Babies, Bob Dylan, rain, a flat tire and more RAGBRAI bliss

Sisters Tracy Henriksen, left, and Teresa Condon ride as “the babies” of RAGBRAI.

RAGBRAI, Day 6 — Maybe you must try the Register’s Annual Great Bicycle Ride Across Iowa at least once before fully comprehending the next sentence: I got a flat tire and rained on, and that made my ride from Ottumwa to Washington all the more wonderful.

But let me start with breakfast. I began the morning with a couple of my Team Larry teammates — fellow grizzled journalists whom I’ll write more about later. Just north of downtown Ottumwa we were joined by Beth Howard, the “pie lady” who used to live in the American Gothic House in Eldon, has authored books and traveled around the globe proclaiming “The World Needs More Pie,” and now lives on a farm in southeast Iowa near Donnellson.

We stopped for egg burritos and coffee at Indian Hills Community College. That’s where I couldn’t help but approach Teresa Condon of Decorah and her sister, Tracy Henriksen of West Salem, Mass.

They were dressed as babies in frilly pink tops and bonnets, plus sagging white diapers over their bicycle shorts, and pink sunglasses.

I didn’t sample the baby bottles stowed on the backs of their bikes, but I don’t think they were filled with breast milk or formula.

But Condon, 52, the older sister from Decorah, had a surprise for me: She recognized me almost instantly and then regaled me with a story: She and her husband, John, attended the 2006 concert at the Val Air Ballroom in West Des Moines that featured Bob Dylan and Merle Haggard playing an ALS benefit honoring Rob Borsellino, a Register columnist colleague and mentor who died from the disease a month later.

This was when I was a music critic. I had angered John by knocking Dylan’s croak of a singing voice in some previous review. (For the record, like most devout music snobs, I do revere Dylan.) So he stood up in the middle of the crowd that evening when I was nearby and yelled, “Kyle Munson sucks!” He even ordered T-shirts with my review printed on the back as retaliatory commentary.

It didn’t scar me or anything, and I had forgotten all about it until Condon mentioned it. We had a good laugh.

“It’s really easy to see each other in a sea of Lycra, whenever we try to meet up,” Condon said of why she and her sister, two years younger, decided to pedal along as infants.

“We’re trying to keep the weird in RAGBRAI,” Henriksen said.

“These are quite breezy on the downhill,” Condon added. “They’re very airy and not as clingy as a jersey.”

On the uphill, whenever the sisters begin to complain, their fellow bicyclists tend to tell them to stop whining and acting like such babies.

The more people who can help keep the weird in RAGBRAI the better, as far as I’m concerned.

“The babies” put me in a good mood for the rest of the day. The riding conditions were just about perfect: overcast and cool until the sun broke through for my final few miles into Washington.

A gentle morning rain pelted us, but it didn’t soak. If I could order a fine mist to bicycle in more often, I would.

At first I thought a rear flat tire was going to ruin my day. But not more than a minute or two after I had pulled to the gravel shoulder and started swearing, an anonymous Good Samaritan from California joined me and began to fix my flat while demonstrating each step in detail.

I’ve often described RAGBRAI as a rolling master class in bicycling that gradually makes anybody a smarter pedaler. And this was a crash course I needed.

To my credit, that spare inner tube I had been carrying on my bike for years finally came in handy. And just as the Californian had reached the end of his help because he lacked a tire pump, Bob Bates from Langley Air Force Base in Virginia, one of the Team Air Force bicyclists whose creed is to help all fellow riders, swooped in to finish the job.

The goodwill felt infectious Friday along the route.

West Chester was the next to last stop before Washington, with yet another old abandoned and converted school building as centerpiece. The RAGBRAI beer sales will fund tuckpointing on the exterior brick. A local guide led riders on a tour of the historical museums inside, but most people seemed interested in the ghost stories of a building where classes ended in 1981 and that next year will celebrate its centennial.

The gymnasium remains inside the old school building in West Chester that now houses historical museums.

But I was drawn to old newspaper clippings on the wall that described the West Chester of a century ago as a progressive community with perhaps the only female mayor in the state, Edna Daniels, elected in 1925.

“It is a live and interesting little town, having a woman for mayor, and women on the school board and city council,” the article reported. “They are doing their part well, and you will not find one shirking her political duty.”

In this week in which Hillary Clinton made history as the first woman nominated for president, that made me wonder how far we’ve really come in our gendered view of leadership.

I was inspired to stop in West Chester in part by Michael Morain, my former Register colleague who now works for the Department of Cultural Affairs and has been riding along pointing out roadside attractions included on the handy Iowa Culture smartphone app.

While we shared the road I happened to spot Condon’s Dylan-loving husband, John. It wasn’t difficult: She warned me that he was sporting a gold sequined top hat and outfit.

His getup was inspired not by Dylan but the Macklemore and Ryan Lewis hit song “Thrift Shop.”

John was effusive in his apology, and we reminisced as we pedaled.

“The things Maker’s Mark will make you do,” he shook his head. Morain and I laughed.

The things RAGBRAI will make you do!

It was a great Friday ride.

Kyle Munson can be reached at 515-284-8124 or kmunson@dmreg.com. See more of his columns and video at DesMoinesRegister.com/KyleMunson. Connect with him on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram (@KyleMunson), and on Snapchat (@kylemunsoniowa).

Related Articles