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Going to RAGBRAI again, God Bless!

The cyclist’s version of Woodstock is once again, gratefully, at hand, and I’m positively stewing in anticipation of the chance to get together with a couple tens of thousands of cyclists and a five-hundred miles of nearly constant SAG support.

For those of you who haven’t heard of it, the acronym stands for Register’s Annual Greater B-something Ride Across Iowa, or something to that effect. In practical terms, it’s a Sunday-Saturday rolling carnival of bikes, people who ride them, and people who come with those people. In reality, it’s extremely hard to peg down what goes on there, other than to say that it’s sort of a bicycle rave, or possibly a county fair you can only get to by bike.

Are there races there? Only in some peoples’ minds. “It’s a ride, not a race,” is the motto. The point is driven home when you pass unicyclists, or the guy who’s bike has a large sail on it, or the rotund person who has apparently decided to become the Biggest Loser and subjected his/herself to the mercies of a slender bike seat to become their old self, or the 12 year old that polishes off nearly 500 miles in seven days with their dad, or college students pedaling a bike pulling a bar, with a bartender on duty dispensing libations. Or Lance — who’s dropped in for the past few years to get everybody in some kind of groove. Yes, that Lance. The list goes on, and gets more zany as you read down it.

And Iowa — isn’t that, like cornfields as far as the eye can see? Usually. But not during RAGBRAI.

For a week, what one sees from sun-up to sun-down is a continuous line of colorful cycling jerseys stretching into the horizon, framed left and right by green fields of corn and soy that feed the world. But for that week, it’s not the crops, but the citizens of this bucolic state that stand out, and that shoulder the burden of feeding great hordes of people.

Day after day, this twenty-grand-strong caravan of fun-loving Gypsy holiday-makers rolls from town to town, where at each one they are no less than adopted by the Boy Scouts, the Fire Department, the Kiwanis’, the Rotary Clubsters, the high school boosters, and other groups, as well as restaurants, bars, motels, campgrounds and other businesses who lay plans all year to harvest what they can from this spectacular migration. On a daily basis, as many as twenty thousand people come to visit at the doorsteps of towns whose populations uniformly total less than a tenth that many. It’s like having all of your extended family and their extended family show up at your house for Thanksgiving dinner. And when you knock, you find nothing but warm, smiling faces inviting you to come sit a while.

The riding itself is more about entertainment than exercise: Costumes, bikinis, team kits, grunge, whatever you wore yesterday and woke up in again today. That kind of stuff. And it’s all good, clean fun — especially after you share a truckbed-shower with a whole lot of strangers . And fueling it all, is ethanol — served up by the family with the little red wagon standing at the edge of their driveway at eight in the morning, mom and dad and pretty little tow-headed kids with a homemade sign, ever so quaint, that says, “Good Morning RAGBRAI Riders! Bloody Mary’s $4 Till 10 am.”

Yeah, the days start off interesting, and just get better. By midnight, it’s as if you’ve pledged all over again and someone’s slapped Greek letters on you and done some kind of interesting handshake, or, wait, what exactly was that thing anyway? Nevermind. Then one recalls their OTHER motto: “What goes on in Iowa, stays in Iowa.”

Okay, so now you know about it. Google it and you’ll get your fill. But if you e-e-e-ever have the chance, put it in your plans!