RAGBRAI day 4

Bolted out of Leon and hit up our now usual breakfast stop 5 miles out of town. There are many small tent or camper vendors, selling everything from coffee and bagels, to breakfast burritos. Free beer is also offered at the stop we've frequented. Many, many people take up the free beer offer. They are a family affair, with 5 kids 13 and under and they seem a pretty good team. 

We passed through many very small towns, but they consistently turn out to guide and sell to and welcome us. Some clever methods of raising money come in to play. Today one town collected money by letting people pose for pictures atop a very docile steer, all the while their rodeo clowns were photo bombing. 

The very last town, Mystic,  before the end town was at the bottom of a steep hill and after our visit, we had to buck up and climb it with no momentum. 

In Centerville, we took a well organized shuttle bus to both delightfulnshowers and dinner. Centerville is one of the biggest towns on the route. 

RAGBRAI day 3

We left Creston at around 6:45 and tried to collect breakfast just outside of town, but we lost Dwight there and didn't pick him up again until the next town, Diagonal. 

They had a whole pirate theme thing going on that was pretty cool. Many towns have cool bike themed arches over the road into town. 

We saw a variety of costumed riders, including Batman, and many with tutus. 

Mount Ayr had creatively taken a horse watering trough, filled it with water and ice chest sized chunks of ice and added colored washers that sank to the bottom.  I got to watch several people jump in and try to get washers off the bottom. The highest washer value was $100. 

My chain fell off today. It got between the chain ring and the frame. I had sent Dwight ahead when returning to the road after a quick rest area, so he did know what had happened. I could only hope that he would think I had gotten ahead of him.  7 or so US Air Force riders tried to tell me, but untimately I took my chain off to fix it. I did finally accept from one couple, who offered me wet wipes. 

The information, signage and general disorganization of the town were apparent. Really nice people tried to help, but were unprepared. Even the people at the information booth did not know where the RAGBRAI camping lot was located. They seemed more familiar with the group campgrounds. I finally figured it out pretty much by myself and checked my phone to find a message each from Patty and Dwight, with their tent site location. Showers at the high school were dreadful; scalding hot, with exceptionally slippery floors. Dinner was a mediocre, but filling, cafeteria style affair. We recharged out phones and hit the hay. 

RAGBRAI day 5

Patty left earlier than us this morning. She wanted to ride while there was less sun and get a better camping spot. We jumped at the chance to get a breakfast burito on the outskirts of town. No lines no waiting. It was odd that people were not stopping. My hypothesis is that they choose the vendors that travel with  RAGBRAI, because they are known entities. 

We kind of ran through and didn't stop too much. There were a couple places with railroad tracks and apparently one of them took somebody down really hard. 

We got into Ottumwa at about 1230. Patty had already found a camping spot and grabbed one of our bags and saved this space. 

We showered for the first time in the shower truck on the strip. They were OK. It was Patty's first time.

Since we got in so early, we had plenty of time to walk around town. I had some problems with my bike earlier. It had been making a clicking noise, but after a mechanic worked on it, it also had problems with the brake, which leaves me slightly suspicious.

Patty thought it was pretty funny, that people had already staked out spots at 4 o'clock in the afternoon for the Rick Springfield, which was slated to start at 9 PM. 

We returned to the tents, and met Jared, from Austin Texas and Portland Oregon. We talked to him for a while, and then later returned to the downtown area for a bite to eat and then bed.

RAGBRAI Day 2

We woke up to the unzippering of tents and the backup noises of the luggage trucks at around 5am. Packing up quickly, we had the bags on the truck by 6am. Breakfast was on the road; we got English muffins with egg, cheese and unbelievably, kale. 

We did 75 miles today, with the most memorable town for me being Corning. They had an announcer answering questions and asking people to tell where they were from. Vicashu was also a cute town; many of them are seeking quality ways to revitalize, while retaining what is the essence of who they are. 

The end town was a bit disappointing, Camping was really pretty far out of town for riding back in after the long day, and they put in a lot of effort on their newsletter and promoting an evening concert, that was overshadowed by our difficulty finding the expo, which we actually needed things from, the seeming  lack of participation from little not- for profits we saw in some of the day hosts. 

The showers were pretty great and the camping area was fine, but the shuttle  bus driver whose bus we got on for the return to the camping did three loops returning to the downtown area each time and never took the increasingly irritated passengers to the 2 main places they wanted to go. We finally got off the bus on its 3 sojourn into downtown. When I told him he never went to the college, he said we would have eventually. 

Day 1 Glenwood to Shanandoah

We woke up and started packing at 5:15.  Dwight and I brushed teeth and I made pita and goat cheese sandwiches to get rid of some of the food and were pretty slow to finish packing. Patty was trying to eat up her cheese curds. All the bags were on the truck by 7:00 and we headed out. You need to know the truck number and the time you put your bag on in order to help you find it in the morning. We hit a smallish hill right off the bat and it was the first of many rollers. The small towns we stopped in were about 10 miles apart. The were lines for most things, but they moved along well. All sorts of foods were available, but most are not vegetarian. All in all, there were generally good vegetarian choices.

We lost Patty at a water bottle filling station and thought we had accidentally left her behind when we decided to move on, but she turned up ahead of us.

And we later lost Dwight when we got close to the end, but he showed up behind us at the end town. A shower and swimming rejuvenated us and we had a yummy dinner at 4:30 in a local restaurant in a converted church. It rained pretty hard, which toned down the temperature. High today was prob around 84. 

RAGBRAI update

Well, we lost our almost 2 year old RAGBRAI companion.  Discretion is the better part of valor.  It was decided that maybe more pressing than whether we could keep a 2 year old engaged during RAGBRAI was the fact that he might not appreciate the 11 hr drive to get there.

Obstacle now: how do we get back to the car when the event is finished.  Well, we decided to hedge our bets.  Currently we have a one way U-Haul from the end, where we will leave the car, to the beginning. ALSO, we have a rental car reserved for the same orientation, but the drop off must be 30 miles north. This would entail dropping the group at the beginning, returning the car and then cycling the 30 miles.  Not undoable, but not the first choice.  So, why don't we just stick with the U-Haul? Because they can't tell us the pickup time until the day before, so if we can't get the truck until 4pm, that would not be very useful, since we are taking 2 days to get there.
There were not any useful ride shares on the forums. Another problem area is that for the rental car, we would need a bike rack (pickups and vans are not available on a one-way trip). And I am pretty sure you can't have the RAGBRAI baggage trucks carry non-bagged items. So we will be trying to get the car bike rack into a duffle and squeeze two people's stuff into a single duffle, so as to not have too many bags. If U-Haul comes through, it won't matter.

Test of Blogger app

This is a test of the Blogger iPhone app. I haven't used this in a while, so it's worth a test drive. We shall see if I can use it while in China. 

China

This is the first of a group of posts about my cycling trip to China in August 2016

So China was on my list of places to visit, but then fell off, solely in regards to the extreme environmental damage they are doing (or more accurately, allowing to be done) to their own country; I felt maybe it would not be pleasant. Then someone I had connected with via CrazyGuyOnABike emailed me to ask if I was still interested in touring there. BAM.  Sold.
I created a whole Blogspot page dedicated to the preparations, in order to leave the posts to cover the journey.
I will be taking my Bike Friday folding bike, since the tour will be a loop (I will need to leave my bike case behind in Beijing), front and back panniers. Still, if I have time, I may investigate if I can purchase a bike on my way back, since Giant bikes are made in China and Beijing has a huge Giant bike store.  It took a little finagling, but I did find Giant's China website and was able to navigate it in its Chinese language version, with a little help from Google Translate. The models are pretty much totally different than the ones found in the States, but I am knowledgeable enough to know what I am looking at, as long as the component list is in english.

RAGBRAI

RAGBRAI XL 2012 by Channone Arif on Flickr

Well, my partner's dream is coming true.  We are going to ride RAGBRAI. This is the ginormous supported party on bicycle wheels. 10,000 people converge on Iowa to ride about 470 miles from the Missouri River on the west side of the state to the Mississippi on the east. Added bonus, we formed a team with another couple and their grandson, who will be almost 2 years old.

I will blog the adventure, so people looking for a feasibility study on taking small children in trailers on RAGBRAI will have some well grounded research.  Now I know small children have done epic road trips with their parents, because I see references to those journeys online and in Adventure Cycling's magazine. It is quite difficult to find references to small children on RAGBRAI events, however.

So many questions revolve around this.  How often do playgrounds or fields to play in occur? I am hoping there will be one per hour in the small towns set up to receive us. Can we tire him out enough? Will he be able to sleep surrounded by 10,000 potentially noisy people in the campground? What kinds of entertainment will engage him for 5 hours a day in a trailer?

And a few solutions. We will have a SAG vehicle, in case he needs to escape. We will cycle (hahahahaha, sniff, sniff) his toys out of the SAG vehicle daily.  We have an older iPhone with audio books and hardcover book accompaniments.  The audio will be recorded by his parents.  His trailer has a full sun shade and netting to keep him from burning and from throwing his toys and books out :)  We are also rigging a hydration bladder above and behind his seat and he has mastered the bite valve (smart boy).

Stay tuned: This will be awesome.

I really want one of these.

Do you suppose my bike would come apart enough to make it into this pack raft?

REI Half Dome Repair strategies

If you read earlier posts, you might know I melted my tent trying out a new stove.  Note to self: try new stoves on the concrete pad behind your house.  I have tried once to repair it using A)Tenacious tape and B) Tear Aid (type A).  The Tear Aid worked well on the smaller holes, using a patch on each side of the fabric.  The Tenacious Tape did not work well by itself when placed under pressure, such as on the edges of a large silicon impregnated fabric patch. Because you can remove/ move the tape, it would not hold well enough to cure.  I will try to rectify this by maybe stitching the new repair fabric to the tent, then applying Tenacious Tape or seam sealer to the edges. I may also try out Sil-Net, which is more of an adhesive. 
So what you see are several different attempts. The black material is a silicone impregnated fabric from Seattle Fabrics.  The holes in this area were so big, there was really no other good way to attach the problem.  I merely laminated the fabric over the damaged areas.  Were it was necessary/appropriate,  I cut out the melted fly fabric, because it was stiff. I made the laminate in 2 pieces to accommodate the roundiness of the fly. I am unsure of which was the outside of the fabric and which was the inside, so I guessed based on the looks of the fly material.
Where the 2 pieces met was a seam on the fly, so I stitched one piece down face up and stitched it down the fly seam, then placed the second on face down and stitched it down the seam. Then I folded it back on itself to protect the raw edges and stitched it again down the seam.

After that I tried cutting Tenacious Tape into strips and using that to stick down the remaining raw edges on the other sides.  FAIL.  That stuff does not work well under tension. You can see the tape at the upper edge of the left piece, where the repair meets up with the fly fabric (cream colored). When I tried to stitch on the repair material over the tape, it gummed up the needle and frayed the thread, so I stitched just to the side of the tape. This seemed to work pretty well, though the tape didn't even hold while the fly was in the sewing machine and so the bottom is messed up and uneven.  I may remove the stitching and redo it. Finally, I used regular seam sealer on the stitching and Seam Grip on the main seam.

Other smaller holes were patched using Tear Aid Type A on both sides of each hole.
*** UPDATE- ultimately these repair were inadequate and the tent could no longer be trusted.  Additionally, this tent has seen extensive use, under difficult circumstances (occasionally packed damp or wet while on extended tours) and the waterproofing had become tacky.  When this happens, you run the risk of peeling when you roll out the tent the next time. Time for a new tent. As a guess, this tent lasted for over 150 nights.

Review: Osprey Manta 25

Osprey returned my Manta 25 (22L) pack, after re-inserting the bladder support panel the eBay seller had pulled out. With the support in, I conclude there is no way the pack will hold a 3 liter water bladder, 7 days of food and a small stove. This is difficult to conceive, since my cycling pal has a 28L and it holds vastly more. Back to the drawing board on that one.  I think I will need to actually go to a store to buy one, taking 7 days of food and the stove with me.  I did carry it around while day hiking and it is really comfy and holds day hike stuff fine.  The bladder and bite valve are really nice, far nicer than my life partner's basic Camelback.

IHSMBR Idaho Hot Spring Bicycle Route Update

We postponed our trek due to physical and financial reasons, but hope to go next summer.  In the meantime, here is some info people might find interesting:

I bought a book called "Another Fork in the Trail", which is a collection of backpacking recipes to be prepared and dehydrated ahead of time.  The recipes were fun to cook and dehydrate with my cycling buddy, but for the most part they are really time consuming. My family recently tried one of the resulting meals on a camping trip and rated it only a 3 out of 4 stars. The rating is not high enough to warrant the prep time.  Some of the recipes could be made more quickly by using canned ingredients, such as canned sweet potatoes.