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.