The journey is over, and I think we'll take the next week (month? year?) off as far as biking goes. It was quite an incredible experience to bike every mile through northern Iowa from the Missouri river to the Mississippi (where I dipped my front tire in this picture), and along the way we saw a lot of neat places and met some nice people. We'll probably go back to at least Clear Lake and Charles City sometime on our own to explore more, based on what we saw while spending nights there this week.
As for the future of our RAGBRAI careers, it remains to be determined when or if we'll do the ride again. We learned a lot about how to do RAGBRAI properly by doing it for the first time, learning from some mistakes along the way. Number one mistake: doing the whole week on hybrid bikes with plain old pedals. The majority of people with road bikes and clip-on pedals could go 1.5 to 2 times as fast as us, and we're in pretty good pedaling shape. Faster speed means less time on the bike, which means less aches and pain and more time to check out all the great communities on the route.
We'll give ourselves some space from this past week, and perhaps in a cold winter snowstorm sometime in January we'll start thinking about how nice it would be to ride on some county highways... on road bikes!
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