RAGBRAI

Every summer in Iowa an event takes place called RAGBRAI. It stands for: Register Area Great Bike Ride Across Iowa. (Register stands for The Des Moines Register, a huge newspaper). This is the 30something year for it. Anyway, I will spare all the details, but it is a HUGE event that bike riders come to ride in. Each year there are over 20,ooo riders and their support teams that travel across Iowa.(so about 35-40k people) They ride for a solid week from one side of the state to another. 2 years ago Lance Armstrong rode a leg of the journey. People come from other states and even countries for this ride! Anyway, so each night the riders all stay in a different town. The towns do it up! There are bands, vendors, roads are blocked off etc. It is a HUGE DEAL for towns to get to be a "sleeping town." The cities begin working on it in January when the bike route is announced. Our church had a baked potato bar to raise money for our children's playground when we eventually build our new church, hopefully breaking ground this fall. We were busy from sun up to way past sun down with this bar. We were right on the bike route and it is just an amazing sight to see the riders come into town after riding some 70 miles that day. They come cruising in as fast as they can, so relieved to be done with the days journey. Can you imagine witnessing more than 20k bikers come barreling down right in front of you?

I have included a few pics although it is hard to capture the mood.

Top: Jeff stands with his sandwich board to advertise our booth. He really enjoyed his day just standing out and talking to all these bikers. In the second picture Jenna and Madison (my neice who is here with us for 10 days) work the raffle booth. We raffled off the herkey statue you can see on the table. Here a few bikers put in a raffle ticket.

2nd row: a feeble attempt to capture a group of bikers coming into town. They come in all through the day, some get in town before noon because they left the last town at the crack of Dawn, some roll in later because they slept in (or had a hangover!). Jeff, Shawn, Rachael, her sister Audrey on her lap, and Amanda from our church all sit on the curb and watch the bikers roll in. It was Amanda's turn with the sandwich board. In the 3rd pic Shawn and Rachael are actually getting ready to ride out the next morning. Rachael's whole family rides in RAGBRAI every year and we hosted 20 of her family members for the night. Some slept in tents/rv's, or on our floor. Jenna gave up her bed for Shawn and Rachael! Rachael has a veil coming out of her helmet and they have "Just Married" signs on the back of their bikes. It was cute. (Notice the white outfit for Rachael and the all black for Shawn?)

3rd row: This is the bus that Rachael's family's support staff drives. It hauls their bags etc. Most riders travel in teams, and have team buses or vans. Amanda poses to gather customers and in the last picture is a customer at our booth. We did "ok" with our potato bar, it was a lot of work and the profits were just ok. Looking back I don't think we would have done food that is so "involved" but I tell you the bikers really appreciated a healthy alternative to all the other vendors, the normal hot dogs, hbs, etc. They did complement us on our delicious bar. One guy said that he ate at a potato bar a couple towns ago and our was "so much better!" That made us feel good.

Yesterday then we spent cleaning up and putting our church back together afterwards, it was a busy day. Jeff's sister Katie and her husband Ken came last night. We were up late with them. He is thinking of taking a job around here so they came to scope out the area. Of course they have been here before but they weren't evaluating the area to see if they would want to live here, so they are here checking it out in detail this weekend.

Where has the summer gone!? I am astounded that there are only 3 weeks left of summer on Monday. The girls can't believe it, and are sad. I am a little sad too. Time passes too quickly...