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Old 08-20-22, 05:28 PM
  #29  
albrt 
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Join Date: Oct 2020
Location: Phoenix, AZ
Posts: 910

Bikes: 1964(?) Frejus Tour de France, 1967(?) Dawes Double Blue, 1979 Trek 710, 1982 Claud Butler Dalesman, 1983 Schwinn Paramount Elite, 2014 Brompton, maybe a couple more

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I also did RAGBRAI for the first time this year. My wife came along as a support driver, so that was nice, but part of the deal was she got some days off from setting up camp so she could go look at Frank Lloyd Wright houses and stuff like that. So I did three nights camping with a support vehicle, two nights on my own loading gear on the truck, and two nights in a hotel a little ways off the route. It was nice to have some variety and get a couple of decent showers - I don't think I would have enjoyed it as much if I had seven straight days of camping and loading my gear on the truck. The quality of the campsites varies quite a bit.

Getting up early does help you avoid the big crowds, but you are not riding alone. There are plenty of people who get going before it is light. Also the earlier you get on the road, the more people pass you (unless you are pretty fast - not something I would know about).

Even if you end up in the middle of the pack, there are still a lot of things you can do to avoid the crowds. There are usually super long lines for a few vendors that everybody loves, but then there are other vendors who have no line at all. I mostly did not wait in the long lines, and I was mostly pretty happy with the food I got. One thing I would say is to eat hearty during the day in the pass-through towns, because some of the overnight towns had fewer choices and many of the same vendors over and over, so we ended up just going to a grocery store for a couple of the evenings.

I am pretty cautious about Covid, but I decided to do this anyway because it is mostly outdoors. You can keep your distance from people (see avoiding lines, above), especially if you do not care too much about standing right in front of the stage for the AC DC cover band in the overnight town. I heard of some Covid cases including two people I knew, but one of them probably caught it before coming to Iowa and the other probably caught it from riding in the car with the first one. The math is probably different for somebody who is immuno-compromised.

Best for last - riding RAGBRAI allows you to get a lifetime's worth of Iowa in one week.
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