Ray and I got seats saved on the bus and when we went to sit down...guess who was behind us? The Magnificent Mullet man. I can’t make this stuff up. There are 4 buses and at least 60 seats on each one and he ends up right behind me. Still no fishnet...but he does have his old school aero helmet with him. I’ve also learned on the bus that he talks to himself...and he sounds very much like Darth Vader! The legend of the magnificent continues to grow!
There appears to be quite a few “new” people on the QCBC charter this year. Hopefully I’ll get to meet some as the week progresses! Of course there are lots of returners as well. Bob is still Bob and I’m hoping he packed the sunscreen this year. Otherwise Bob will be a tomato by Tuesday. Chuck is still here too. And I’m not going to lie...every year I see Chuck I breathe a sigh of relief because he looks like every year could be his last. He’s the nicest old man, but he’s frail. Cycling keeps you young though so I’m sure that keeps him going.
The ride out to Council Bluffs is only about 4.5 hours...the shortest we’ve ever had so we should be setting up our tents right in the middle of the heat of the day! Lucky me!!! Nothing like setting up a tent when it’s 95 degrees and 90% humidity!!
When we got to Council Bluffs we realized that we were supposed to be camping in a really rough hay field...ok maybe not hay field but it was really rough, uncut, and had lots of big rocks and gopher mounds. Actually that gives hay fields a bad rap! Not the ideal setting....BUT....we lucked out. We put our stuff on bus 4 this morning but ended up riding on bus 3. When we got to CB, we couldn’t find bus 4. As we stared in disbelief about the horrible conditions for our campsite and looked around for our bus we realized we were going to have to suck it up and camp here regardless. We finally had to ask the othe bus drivers where Bus 4 was and lucky us....it was on the other side of the campsite. :( By the time we found it ours were the only bags left and someone had actually took them off the bus because the bus was getting ready to leave! The only good this about this is that there was a nice strip of grass along the street, so Ray said why don’t we go here instead of the hay field. It was a great call.
Of course as we went to set up camp it was in the heat of the day. 95 degrees and a feels like temp of 105 meant completely drenched in sweat within 2 minutes. Yay RAGBRAI! This is fun, right? We do this because we like it, right? But my gosh it was hot! I got my tent set up in record time and decided that this tiny tree across the street provided just enough shade to get my bike ready for tomorrow. We have to take off our pedals and turn our handle bars so they fit better on the truck. That sliver of shade....despite it being across the street was worth it. Oh and Magnificent just happened to be camping here in this grass too...lucky us. He set up his tent while wearing his nice aero helmet! How is that even comfortable??? He prepared his bike by tying orange streamers on his handle bars.....yes you read that correctly.....he has added at least 20 streamers to his bike. Each individually tied!!! Oh and Roy came to find me to fill up his sleeping pad....pretty sure I’ll be seeing him every day this week!!
After we sweat through every piece of clothes we had on, we headed to the expo. I got my patch and a new shirt. We talked to vendors and tried to pick up some free stuff. You can never have enough chapstick or tide headbands on RAGBRAI. We sought out some air conditioning in the event center because well...we would have died! We then thought we’d try to get a Tailwind beer. This beer is the official beer of Ragbrai and is new this year. It’s made by Big Grove brewery. We thought it would be a good way to start the week...apparently everyone else thought the same because by 3 pm it was sold out. Ummmm poor planning RAGBRAI....poor planning!!
We decided to go back to work on some of our tent stuff. It’s so hard to get your stuff situated in your tent when it’s hot. We then went to this brewery called Full Fledge...it was their 2nd day of being open. Talk about a good opening...having Ragbrai in your backyard. It’s a really cool place and good facility. As we were leaving I ran into my BSU colleague Scott. Can’t believe we found each other on day 1! Ray got a t shirt from this brewery...it’s a cool shirt but about a couple hours after he bought it he decided he wanted a different color. So he went back and exchanged it. He’ll be rocking a new gold shirt in Philly soon!! Only one photo today. This cool sculpture by our campsite!!
Somewhere over the course of the night Ray decided to rename Magnificent to Skippy. So I may have “skippy” stories too! Tonight it is supposed to rain and maybe storm. Yay...lucky me. But that means cooler temps. So I think I’ll take it. The high tomorrow is supposed to be in the mid 70s. Lots of hills tomorrow for Day 1. Going to call it a night and hope I don’t get soaked!!!
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