Amazing Concerts - RAGBRAI 2013 Part IV

I was pleasantly surprised with the music scene all throughout RAGBRAI, and not from the typical sources.

The first few days were not too impressive:
Saturday, Day 0:
The musical act was Better Than Ezra.  I likely would have attended this concert if it weren't for the only 3 hours sleep I had gotten each of the previous two nights.  Not to worry though, they had the volume loud enough for everyone in our charter group's camp to hear it and be kept awake by it.  Although I recognized a couple of their songs, their performance didn't sound good at all.  Glad I skipped it.

Sunday and Monday:
I didn't hear anything out of the ordinary fare during the rides.  I didn't care for the mainstage acts either night.  The Monday one was washed out by rain and hail anyway.

Things got much better from Tuesday forward:
Tuesday:
No memorable bands from along the route.
The evening concert right on a bridge over the Des Moines River was a decent lineup of bands that have recently gotten back together.  The headliner was Everclear, which I have never cared for, so I left before their act.  I knew a few of the songs by Filter and Live, so I did see those acts.  They were OK, but not spectacular rock bands.  Nothing to complain about, other than the sound engineer must have been deaf since they had the volume loud enough to shake my chest.

Wednesday:
I'm not sure whether Wednesday or Thursday was the best day for music.  Both days were spectacular!
Wednesday morning I rolled into the town of Runnells, not too far outside of the Des Moines metro area.  Greeting us at the entrance was the SE Polk H.S. pep band.  This was the best pep band I have ever heard.  They had not just a great set list but also great arrangements.  I stayed and listened to them for an hour.  They barely had any down time, yet still sounded great.  Only one song was repeated during that entire hour.  They also had a great balance of instruments as well.  Most high schools are overloaded with trumpets and clarinets and it just distorts the sound too much.  This one actually represented the lower registers well.

I had another great musical experience later on when I rolled into Monroe.  There was an exceptional blues rock band playing in the city square band shell.  I wish I had caught their name.  The only thing I know about them is that they are based out of Des Moines.  I'll have to see if I can find them somewhere in the metro area sometime.  I only caught half of the first set.  I stuck around through the set break and then listened to the entire second set.  Unfortunately, their time was up after that.

I didn't try to stick around for the main stage act that night; I walked by them, but wasn't interested in their sound.  [Besides, I was in some pain and didn't want my muscles to tighten up, another teaser for another post]

That was about two and a half hours of great music that day.

Thursday:
I was not in a hurry at all in Pella on Thursday.  I ate pancakes and sausages at a Central College student group's stand.  I was in a calorie deficit still from the ride to Pella and from Wednesday, so I then stopped at the downtown square and went to the delicious Jaarsma Bakery for a couple Dutch letters.  I found a nice place in the square to enjoy my second breakfast when I saw some musicians preparing for a jazz concert in the band shell.  I stayed for quite a long time there as well.  After that, I went and did some more touristy things around the Dutch windmill and "canal" area tourist traps and stumbled across a novel breakfast concept.  Take a waffle cone, fill it three quarters of the way with scrambled eggs, then place small sausage balls, shredded cheese, and a little bit of maple syrup on top.  On the sides, place two strips of chocolate covered bacon.  Although it was interesting, I won't try that one again since it was too dry.

In the evening, in Oskaloosa, I was treated to another excellent concert.  I barely had any down time on Thursday since the day was so packed with events.  I had just gotten back to camp a few minutes before [got back from what you ask? - yep, another teaser].  A man driving a 15-passenger van came by our camp and inquired about people who wanted a ride to a local church that was serving a nice dinner.  You had three choices for main entree, which is rare, and one of them was herb crusted, baked chicken.  In addition, there was a baked potato, cut fruit, standard mixed salad, and pie.  People from our camp filled that van very quickly.  On RAGBRAI, dinners like that get people excited.

In the dining area, there was an advertisement for a concert that was going to start at about the time that we would be finished eating.  A few of us were interested in attending it.  The concert didn't quite start on time since there was a pastor who gave a predictable sermon first.  It was about his first experiences with bicycles and how his biking progression has brought obstacles in his life and how he overcame them.  Once that was over with, the concert began.  I doubt this concert was advertised heavily, but it certainly was worthy of it.

The performers were a mid-twenties couple with a keyboard playing woman and guitar playing man.  They go by the name of You Plus Me [I think.  I am checking on this and will edit if need be].  They play what I would call adult contemporary. Most of their stuff was original, but they did perform an amazing cover of "Radioactive" by Imagine Dragons.  I had only heard that song as a hard baseline, heavy beat dance song before.  The man's voice was decent, but the woman's was spectacular!  In his introduction, the pastor mentioned they had gotten married within the past couple of months.  You could tell that they were very much in love from some of the looks that they gave each other.  

They were sheepishly introduced as being national recording artists since they had recently gone to Nashville to record some of their work.  They currently reside right in Oskaloosa.  I have no doubt that they have the potential to make it bigger if things fall their way.

Unfortunately, I was only able to stick around for about 5 songs since our group had to catch the shuttle back to the campground.  I would have stuck around for the whole thing and bought their CD if I had the time.  I'll have to try to find it online somewhere.

Friday:
In Part II, I mentioned there was a reason I didn't get into town until 5:15 that day.  The reason was that I had spent 5 hours on the lawn of a nice acreage in the middle of the country, about 15 miles away from the end town of Fairfield.  I stayed there from about 11:30 until 4:30 that day.  There hadn't really been notable activities on Friday up until that time.  What initially attracted me to this place was the long slip-and-slide.  What kept me there was a good classic rock cover band called Hell For Stout.

I had fallen behind in my sleep throughout the week.  I was really tired, so after the ride, and the 5 hours at one place, and the play in Fairfield, I didn't have the energy to stick around downtown for the main act, an 80's cover band.  We were camped close enough to downtown to be able to hear it though.  They had funny interpretations of everything.  I just didn't have the energy.  I fell asleep while listening to them, concluding a great day of RAGBRAI.

Saturday:
Nothing musically notable.

Summary:
It was a good week for music.  I'd say that the best acts were the blues rock band and the adult contemporary group.

Riding Isn't Everything? - RAGBRAI 2013 Part III

You would think that with a ride that has "Great Bicycle Ride Across Iowa" in the title, the bicycle ride would be the main attraction for the week.  That is actually not the main attraction for most people.  There are tons of weeklong bicycle rides across the country where you can focus solely on the riding and have that be the highlight of the day.  That emphasis is not what has made RAGBRAI the most popular.  Sure, the biking is certainly a major focal point for the week, and might get people interested.  However, it is the activities, fun, and fellowship that I think brings people back.

I've often heard RAGBRAI described as a weeklong party rolling along on two wheels.  How you want to define "party" is up to you.

For some people, they "party" like a prototypical college frat: roll out of bed at 11AM, have a couple bloody marys at the first bar or beer garden they see, then switch to cheap, domestic beers for the remainder of the day.  Roll into the overnight town around 7 or 8, set up camp and find some food, then either go to the concerts or find another bar to hang out at for the rest of the night.

That is how RAGBRAI is portrayed sometimes, and it is accurate for a portion of the crowd, but not a majority.

To someone like me, I "party" by involving myself in all sorts of activities I find along the way that pique my interest.  Most of these activities don't involve alcohol and/or I need to watch my alcohol consumption because of my tendency to get dehydrated faster than most people do.

In my charter group, we have several different cliques of people.  [More in-depth about the cliques in a later post] We come in clumps from all over the country, and some of these clumps are family units, so they just naturally form cliques.  I have a personality that allows me to usually fit in with a wide variety of groups.  One of these cliques is what I'll call the "older but still active" crowd.  They like hearing my stories as I get in to town about what interesting things I found along the route that day.  And I like hearing their stories about the interesting things they found as well.

Take Monday for example.  Every year there is one day that has an optional biking portion to it.  This optional portion allows you to get in enough miles for a century [100 mile ride = century].  This year it was on Monday.  We went through the town of Elk Horn during the optional part.  I had a great time in this town, and not just because half of one of the cliques I got to know well lives there.  I toured an imported Danish windmill, had aebleskivers [traditional Danish breakfast food sort of like pancake balls crossed with the hush puppies you can get at Long John Silver's] served up in the fire department building, and visited the Danish Immigrant Museum.  The windmill was the most interesting I think.  As you climbed higher and higher, the stairs became more and more like a ladder.  That was difficult to climb while in cycling shoes that only let a small portion of the cleat touch the rungs.

Maybe a fifth of all riders did the loop this year and that was up drastically from 2012.  Of that group, maybe a tenth of that group went a block out of their way to the windmill.  Most of those people only went down there because they were selling some food.  Of that small group, maybe only a tenth actually climbed higher than the lowest level of the windmill.

Even though very few people did climb the windmill, I found it quite entertaining and enjoyed it very much.

Biking the loop was very entertaining since it had some of the best hills on the route, but it was not the only reason for a good day on Monday.

God of Carnage - RAGBRAI 2013 Part II

I laid out a rather ambitious agenda in Part I filled with many of the things I did during RAGBRAI.  Perhaps one of the more unexpected items occurred on Friday.  

It was Day 6, and I had rolled into Fairfield quite late [for reasons that I will share later - yep, I'm teasing this kind of stuff], for such an easy biking day.  I didn't get in until 5:15 or so, and didn't have my tent set up and shower taken until 6:15.

Unfortunately, I didn't know about the world record fake mustache attempt ahead of time and missed it.  Fairfield was trying to break a world record that was set a few months ago in some U.S. city with 1,500 people simultaneously wearing a fake mustache for 5 continuous minutes.  The way it worked was that you came near the town square area to a specially designated area.  When you arrived, you received a fake mustache that had a number attached to it.  The number was then set aside somehow for counting purposes. [I learned of this secondhand so details are sketchy].  It supposedly took a long time to get everyone assembled.  Once everyone was in the designated area, they were all told to put on the fake mustaches.  The timer started then.  If a mustache fell off, or was taken off, it didn't count.  As well, anyone with a real mustache didn't count because there was no number associated with him.  I don't know the results on how many people they ended up counting.  The Guinness people filmed the event from several angles and were going to pore over the footage to get an exact count later.

The mustache attempt reminded me of an event that happened in 2009 in Indianola.  There they were attempting to set a world record for the most number of handprints they could get within a section of concrete.  I did get in on that one, it was memorable.  Indianola had an alley right off the town square that they needed to repave.  My handprint will stay there until the concrete falls apart again.

Although I unfortunately didn't hear about it in time, the mustache world record actually isn't very unusual or unexpected on RAGBRAI.  There is often some cool event like that at one of the overnight towns.  Some places just go out of their way to make sure that we have something special to remember them by.  Some do not and act as if we are pests to them [ahem, Perry this year].

The unexpected thing happened a little bit later after I had actually made it downtown.  Fairfield had things set up so that pedestrians had to either go around the perimeter of the town square or go through the beer garden.  I wasn't feeling like alcohol at the time and didn't want to go through the hassle of wading through that crowd, so I walked by all the local shops.  A little poster in a pedestal on the sidewalk caught my attention.  The sign was for a community theatre that was putting on a play.  I briefly looked at the poster, but didn't have high hopes for the play.  I mean, who would put on a play while RAGBRAI was in town?  Sure enough, they were holding a performance on Friday the 26th.

I had an hour to kill before the show started, so I took in another show out on the square.  A bunch of little kids were performing circus acts for a huge crowd.  They were a part of a training academy for kids.  I guess I had never given much thought to how the circus performers learned their craft in modern times.  I had an idea that things are not like the days of old when families lived their whole lives as part of an act, but I hadn't given it much thought.  It is certainly not something I will sign my future kids up for.  It was entertaining though.  

I had gotten into town too late to take advantage of the good church dinners and I didn't have enough time before the play to seek out a restaurant, decent or not.  That meant that I had to go with the greasy fair food that I always avoid if possible.  Oh well.  One greasy, giant tenderloin later and I was back in front of the theater.

This theater was not what you would normally think of as a theater.  It didn't have much frontage space on the square, only the width of a single door.  Once through the door you immediately go up a flight of stairs and arrive at a small lobby.  I purchased my ticket and headed inside.  The inside had a small stage directly ahead.  The rest of the room looked like a dance studio.  It was obvious that this stage was constructed just for the play.  The seating area was just simple folding chairs lined up neatly in six rows, maybe 15 seats wide.  So, at most, they could hold 90 or so.  I had gotten there a few minutes early, but was still a little bit shocked.  I was only the fourth person in the audience.  By the time the show started, the crowd had swelled to 15.

The play was one I had never heard of before, a comedy called God of Carnage.  The poster outside advertised it as the Tony award winner for best play in 2009.  The program heavily touted that James Gandolfini had one of the four roles during the original Broadway production.  It even dedicated the performance to his memory.  The premise was that the son of one of the couples had knocked out two teeth of the son of the other couple and they were in one of the couples' apartment to sort things out.  

The play was surprisingly good.  It deals with all sorts of relationship issues taken to an extreme for comedic purposes.  I would have gone with a different title, though, since the phrase "God of Carnage" was used during a part aside to the audience and part line of dialogue with another character.  I thought the line was extraneous and could have been omitted. The play isn't about religion at all.

The four actors did a great job of performing and didn't seem too phased about the lack of an audience.  I don't get the prevailing attitude against community theatre.  I have generally had a great time at those plays, whether it was in Burlington or elsewhere.

This play and other events from Friday made for a perfect climax to the week.

A Jewel in the Rough - RAGBRAI 2013 Part I

This is the beginning of my account of what went on during this year's RAGBRAI.  The write-up will be split up amongst several posts.  At least once a day I will try to put up another section, but that is not definite.  Check back regularly and use the navigation tools to the right to find the other parts.  This might be the only post I promote on Facebook, but rest assured they will be showing up on the blog.

This year's RAGBRAI was like a large, multi-faceted jewel found in the rough.  You sometimes don't quite know what you are looking at, but there are definite signs that there is something beautiful in there.  There might be a few bad spots in there, but it is nothing that can't be handled.  Once this jewel was cleaned up, there was plenty to see.  All facets of this jewel have slightly different reflective properties.  I could see myself differently after looking at each facet.  Some were me as usual.  Others were different versions of me than many of you are used to.

There will be tales of injuries, giddy 31-year-olds on slip-and-slides, traffic obstructions, car alarms at 3AM lasting for 10 minutes, a homeless cat, James Gandolfini and a community theater stage play, an exceptional blues rock band, triple breakfasts and a jazz band in one town, waiting out a hailstorm in a Casey's gas station, a rock concert on a river bridge, a Danish windmill, midget wrestling, a church sermon and concert by an amazing contemporary guitar and keyboard duo, a low tolerance to alcohol, a Dutch windmill, my gastronomic tour, a world record mustache attempt, and much more.

I look forward to the week of RAGBRAI more than any other week of the year.  After the week is over, I always get a little bit sad about it.  It's another 51 weeks until RAGBRAI is available again.  I have more fun during this week than probably all three months of winter put together.  I always feel excited and giddy during this time.  I hope that this energy can flow through to these posts.

Relationship Equality

Editorial note: Like I announced on Facebook yesterday, I have changed the look of the blog significantly.  I hope you like it.  If you have any suggestions for improvements, please let me know in the comment section.  I'm not satisfied with the background image, but it will do for now until I find a better one.  The content is the same as before, just use the area to the right to navigate to some of my older stuff.  Thanks for looking at the blog, I appreciate it.

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Sometimes I don't understand the inner workings of some people.  I have a coworker who has been with the company for a couple months now, and I have to wonder about some of his actions.  Apparently, we were under a heat advisory today here in Des Moines.  We had a high of 93 degrees.  It is July after all.  The strange part is how my coworker called home to his wife this morning to tell her about it.  He said something to the effect of, "Honey, I just found out there's a heat advisory for us today.  Tell the kids that for every hour they play outside today they have to come in for 5 minutes for water.  They must have a cup in their hand during this time.  This rule also applies to you, too, honey. Love you, bye."

After being subjected to that conversation (I share a cubicle wall with him), I just shook my head to myself.  Just because you are in a relationship doesn't mean that you lose the ability to think independently.

I had met his wife and kids a couple weeks ago.  My coworker brought them into the office.  He had told me ahead of time that she used to be a French-English translator (English is her primary language), so I had a little bit of time to prepare a few sentences to say to her.  She and I had a nice little conversation in French.  I didn't mess up too badly.  Anyway, she seemed well adjusted and seemed to do a decent job of controlling the little kids while they were in the office.  It seemed like she performs just fine in her current role as a stay-at-home mom.  I bet she already knew ways to make sure that the kids stay hydrated, and especially knew how to read her own body signs to see if she needed fluids.


It is fairly well known that I am currently single.  Probably one of the leading things I am looking for in a woman is the ability to challenge me mentally.  I'll explain.  By challenge, I don't mean to get into verbal confrontations, fights, or anything like that.  I mean that she would have a point of view on topics and be willing to espouse them and make me think.  I don't mean on just extremely light topics like, "Should I wear the red top or the blue top", or extremely heavy topics like politics.  I mean the intermediate topics as well.

To put it crudely, I don't want to end up with an Americanized version of a harem girl serving only as fodder for any physical desires I might have.  I don't want a woman who thinks that it is her duty to acquiesce to me just because I have more testosterone and less estrogen than she has.  I want an equal partner where one isn't dominant over the other.  I don't want a mindless robot.  If my idea about what action we should take is preferable to us as a couple, then we should use it.  If her idea is preferable, then we should use hers.

I think I'll stop for the day here.  I don't need to spew out all of my thoughts on relationships here at once.