Leah, I took the opportunity to ride the first day of RAGBRAI last summer. I live in eastern Nebraska. I happened to be off that weekend, heard it was starting that weekend and that it was the 50th anniversary of the ride. Had always thought of doing at least the first day, but never took the opportunity to look into it and would find out the morning of when local news would do reports on it. I took the opportunity. I enjoyed it, even if I tried to bite off too much in the process. I think if you are going to do the whole thing you best look at the dates and locations and figure out hotel/motel stays now. It is not a race, but definitely get conditioned for the heat, humidity and hills before hand. My plan was to ride to the second to last city location and double back in order to get in a century. I fell short of that and wished I would have just rode to the end city and called it a day. First day miles to the end city was 77. I estimated I did about 64 miles in my attempt to ride back to Sioux City. Sag truck ended up taking me to Storm Lake, IA where and I ended calling out a mayday to a friend to pick me up and get me back to Sioux City to my car.
I rode my Rivendell Mountain because I felt it would be the most comfortable with it's Softride suspension stem and Thudbuster Uni-Pivot post. The next bike I was considering was the OX Brand Ti Cruiser 29er. Got some compliments on the Riv. Ran into some fellow RBW/iBOB members and chatted for a bit. The logistics can be much. Deciding if you want to park on the west Iowa and get shuttled back after or park in east Iowa and have your transportation handy once it is done. Ran into some folks at the first day stop. One gal had threw in the towel after the first 5 or so miles. She ended up hitching a ride to the final to retrieve her vehicle so her and the rest of her group could could use it for camping purposes the rest of the ride. Amtrak does run through the state out of Chicago going to California, The Omaha station will probably be the closest one the start location. One of the folks I chatted with said she had a friend that took Amtrak to Omaha and rode from Omaha to Sioux City to start the ride. Good luck with getting things figured out. Thanks, Reginald Alexis On Monday, January 15, 2024 at 5:33:07 PM UTC-6 Bicycle Belle Ding Ding! wrote: > Who knows about Bike Film Festival? > > I paid for the pass to watch this year’s videos and it was money > well-spent. I got to the RAGBRAI documentary last night. Wow. I had heard > of it but really knew nothing about it and now I would just love to figure > out how to ride it this year. It just looks like such an experience. And > I’ve had very few experiences, because I’m late to the bike adventure scene > AND I’ve been raising kids! But now they are teenagers and might not even > know that I’m gone so maybe I should ride this epic ride! > > There are a ton of logistics I don’t understand. I think you need a > “charter” to haul your stuff, yes? And to bring you back across the state > after you finish? And if you use these “charters” do they trash your bike > in their racks or will they have something that can handle a a mixte with > fenders? Is there are charter that is more friendly to Riv bikes than the > others? > > Also, no camping. I’m really hoping to end up in a hotel or some sort of > dwelling. I don’t have any tents, don’t know how to pitch tents and so on. > This may be the thing I can’t plan my way out of, because there are so many > riders moving through tiny host towns. > > I’ll look up more info tonight after I get my chores done! But it really > is so exciting to imagine riding my bike across a whole state… Also, it’s > Real Winter here in Michigan, so maybe that’s why this hits different. > > Leah > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "RBW Owners Bunch" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to rbw-owners-bunch+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/rbw-owners-bunch/7e3a3b34-5b6b-4a0d-b732-da8bfd3534a7n%40googlegroups.com.
