Ragbrai Indianola to Chariton

This street sign was on one of the corners in Indianola. It is an interesting mix of destinations.

This was the only bummer of the day. Many guys were grumbling about the waste of a perfectly good bridge. It was perfect in that the railing was the right height and it would have accomodated 60-70 guys easy--on each side. Personally I thought it marginally heavy handed (so to speak) and probably not enforceable under current Iowa Sate law, but I did not test it because i had just visited a corn field about 3 miles before I came to this bridge.

By popular demand this is another pic of our kilted friends. Although I have not been in position to do so the word on the street is that the place to be when these ride is directly in front of them and if you are lucky there will be a strong head wind blowing at these riders.
Miss Sassy reports that she has not yet found the one kilt biker who is wearing anything under the kilt. The search will continue tomorrow.

This entire group is sort of an enigma in that besides their distinctive Irish garb not a lot is known about them. I did have a brief (so to speak) conversation with another rider today and learned that the word on the street is that they are all professors at Notre Dame (the school in South Bend) and that this is how they spend their summers. He was unclear about the purpose but I suspect it has something to do with recruiting new student athletes. I will attempt to find out more in the next few days from other riders.

This is a group dressed as the characters in the Wizard of Oz after a tough day of riding. They just collapsed in a heep.

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Today was a cake day. Only 45 miles and a lot of fun. Many of the riders partied a lot longer than normal last night and I also noticed that there was a lot more imbiding of alchoholic liquid during the ride than normal (which is saying a lot). There was a spirit of bigger party atmosphere at every stop if that is possible and a lot more loud talk and hollaring on the road.

There was another wild karaoke del in Milo , one of the stops along the way. There are some seriously good singers that really gets the crowd going. Elvis , Bob Marley, Frank Sinatra were all represented. The hit of the day was a group of "rainbow" bikers from Des Moines--a rather poor singer belted out the song "It's Raining Men" while 6 of his comrades danced to the music on stage. These guys were great dancers and many in the crowd were rolling on the ground laughing , but then again it did not take a lot to get some of these bikers on the ground for any reason.