Ragbrai Week

RAGBRAI -- XXV, 1997

     Another year, another birthday, this time the twenty-fifth.
     And the weather on this one was as bad as the weather was good the year before. In fact, I have no doubt that the weather on RAGBRAI XXV was the worst, the most difficult the ride has ever experienced. The humidity was in the 90s the entire week. And it was hot, hotter, hottest. Overcast skies through the middle of the week, and a drizzle at least one morning helped, but then the sun came out with ferocity Thursday afternoon and stayed out all day Friday and Saturday.
     There were places on the road at the bottom of hills and in sheltered areas untouched by breezes where the temperature had to be well over 100 degrees.
     The route was no help. The first day, Missouri Valley to Red Oak, was 82 miles of unrelenting hills. The rest of the route went mainly through southern Iowa, overnighting after Red Oak in Creston, Des Moines, Chariton, Bloomfield and Fairfield and ending in Fort Madison.
     I knew it was a difficult route from the start, writing in the February announcement story, "This year's route could be characterized as the answer to a masochist's dream -- it is guaranteed to make strong men weep, strong women stronger and young children old." And that was before anyone knew anything about the weather.


John Karras and Ann Karras, Ragbrai: Everyone Pronounces It Wrong

Scarth Exhibit Premiere

If you're in the Iowa City area, come over to the University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics to see art by Robert and Linda Scarth, photographers of Deep Nature: Photographs from Iowa! Their photos are in the PVAC Gallery 1 wall on the 8th floor of the Colloton Pavillion in the University of Iowa Hospitals & Clinics starting today!

Gardening in July

Sunday, July 23

     If it were just a simple matter of having fresh, tasty, organically grown vegetables, I'd have given up gardening several years ago, when the co-op and the farmers' market started selling a wide variety of locally grown produce, just a fifteen-minute walk from home. Last night, for example, the leeks that Kate got at the farmers' market tasted as earthy and fresh as the ones I've grown in recent years. And the flat green beans we had from our own garden didn't upstage the leeks, even though I'd carefully dressed them with a light coating of olive oil, a sprinkling of marjoram, a squeeze of fresh lime juice, a twist of grated pepper, and a dash of salt. That austere dressing balanced the intense Creole vinaigrette on the leeks and artichoke, and together they provided a fitting accompaniment to the charcoal grilled swordfish.
     But when we were sitting in the gazebo last night, dining on the fish and leeks and the beans and the cucumber salad and the beet salad, it was a special pleasure to look out at the vegetable garden just a few feet away and behold the row of plants from which I'd harvested those beans.


Carl H. Klaus, My Vegetable Love: A Journal of the Growing Season

Ragbrai Week

RAGBRAI - XXI, 1993

     This was the year of the flood, the summer that Des Moines went 12 days without tap water.
     Fortunately, we had chosen a northern route that year that avoided the worst hit areas of the state -- Sioux City to Dubuque, with overnight stops at Sheldon, Emmetsburg, Clarion, Osage, Decorah and Manchester. At one time, we had considered ending the ride that year in Muscatine. Good thing we didn't, because the riverfront ending area in Muscatine was still under water at the end of July.
     As it was, the mud in the cornfields was one of the memories everyone took away from the 1993 ride. That and the areas of washouts. It was something to look down on the way to Emmetsburg and find a two-foot dropoff where only weeks before there had been a solid shoulder.


John Karras and Ann Karras, Ragbrai: Everyone Pronounces It Wrong

Scarth Art Exhibit at the UIHC

If you're in the Iowa City area, come over to the University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics to see art by Robert and Linda Scarth, photographers of Deep Nature: Photographs from Iowa! Their photos will be in the PVAC Gallery 1 wall on the 8th floor of the Colloton Pavillion in the University of Iowa Hospitals & Clinics on July 25.

Ragbrai Week

     The main feature of the next year's ride in 1985, of course, was the astoundingly large horde of cyclists that rode out of Hawarden on the way to Clinton. Benson was quoted as saying that that was the first year any applicants for the ride had been turned away, but methinks he dissembled because he later said that everyone who applied got tags, and there had to be at least 10,000 cyclists on the road out of Hawarden.
     And with that number, we finally got the answer to a question that had been haunting us from the start: What happens if this ride gets too big?
     We'd imagined all sorts of things -- towns running out of food, water, toilet paper, patience -- but had never even considered the real answer, which was: There was hardly any room on the road to ride. It was wheel to wheel for the first three days. By Tuesday, I wanted to go home, but by the end of that day the cyclists, displaying more wisdom than all of the RAGBRAI managers put together, had spread out on the road and relaxed.


John Karras and Ann Karras, Ragbrai: Everyone Pronounces It Wrong

Ragbrai Week

     The acronym, RAGBRAI, first appeared in print in the Sunday Register's Iowa Living section on Jan. 5, 1975, in a brief story I wrote announcing that The Register had decided to sponsor another cross-Iowa bicycle ride, the third annual.
     The acronym came about this way. The first ride was called simply the Great Six-Day Bicycle Ride Across Iowa. All of us assumed at the time that the first ride also would be the last. How wrong we were. Popular sentiment -- in the form of a flood of mail to The Register -- demanded at least a second ride, which was called the Second Annual Great Bicycle Ride Across Iowa, or SAGBRAI. Again, the public response called for another and it became obvious by the third year that the event was going to have a much longer life than any of us had expected. This raised the prospect of a TAGBRAI and even a NAGBRAI.
     Something, obviously, had to be done. So I determined to make up an acronym that could go the distance, whatever that distance turned out to be, by simply tacking Roman numerals on it in each succeeding year. Further, as noted in the introduction to this book, I wanted it to be so long and ludicrous that everyone would think of it as a good-natured joke (which didn't work, alas, people took it seriously).
     And finally, Michael Gartner, then the editor of the Register and Tribune Company, suggested (actually, he told me to), "Get The Register's name in it, for crying out loud." He might not have said, "for crying out loud," which I did.
     The result in 1975 was the title we've used ever since: RAGBRAI (the Register's Annual Great Bicycle Ride Across Iowa) with a Roman numeral.



John Karras and Ann Karras, Ragbrai: Everyone Pronounces It Wrong