(Fri-Sat, July 18-19, 2025)
“Day 0” for RAGBRAI is the day everyone arrives to the Bike Expo at the starting town. This year the starting town is Orange City, Iowa, a beautifully manicured town of 6000 dutch settlers. Four of us drove to the final ENDING town, Guttenberg, from Chippewa Falls on Friday: Tom Hotle, Christopher Thielen, and John Panzer and I. We left at 6:45 am to allow plenty of time to load our bikes onto the semi that would take them across Iowa to the start town. Then we had to ride a bus for five hours. (Theoretically five hours — it took more like six and a half with the stops and slow driving along the way.)
We got our tents set up in Orange City just before dark. When I woke up Saturday morning, I still wasn’t feeling quite right. The previous Tuesday I had a nasty stomach flu that emptied out my large intestines, small intestines, and just every internal organ, or so it felt. The good news is that I was seven pounds lighter! The bad news is that I had no energy, since I hadn’t eaten much for four days. I thought for sure I’d be normal by Saturday, but my digestive system was still feeling really weird.
Saturday morning I decided to push through and bike 18 miles to a national historic landmark: The Boyhood Farm Home of Lyle Stoll. Yes, my friend from Chippewa Falls grew up just three miles from Granville, the first pass-through town of RAGBRAI 2025! I was exhausted when I got there, partly due to rare headwinds from the east, but also because my body was not right yet. But it was fun to see the farm I had been hearing about for years. And I lucked out because Lyle and his wife Christi gave me a ride back to Orange City, since their son Andy (my son Simon’s friend and a former Scout in my Boy Scout troop) and his wife Hannah also needed a ride there, because are riding RAGBRAI for the first time!
Other than walking through the huge expo (where I got a selfie with Ryan Van Duzer, the world’s greatest biker Youtuber!), I spent most of my Saturday afternoon on a quest to find “probiotics” per my wife’s orders. Beth said to look for “active culture” yogurt and sauerkraut. It took some searching, but I did eventually manage to find both. I still had no appetite, but I forced them down and hoped I would be normal by Sunday, the first day of RAGBRAI. That looked to be a relatively difficult day, with more rare headwinds from the east, and 72 miles to cover.
But based on today’s performance, tomorrow might be too much. RAGBRAI does have a sag wagon we can use if needed, and better yet, Lyle offered to pick me up anywhere along the route and bring me to the end town for Day 1. So my plan was to go to bed early, get up at 4:00 a.m. to get an early start, and just take one town at a time and see how far I can get before waving the white flag.
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TRANSLATIONS/BACKGROUND: “RAGBRAI” = Register’s Annual Great Bike Ride Across Iowa, the world’s oldest, longest, and largest recreational bike ride. Started in 1973, it now averages about 20,000 riders per year who bike from the Missouri River on the west coast of Iowa to the Mississippi River on the east coast, usually 420-500 miles, over seven days.
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LINKS:
Old-fashioned BLOG if you have friends who don’t use Facebook:
“Old Scouter” Facebook page if you want to follow big adventures with more pictures and video clips (but not unrelated personal posts):
https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100066334039590
“Old Scouter” YouTube page (when I get time to edit after the trip):