What a great week we had! The weather was pretty close to being almost perfect and it is always so fun to be out with some of your closest 10,000 bikers.
We were lucky again to be able to stay in houses instead of camping and that is nothing but a really good feeling. I mean we did the camping thing for about 10 years and it was fun, but staying in houses… is really good.
So I’m going to give it my best to put together an over view of the week we had and hopefully I won’t leave too much out 🙂
Saturday – the day before the ride. This is the day that we start out for the overnight town and get ourselves somewhat organized. It’s the time to see if you remembered everything that you’ll need and get all your maps and money ready for the week. I never sleep too good during this week so I wasn’t disappointed when I spent the whole night tossing and turning thinking about how the week will go. Then the sun came up and it was time to ride.
We finally came up with a Team name this year!
Sunday – We got our bikes ready, adjusted our helmets and off we went. I can’t explain how it feels for other people on the first day – but for me it’s such a good feeling. It like you’re excited, anxious, happy, and nervous all at the same time. You know that if you weren’t there you’d probably be at work so that kind of makes you smile. The first stop was to dunk our tires.
It’s a tradition that you dunk your back tires in on the west side of Iowa in the Missouri River and then when you get to the east side of Iowa you put your front tires in the Mississippi River. After the tire dunking we all took off riding between veterans and the state flags on the highway and to say that is was cool is such an understatement. The ride wasn’t a long ride today and it was good to get some miles on our bikes. We laughed because we weren’t able to get a lot of training in this year and we only rode 45 miles to train. So we kind of say that the first days of Ragbrai is our training and this year that statement couldn’t be a more true!
Way cool way to start the weeks ride
We rode around 70 miles today so we just doubled our training. Too funny! It didn’t take long until the guys found watermelon along the way. For some reason watermelon tastes so good on a bike ride and this year? Yup, it was good! 
So tonight’s accommodations is a little tricky. We couldn’t find a house to stay at and we were lucky that we did book a hotel room back in January for us. So 11 people stayed in this really small hotel room. When we had booked the room she said ‘Oh you guys are in the suite’. hummm.. I’m not sure I’d call it a suite, but it was a roof over our heads and we spent a good part of the night just laughing. I think this bike ride is a lot about getting together with friends and family and just enjoying not only the ride but also hanging out for the days and nights in between the rides. It’s just a lot of fun.
You gotta do what you gotta do….