.
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